Although on the big screen the film noir/crime b-movies were on their
way out (or morphing into something else), television held onto this
B&W gritty aesthetic that, in this case, takes from the 1930's law
propaganda programmers involving a narrator and perfectly-suited cops,
in this case led by Wendell Corey of the titular waterfront HARBOR
COMMAND...
The best thing is that each episode is 30 minutes, so
you get in and out without a lot of fuss or... as happened on another
noir-series, NAKED CITY... without an abundance of early Actor's
Studio-style staging and melodrama, despite the fact that that
crime-pays narration can get too wordy, mainly with expository dialogue
the actors could have tackled otherwise, if not for a few lines...
And
right when the plot gets underway, usually beginning with a certain
crime or heist going bad around the dockside or surrounding warehouses,
the episode cuts to the chase... or rather, the starting gate... So
HARBOR COMMAND is always primed to move... each episode making for
tight, nifty story-telling without an overboard cliche evil dame or
monologue-spouting heavies, and... different from most shows of this
era... there aren't a lot of non-famous cameos... so you feel like
what's being played out is more real than otherwise. RATES: ****
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