Even if you don't like this police procedural, you will need to jump to around the 58 minute mark where the Mercedes McCambridge master class gold starts. Working with a young Richard Dreyfus, McCambridge's brief performance would give this young kid in 1972 nightmares.
Her incessant rant was limited to Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing with portions of Balthasar's song in Act 2, Scene 3:
Sigh no more ladies, sigh no more,
Men were deceivers ever,
One foot in sea and one on shore,
To one thing constant never.
Then sigh not so, but let them go,
And be you blithe and bonny,
Converting all your sounds of woe
Into hey nonny, nonny,
Of interest is that Mercedes McCambridge, who played her Mrs. Castle character so flawlessly, would, herself, struggle with alcoholism and mental illness in real life. And there is a most tragic end to her son's life in which, in a murder-suicide, he would take the lives of his wife and two children, but not before penning a pointed note to his mother.
