The Glitter Dome

As a one-time member of the LAPD, Joseph Wambaugh presumably has the merit of authenticity in his very personal treatment of police procedure; all the more worrying, then, that he chooses to cast his scenarios in the form of black farce. Cases get solved more by accident and coincidence than by detection, the police chiefs are all rattled idiots, and the detectives are divided between the 'survivors' - hard-drinking wearies, given to carnal jags of mind-bending proportion - and the 'sensitives', who can't find the release of outrageous behaviour and tend to crack up. Margolin's direction of this Tinsel-town thriller about child porn and murder (designed for cable TV) is too diffuse to be faithful to the particularities of Wambaugh's vision. But Garner contributes a very watchable wrinkly 'tec with lines like 'In Hollywood, Halloween is redundant'; and as his partner, Lithgow acquits himself perfectly in the role of the 'sensitive' with nightmares of an especially nasty case of child abuse. CPea.