Muggable Mary, Street Cop (also styled as Muggable Mary: Street Cop) is a 1982 American drama television film written and directed by Sandor Stern. It is inspired by the 1980 book Muggable Mary by Mary Glatzle with Evelyn Fiore, which details Glatzle's real-life experiences as a detective in the New York City Police Department's Street Crimes Unit, where she served as an undercover decoy in over five hundred operations during the peak of New York City's mugging epidemic. It stars Karen Valentine as Glatzle, Michael Pearlman as her son Eric, John Getz as her colleague and love interest Dan Waters, and Vincent Gardenia as her supervisor Maggio.
The film premiered on CBS on February 25, 1982, as a CBS Special Movie Presentation. Valentine earned widespread critical acclaim for her performance, which marked her first time playing a real-life person and a police officer, as well as her transition to more serious dramatic roles.
Plot Mary Glatzle is an unemployed single mother who lives in New York City with her eight-year-old son Eric, who was born with hydrocephalus and is partially blind in one eye. Her father wanted her to place him in an institution, but she refused and still resents him. About a year after Eric was born, she and her husband divorced; he now lives in Denver with his new family.
Eric is a bright and active boy, but he has had several surgeries and must have more. So when Mary is invited to become a police officer in response to an application she submitted to the New York City Police Department (NYPD) five years ago, she accepts to take advantage of the good medical benefits. Eric, however, opposes her decision because he fears she will be killed.
Mary survives the rigors of her police academy training, including those imposed by her relentless judo instructor, Frank Reineke. She pushes through with the emotional support of fellow cadet Donna Metzger. Donna encourages her to go out with another cadet, Dan Waters, who flirtatiously calls her "Peanut" because of her small stature.
Mary is assigned to a precinct house in Manhattan as a matron supervising arrestees. On her first day she helps her new colleague, Kathy Thomas, restrain a violent prisoner. The stresses of her job are compounded by her tense relationship with her father and her fear that Eric hates her, as she confesses to her friend. Kathy convinces Mary to accept a special assignment posing as a prostitute. Realizing that she has a talent for decoy work, she joins the Street Crimes Unit and becomes a mugging decoy. On their first operation together, Mary, Dan, and Joe track a rapist. The incident frightens, but also excites, her.
Meanwhile, Eric, who has been playing baseball without Mary's permission, is injured in the face during a game and is sent to the hospital. Mary tells him he could have permanently damaged his eye and demands that he promise not to play baseball again. Their conflict intensifies, and Eric decides to accept his father's invitation to spend the summer in Denver.
Three months later, after several successful operations, Dan and Joe give Mary the name "Muggable Mary" in a celebration at a bar. Dan spontaneously kisses Mary, who slaps him and storms out. After a brief argument, they spend the night together and begin dating.
Subsequently, Joe is killed by a woman who has just murdered her father. Mary confronts the woman, only to freeze when a gun is pointed at her. Dan fatally shoots the woman to save Mary's life. A distraught Mary tells her supervisor Maggio that she cannot go out on the street again.
Eric returns from Denver, where he spent a happy summer with his father and learned to ride a horse. He tells Mary that his father is adding him to his medical plan, so she can quit her job. She subsequently learns that a psychopathic killer/rapist in Central Park has slashed Donna to death. Maggio pleads with her to help catch him, but she insists on quitting.
Mary and Eric go horseback riding in the park. During a break, she glances at the front page of a newspaper and sees that the killer has struck again. While she is preoccupied, Eric rides away on his horse. She panics, but he circles back safely. She tells him, "You trained to ride a horse; I trained to be a cop."
Mary informs Maggio that she agrees to be a decoy to catch the killer and asks for Dan, whom she is no longer dating, as a backup; her other partner is Vince. On the night of the operation, Mary knocks on Eric's bedroom to tell him she is leaving; he coldly says goodbye to her through the closed door. However, as she is about to drive away, he runs to her car, asks if he can wait up for her, and says he hopes she catches the killer. In the park, Dan gives Mary a protective leather band to wear around her neck; however, the radios the team relies on are not working properly. As she passes under the 81st Street bridge walking a dog, the killer suddenly jumps down from the structure, grabs her from behind, and puts a knife to her throat. She fends him off and then fatally shoots him. Dan and Vince run to her aid, and she tells a visibly upset Dan that her training from Frank and his leather band saved her life.
Dan drives Mary home. She invites him to come by next Sunday to meet Eric, implying that she is considering rekindling their romance. When she enters her home, the babysitter sees her arm in a sling and asks her what happened. She replies, "I fell off my horse," and Eric runs to embraces her.
Cast
Main cast
Karen Valentine as Mary Glatzle John Getz as Dan Waters Anne DeSalvo as Mary's friend Robert Christian as Joe Bell Michael Pearlman as Eric Glatzle Vincent Gardenia (as Vince Gardenia) as Maggio
Other cast
Beej Johnson as Donna Metzger Alan North as Mary's father Anna Maria Horsford as Kathy Thomas Dan Lauria as Vince Palucci John Corcoran as Frank Reineke
Production Muggable Mary: Street Cop is based on the book Muggable Mary by Mary Glatzle with Evelyn Fiore, in which she recounted her real-life experiences a plainclothes mugging decoy in the NYPD. Born in 1942, Glatzle worked as a bookkeeper for several years before becoming an NYPD officer in 1969. She initially supervised arrestees as a matron at a Manhattan precinct house. Then she joined the department's Street Crime Unit (SCU), which formed in 1971 to combat the city's epidemic of muggings. An innovative but controversial program that deployed plainclothes officers as decoys in high-crime areas, the SCU recruited highly trained officers of different physical types like Glatzle, who was 5 feet 2 inches tall and 100 pounds. As she wrote, "We have to be a diversified bunch. We're supposed to fade into the street picture, and in this city that has to be a mix of the whole human works. Women. Every shade of white, brown, black, yellow, red, beige."
Part of the first wave of recruits, Glatzle and her backup teams apprehended muggers, rapists, and other criminals, with Glatzle disguised as the decoy. She started to gain media attention for her work as "Muggable Mary" as early as 1972 and became a folk hero. New York City Mayor Abraham Beame presented her with the city's certificate of appreciation in 1975. By the time she published her book in 1980, she had participated in over five hundred decoy operations; during this time, she was mugged, shot at, and threatened with rape. She was promoted to Detective First Class in 1979. Her book told the story of the city's mugging epidemic from the side of law enforcement, in contrast to James Willwerth's 1974 book Jones: Portrait of a Mugger. The SCU was disbanded in 2002 in the aftermath of the Amadou Diallo killing in 1999. It was reactivated in 2015 but shut down again after the murder of George Floyd.
Valentine recalled that producer Joel T. Maffeo, the former head of production at Lorimar, was given a copy of Glatzle's book at a reunion. He liked it and subsequently hired Sandor Stern, a former physician who was also a screenwriter who had written numerous episodes of police dramas for television as well as the hit film, The Amityville Horror, to draft the screenplay and direct. When Valentine's agent suggested to Maffeo that she could play Mary, he was skeptical at first.
At the time, Valentine was best known for her Emmy Award–winning role as student teacher Alice Johnson in the hit sitcom Room 222, which aired on ABC from 1969 to 1974. She was subsequently typecast as a young ingenue. As she told an interviewer, "My character was so fumbling and clutzy, people forgot that there could be many other sides to me, so I've tried to balance my choice of characters a bit more." Although she tried to modify her image in made-for-television films like The Daughters of Joshua Cabe, Coffee, Tea or Me?, and The Girl Who Came Gift-Wrapped, she could not shed her persona of youthful innocence. For this reason, in 1979, she decided to avoid television for three years to focus on theater, appearing in plays like Born Yesterday, The Goodbye Girl, and Romantic Comedy to demonstrate that she could play roles for adult women.
After talking to Valentine, Maffeo became convinced that she could play Mary. Nevertheless, despite her credentials, CBS insisted that she read for the role. Though she was nervous and somewhat irritated, she performed two scenes, including an emotional one in which she had to cry, for a group of executives, and then bluntly asked them if she had the job or not, but they did not say yes until later in the day. In October 1981 it was publicly announced that Valentine was starring in the film.
Mary was the first real-life person and the first police officer that Valentine had portrayed. To prepare for the role, she met with Glatzle to better understand her personality. She studied Glatzle's accent, mannerisms, and demeanor to develop her characterization. She also attempted to tamp down her own natural exuberance. However, instead of impersonating her, she aimed to capture Glatzle's essence. She described Glatzle as a woman who "takes the bull by the horn and does her job .... But there are many more layers to her character. She is fallible. She is vulnerable. She is scared at the same time that she shows a lot of courage. When she is in a dangerous situation, she is no superwoman, but a vulnerable human being who digs in her heels and pulls off her job." Glatzle and her son Eric observed part of the filming, including the scenes shot in the gymnasium where Mary practices judo.
Filming was scheduled to begin on October 26, 1981, for four weeks in New York. Most of the filming took place on the Lower East Side. While Stern's script follows the broad outlines of Glatzle's book, it makes modifications for dramatic effect, including the addition of fictional characters and episodes. For example, the encounter with the Central Park killer/rapist who murders Mary's friend Donna, the film's dramatic climax, is based on Glatzle's real encounter with Bernard Deveaux, a 23-year-old man who raped multiple women in Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, but it diverges from her account. Specifically, none of Glatzle's friends were victims, and she did not shoot and kill the man; however, she specifically requested the members of her backup team for this operation, and they experienced problems with their radios. In addition, the script places much more emphasis on Mary's personal life, especially her conflicts with her son Eric and her rocky relationships with her father and her love interest Dan, than does Glatzle, who focuses on her experiences in the SCU. In fact, while Eric is based on Glatzle's real-life son, Dan is an invented character.
Broadcast