{"id":185896,"date":"2014-07-21T18:26:00","date_gmt":"2014-07-21T23:26:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2014\/07\/21\/thoughts-on-the-passing-of-james-garner\/"},"modified":"2014-07-21T18:26:00","modified_gmt":"2014-07-21T23:26:00","slug":"thoughts-on-the-passing-of-james-garner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2014\/07\/21\/thoughts-on-the-passing-of-james-garner\/","title":{"rendered":"Thoughts on the Passing of James Garner"},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"border: 1px solid black; float: right; margin: 0px 10px; padding: 5px; text-align: center; width: 360px;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" allowfullscreen=\"\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"263\" src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/reUstMn4bM8\" width=\"350\"><\/iframe><br \/><i>The Americanization of Emily<br \/>I cannot imagine seeing this in a movie today<\/i><\/div>\n<p>I&#8217;ve had to think about it for a while.<\/p>\n<p>He paid a big part in my childhood, both as Jim Rockford in <i>The Rockford Files<\/i>, and as Brett Maverick in <i>Maverick<\/i>.  (I&#8217;m not that old, it was rerun in Portland, Oregon during my High School years.)<\/p>\n<p>Well, following his death, I read <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/James_Garner\">his Wiki<\/a>, and discovered a number of interesting facts:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li> He got two purple hearts in the Korean war, one for wounds in his butt from friendly fire while diving into a fox hole.<\/li>\n<li> While in Korea, he was the the scrounger for his unit, which kind of mirrors a lot of roles that he played, most notably <i>The Americanization of Emily<\/i>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I will note that of all the PI shows and police procedurals that I saw growing up, <i>The Rockford Files<\/i> was the <b>only<\/b> show that had a pro civil liberties\/due process\/privacy bent.<\/p>\n<p>There was an episode about prosecutorial abuse of the grand jury process, &#8220;So Help Me God&#8221;, another about private efforts to create massive server farms to invade people&#8217;s privacy, &#8220;The House on Willis Avenue,&#8221; and law enforcement misconduct was a frequent theme in the show.<\/p>\n<p>My older (hairier) brother always noted that it was rather ironic that <i>The Rockford Files<\/i> was regularly scheduled for broadcast with <i>Quincy, M.E.<\/i>, which routinely used civil rights and due process as a bogeyman for plot purposes.<\/p>\n<p>In any case, he was always fun to watch.<\/p>\n<p>I have to turn my kids onto <a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0067809\/\"><i>Support Your Local Gunfighter<\/i><\/a>, which is IMNSHO the classic Garner movie role.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Americanization of EmilyI cannot imagine seeing this in a movie today I&#8217;ve had to think about it for a while. He paid a big part in my childhood, both as Jim Rockford in The Rockford Files, and as Brett Maverick in Maverick. (I&#8217;m not that old, it was rerun in Portland, Oregon during my &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[993,1064,994,1077],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-185896","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cinema","category-media","category-obituaries","category-television"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185896"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=185896"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185896\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=185896"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=185896"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=185896"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}