1959 police procedural, eighth in the 87th Precinct series. A woman
comes into the squad room and holds the detectives hostage with a
pistol and a bottle of nitroglycerine.
So in television terms this would be a bottle episode: mostly the
regulars, mostly on the standing sets (though a side plot has Carella
out on an investigation; the woman wants her revenge on him, and
they're all waiting for him to come back).
And some of that works pretty well; the tension of sitting waiting on
a hot day is well portrayed. The physicality of the space, perhaps
rather less; while everyone is waiting for the woman to aim away from
the bottle so that they can jump her and only risk themselves rather
than the whole room, there's one occasion on which this clearly
happens—she shoots someone out in the hall—and nobody tries it. (They
do later, with varying degrees of success, which is fair enough.)
This would work better if they characters were a bit deeper. We know
who they are, we know what they're thinking about, but if I knew then
as people I'd feel more tension over their potential deaths. Maybe
that's just me. Carella is a good detective, loves his wife, is
excited about her pregnancy, and that's pretty much his whole
personality. On a TV show with an actor putting facial expressions
behind the lines that might be enough.
But that said, it does still work; I enjoyed this rather more than
Lady Killer, in part because the detectives aren't getting to be
"necessarily" tough on suspects as they were then; they're trying to
work out a way to save their buddy and themselves.