Even before I looked up his career, I knew Joe Santos would be easy for me to write about. Some people are easier than others, and Joe Santos would be a piece of cake to anyone who’d seen as much of The Rockford Files as I. Santos appeared on over a hundred episodes as Dennis Becker, then in all the movies. We probably learned more about him as a person than any other recurring character, possibly even Jim. Riffing on Dennis would fill five paragraphs easily. Then I learned more about his career beyond Rockford, and I had even more to say about him.
His father died the day he was born, which is a lot for a kid. His mom ended up owning and singing in a nightclub, then eventually married a Puerto Rican born man whose last name she and young Joseph Minieri took. He played semi-pro football and is one of a handful of Rockford cast members, including of course James Garner, to serve in the Korean War. Somewhere along there, he befriended Al Pacino, who, after Santos had been struggling for some eight years in the business, got him a job in The Panic in Needle Park.
Of course, Santos still wasn’t a star, but he got steady work. Shaft’s Big Score. The Friends of Eddie Coyle. Barnaby Jones. Maybe not great work, but work. And then, in 1974, he took a role as a frustrated friend of Jim Rockford’s, an LAPD sergeant who Jim asked to run plates for him and so forth. A friend—as time went on, Jim would go fishing and to Lakers games with him—but a person who did a lot for him, too. Santos would take minor roles, too, in other projects—Kung Fu, Lou Grant, The Hustler of Party Beach—but for years, he would play Dennis Becker steadily.
I like Dennis. We recently discussed how a whole series about Angel would’ve been too much Angel, but getting into Dennis every week would’ve been just fine. He has that rarest of media commodities, a stable and loving marriage. He expresses affection and concern for his wife. He enjoys her company. They have real, human conversations. They fight sometimes, but that just makes their marriage feel more real. And frankly, if every cop were Dennis, we’d be a lot better off as a society. We would also have the contrast of the odious Chapman to remind us that every cop is not Dennis, not by a long shot.
He did continue to work post-Rockford. Mostly an episode here and there, often playing cops. In the ‘80s, he had the Standard TV career. Remington Steele. Two episodes of Murder, She Wrote, playing a cop on one of them. T.J. Hooker. Five episodes playing a cop on Magnum. He’s in various of the Rockford reunion movies. He got to be “Sam’s” father on an episode of Quantum Leap and did seven episodes of The Sopranos. All in all, quite the career even beyond The Rockford Files.
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