As a young man in the 1970's I watched the occasional episode of Kojak. While I have always liked Telly Savalis as an actor, I was not a regular viewer of the Kojak series thinking it just another of the ubiquitous "cops and detectives" shows that were so common at the time.
This important TV movie has never been issued on DVD, but only as a 1980s video, so that it is very difficult to obtain. It may be the only accurate portrayal of one of the shadier aspects of American post-war foreign policy ever filmed.
Those who were fans of the original "Kojak" series or who have been discovering it anew on DVD thanks to the recent (and long overdue) release of S2 should be forewarned that if they ever come across this TV-movie, the first of the post-series Kojak movies, they will see almost none of what made the series fun. Basically, what has happened is the character of Kojak has been shoehorned into a thin story that has almost nothing in the way of police process but is just an excuse to dramatize the highly suspect arguments of author John Loftus (who I might add has also written some dubious and thoroughly discredited junk trying to link the Bush family to the Nazi regime) about the Americans smuggling in Nazi criminals from Russia after the war.
This was a full-length movie featuring the television series star "Kojak," played by Telly Savalas. He made the fictional New York city detective a pretty famous person.
A great story! Kojak investigates a series of recent killings that involve Russian Jews that worked with the Germans 40 years earlier to help imprison Jews in Hitler's concentration camps.
Lollipop-loving, follicle-free. There, that's those cliches out of the way.
Probably pro-Kojak sentiments coupled with the courageous story line led to my exaggerating a "fair" rating for this movie. Probably a fair rating of this movie should be 8.
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