homicide 313 a game of chance

Volume 13 of Homicide turned up today and I was saddened to discover that this is Norman Yemm's last volume (Jim Patterson resigns at the end of episode 333). The character is already displaying strain in the first episode, 313, when he has to tell the wife of a gun shop owner that her husband has been shot in a robbery. 

What amazes me is that the gun shop is a real gun shop. Whoever owned it (I can't tell where it was, obviously inner city) was happy to lend their premises for an episode of Homicide where the proprietor of the shop is showing a customer a gun who then turns it on him. Wow! Sure, it gives your shop quite a bit of prominence (once again, it's not completely obvious where the shop is but if you knew, you knew) but even just giving impressionable youngsters ideas about how gun shops are a great place to get guns that you can then use to kill people, is kind of irresponsible surely. 

Anne Scott-Pendlebury is in this episode playing Pina Bianchi, the daughter of an Italian gambler who is the unwitting informant to the most psycho of three crims about her father's card games. 

Here she is arguing with her father (played by Frank Rich - Homicide had no shame when it came to casting anglos in italian roles) about the suitability of her boyfriend Brian Clark (Brendon Lunney). As it transpires Brian is the very same POS who killed the gunshop owner and then also holds up Pina's father's card game (twice) because she happens to be conversational with him about where they are being held. 

Nice exterior scenes as the Ds (they are often referred to as such) round up Brian's gang. This is I think Peter Hepworth as the hapless Keith, who was rightfully nervous about the second of the heists. Lunney and Hepworth both ended up in writing and producing roles long after they stopped acting. 

It's rare to get a really good location still in Homicide but for once I did it. Melbourne Roofing was at 92 Grattan St Carlton at this time. It's possible that that's where this scene was shot, though obviously it's also quite possible that they just put their sign up wherever they were working. 

Lunney as Clark holding up the second card game. He likes to explain himself a lot, and tells Pina that he was just using her and that he really enjoys having a gun as it gives him power and freedom. Then someone (it's unclear who) shoots him but he doesn't die but he does go to prison. At no point does Pina seem to comprehend that Brian is not a nice boy. 

This episode first screened in Melbourne on 12 October 1971. Terry McDermott, who had of course been Bronson in Homicide in the first sixty episodes but by 1971 was playing Max Pearson in Bellbird, was also in a show called Tell the Truth which was on before Homicide.