What a violent show.

In his later films for Wasserman Hitchcock went more Hollywood than ever, it seems. One may not like the look and feel of many of those Universals but they're movies all the way, don't have a TV "vibe".

---

Agreed. And three of those Wassermans -- made over a ten-year period -- had a strong "international/foreign" bent. With "Torn Curtain" and "Topaz," Hitchcock shipped foreign actors TO Hollywood(practically everybody other than Paul Newman in "Torn Curtain", including Julie Andrews; and Noiret, Piccoli and the others in "Topaz.") For "Frenzy," Hitchcock went to England and essentially made a "pure British" movie. (In the 1972 edition of "Films in Review," a comprehensive Encylopedia of all films released that year, "Frenzy" was in the "foreign films" section.)

The return to America for "Family Plot" found Hitchcock eschewing a lot of the usual American TV talent in suppporting roles. Many of the actors(like the guys playing the FBI guys and the chopper pilot) were practically unknown Yanks.

I believe that somewhere in this later period Hitchcock himself said he was tired of "all the familar faces" in the supporting casts of American films.

That's makes sense that Hitchcock didn't want to repeat himself. He had a few players he was particularly fond of, such as Leo G. Carroll and, later on, John Williams, never had a stock company of the John Ford kind. My sense is that he didn't want to repeat himself, had a "thing" about moving on, as some of us do (not wanting to live in the same town or neighborhood again, as in "been there, done that"; or work for the same employer, even in a new position).

Hitchcock did move on in his career, as each of his "decades" has a discrete, unique feel to it. That said, he remade The Man Who Knew Too Much and he certainly recycled the same themes, but one expects the latter. The former strikes me as an odd career move for a director on a roll as Hitch was in the 50s.

Still, Hitchcock's filmography shows us "pairs" or "double" films; movies in which one seems a complement to another even if several years apart, as seems the case with the two mother obsessed young men killer films Strangers On a Train and Psycho. In the case of Rebacca it had a "follow up" the next year with the same star and a similar plot, Suspicion, but that was early in Hitchcock's American career when he was under Selznick's thumb.

The "experiment" of Libeboat was repeated in the even more "experimental" Rope; and the latter was in a manner of speaking complemented by another relatively small scale film also adapted from a successful play, Dial M For Murder. Yet these are very different films, with different moods: one set wholly oudoors (albeit filmed in a studio "tank"); the other made wholly indoors; with the last mostly indoors, featuring some brief outdoors scenes. Once in control of his destiny and prior to signing with Wasserman, Hitchcock seemed particularly sensitive to moving on to different themes in his various films. When he made a classic, a winner (and deep down I think he knew it even at the time) he knew better than to make another film like it, thus there's only one The Lady Vanishes, one Rear Window, one Psycho.

That's makes sense that Hitchcock didn't want to repeat himself. He had a few players he was particularly fond of, such as Leo G. Carroll and, later on, John Williams, never had a stock company of the John Ford kind. My sense is that he didn't want to repeat himself, had a "thing" about moving on, as some of us do (not wanting to live in the same town or neighborhood again, as in "been there, done that"; or work for the same employer, even in a new position).

---

Yes, it seems evident that Hitchcock felt a need to reinvent himself so as to "stay current." One finds Billy Wilder in the late years of his career depending almost solely upon old pals Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau and(once) William Holden for his casts. Hawks and Ford used John Wayne a lot. Hitchcock reached out and got Connery, Newman and Andrews and TRIED to get other new young stars.

There was ruthless side to Hitchcock's moving on, too. As great as his "team of the fifties" was(Herrmann, DP Burks, film editor Tomasini and assistants Herbert Coleman and Doc Erickson), he fired Herrmann off "Torn Curtain" and refused to hire Burks for it, and pretty much drove Coleman and Erickson away(Tomasini made his own exit in '65: a heart attack.) We find Hitchcock in his last few movies restlessly hiring different composers, different DPS, different EVERYTHING.

---


Hitchcock did move on in his career, as each of his "decades" has a discrete, unique feel to it. That said, he remade The Man Who Knew Too Much and he certainly recycled the same themes, but one expects the latter. The former strikes me as an odd career move for a director on a roll as Hitch was in the 50s.

---

My guess on two pictures -- "The Man Who Knew Too Much" and "North by Northwest" -- is that Hitchcock somehow wanted to "reboot" his great 30's British black-and-whites for "Technicolor, VistaVision and Big Hollywood Stars." "Man" was an overt remake(for awhile, it was going to be called "Into Thin Air") but with many changes to the scenes, set-pieces and locales(Morocco in for Switzerland). "NBNW" -- which Hitchcock called "The American 39 Steps" had that movie as a base, but also aspects of The Lady Vanishes(the train).

Seems to me in capturing The Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps, and The Lady Vanishes for the Technicolor era...Hitchcock really had grabbed the BIG 30's Hitchcock movies. "Sabotage" (a bomber movie) was too grim; "Secret Agent" too of its time, etc. No, Hitchcocok knew what his entertainments were from the 30's, and The Man Who Knew Too Much was a "two-fer": A Child-Kidnapping Story mixed with a Stop-the-Assassination! yarn.

--

Still, Hitchcock's filmography shows us "pairs" or "double" films; movies in which one seems a complement to another even if several years apart, as seems the case with the two mother obsessed young men killer films Strangers On a Train and Psycho. In the case of Rebacca it had a "follow up" the next year with the same star and a similar plot, Suspicion, but that was early in Hitchcock's American career when he was under Selznick's thumb.

---

I take your point on the "pairings, but what is funny to me is that OTHER pairs can be made of these movies. As a "commercial"(not thematic) matter, "Strangers on a Train" and "North by Northwest" are linked as "big action entertainments to break a career slump."

---

The "experiment" of Libeboat was repeated in the even more "experimental" Rope; and the latter was in a manner of speaking complemented by another relatively small scale film also adapted from a successful play, Dial M For Murder. Yet these are very different films, with different moods: one set wholly oudoors (albeit filmed in a studio "tank"); the other made wholly indoors; with the last mostly indoors, featuring some brief outdoors scenes.

---
Once in control of his destiny and prior to signing with Wasserman, Hitchcock seemed particularly sensitive to moving on to different themes in his various films. When he made a classic, a winner (and deep down I think he knew it even at the time) he knew better than to make another film like it, thus there's only one The Lady Vanishes, one Rear Window, one Psycho.

---

Thanks to Wasserman that "never do anything twice" formula failed with the back-to-back Cold War failures of "Torn Curtain" and "Topaz", similar in titles and often confused..even though the first one has "big, big stars" and the second one doesn't.

---

All in all, Hitchcock was pretty damn adroit in matching his work to the Hollywood trends: noirish and Ladies Filmish in the 40's; Techniclor Travelogues(a lot) in the fifties; teenage horror movies (of sorts) with Psycho and The Birds; Cold War espionage in the late sixties, "R" rated sexual horror with "Frenzy" etc.

But he always snuck in "the unexpected": Rear Window ain't a travelogue; Rope is in color and setbound; The Trouble With Harry is its own very twee thing, etc.

Thanks for all that

Not a lot of time but yup, you can pair 'em any which way you can (to paraphrase the title of an old Clint Eastwood flick). The Lodger arguably connects with Psycho, and they're decades apart.

Saboteur resembles The Wrong Man in its falsely accused theme, is otherwise a totally different film.

How's about the two "pastorals", one weeps, the other laughs: Shadow Of a Doubt and The Trouble With Harry, both very Anglo-Saxon, borderline British, especially the latter.

Rebecca and Suspicionm, famously alike, are in some respects updated in their themes, this time with a real killer, with the new Hitchcock blonde, Grace Kelly, in Dial M For Murder.

Vertigo and Marnie? I'm not a big fan of either but there are similarities, especially all the "obsessive psychologizing".

Not a lot of time but yup, you can pair 'em any which way you can (to paraphrase the title of an old Clint Eastwood flick). The Lodger arguably connects with Psycho, and they're decades apart

---

Pair 'em any which way you can and turn 'em any which way but loose...

Yes, you can.

Even though we noted that Hitchcock tried to avoid the same film twice in a row(with the Wasserman-forced exception of Torn Curtain and Topaz), we have these "near matches" side by side like Spellbound and Notorious(b/w, Selznick, Bergman, a male star -- even if the plots are NOT similar at all), Rebecca and Suspicion, etc.

Hitchcock worked long enough where I figure he himself knew that he had several "thriller templates" from which to work:

"Spy thriller": Many of the British films, most of the 40's WWII Nazi films, The Man Who Knew Too Much, NBNW, Torn Curtain, Topaz. Drop only a few of those out, you get "spy CHASE thrillers."

"Movies about psychopaths": The Lodger, Shadow of a Doubt, Strangers on a Train, Psycho, Frenzy

"Twisted obsessional love": Rebecca, Suspicion, Spellbound, Notorious, The Paradine Case, Under Capricorn, Vertigo, Marnie

Now with 53 films, that left PLENTY of tales that don't quite fit those templates -- The Birds, The Trouble With Harry, the utterly unique Rear Window -- and yet even THOSE can be paired up:

Psycho and The Birds: irrational killers and horror

Psycho and The Trouble With Harry: Body disposal

Rope and The Trouble With Harry: A body in plain sight.

Rear Window and Psycho: Murder most foul with knives and bathtubs involved

Etc, etc, etc.

Rear Window also fits the body disposal category.

Rope, Dial M for Murder, and Rear Window are all essentially single set films.

True enough, EC, and one can also pair (as in a "dry run") Joseph Cotten's uncle Charley with Norman Bates in Shadow Of a Doubt, which with its murderer in small town California does rather anticipate the (admittedly in most other respects very different) Psycho. Both films feature lively supporting characters, more so than usual for Hitchcock.

Vertigo works with Marnie but it's a hard sell, for me anyway, as to trying to pair it with any other Hitchcock.

Lifeboat is a real one off, and I love it.

There are vague similarities between Rebecca and Marnie, if one can switch the pathology around from male to female.

The Wrong Man is also a one off, with its neo-realistic style and "commited" non-glamorous setting and characters. I believe you've linked it to Psycho, and indeed it's Hitchcock's second to last black and white film. There are also ironies when one compares the two, as Manny is the wrong man, wrongly identified, Norman the right man, who comes off as so harmless. Manny's as in touch with others (co-workers, family) as Norman is out of touch. Even so, Manny's relative gregariousness doesn't help him, while Norman's isolation does help him

The "three star" Dial M For Murder (Milland, Kelly, Cummings) compares in that if in no other respect to the "three star" North By Norhtwest (Grant, Saint, Mason). The later film has hotter, better established stars, while the earlier one has the past their respective primes Milland and Cummings, the up and coming,--and just about "arrived"--Grace Kelly. Totally different films, with the later one as budget as the earlier one is small budget. Interestingly, Milland was a kind of second string Grant, while Eva marie Saint was presented as a sort of midwest Grace Kelly. Needless to say, James Mason and Bob Cummings have little in common .

Rear Window also fits the body disposal category.

---

Indeed it does. In fact, you might say that "Rear Window" and "The Trouble With Harry" are almost entirely ABOUT(plot-wise, at least) the disposal of a body.

Meanwhile, two other Hitchcock films -- "Psycho" and "Frenzy" -- instead rely on lenghty SEQUENCES about body disposal: Norman of Marion's body in Cabin One, Bob Rusk in the potato truck with Babs' body.

----

Billy Wilder said of Hitchcock's movies: "Always a corpse." That's a good parlor game to play: IS there always a corpse? -- somebody gets killed in almost ALL of Hitchcock's thrillers(only The Wrong Man comes to mind as a film where someone does not.)

But when the emphasis is on DISPOSING of the body, well...I think that is profound and macabre at the same time.

Consider the body of Marion Crane in "Psycho." We knew Marion for 45 minutes, give or take, as a pretty, hard-working, romantically desperate, courageous and borderline crazy HUMAN BEING, and we became enwrapped in her story.

And soon...she is a corpse. Marion Crane as a human being is no more. Whatever one's spiritual grounding...the body is not the person. And in that reality comes a profoundly disturbing vibe: when a human becomes a corpse...we must bury that corpse and remove it from our lives as quickly as possible.

Bob Rusk is a serial killer in "Frenzy" and we come to view body disposal as "part of his job." He throws one in the Thames River, leaves one in her office chair, throws one in a potato sack on a truck, and is about to dispose of his final victim in a steamer trunk. It is almost as if Good Old Bob wants to "be creative" and never dispose of a body the same way twice!

True enough, EC, and one can also pair (as in a "dry run") Joseph Cotten's uncle Charley with Norman Bates in Shadow Of a Doubt, which with its murderer in small town California does rather anticipate the (admittedly in most other respects very different) Psycho. Both films feature lively supporting characters, more so than usual for Hitchcock.

---

I've noted before that Hitchocck seemed to do "one psycho picture per decade(Doubt in the 40's Strangers in the 50's Psycho in the 60's Frenzy in the 70's) each one more brutal than from the decade before, and thus they ALL pair up.

But "Shadow of a Doubt" certainly feels most "comfortable" alongside "Psycho" -- what with their small-town Northern California locales (the real Santa Rosa, the fictional Fairvale) and the idea of Psychotic Evil parked right there in the American back country.

---

Vertigo works with Marnie but it's a hard sell, for me anyway, as to trying to pair it with any other Hitchcock.

---

I very much see "Marnie" as Hitchcock's attempt to bring that "Vertigo" feeling back, and it failed because it was a flawed version of a perfect version of...a problematic story in EITHER version.

Once Hitchcock made this climactic "Big Three"(Vertigo, NBNW, Psycho) those three perfect works "harmed" all the final Hitchcock's that followed them:

The Birds, Frenzy: "Not as scary as Psycho"
Torn Curtain, Topaz: "Not as exciting as spy movies as NBNW"
Family Plot: "Not as big a comedy-thriller as NBNW, and both were written by Ernest Lehman."
Marnie: Not as good as Vertigo.

---

I think "Vertigo" and "Marnie" link up primarly in that they are NOT spy movies, chase movies, comedy thrillers, or psycho movies(even though Scottie, Marnie and possibly Mark DO have serious mental problems.)

They are "obessional love" movies in which the male(James Stewart, Sean Connery) fixates on and dominates a criminal blonde female(Kim Novak, Tippi Hedren.) But one of the two movies(and only one) has a "happy ending."

---

Lifeboat is a real one off, and I love it.

---

Yep, and me too. It can perhaps be grouped with Hitchcock's "stunt movies"(Rope, Rear Window) but its grit and grime and hard look at human truths...its quite different in the Hitchocck canon(and his only movie for Twentieth Century Fox, which might be why it looks and sounds different.)

---

There are vague similarities between Rebecca and Marnie, if one can switch the pathology around from male to female.

---

Sure. These "Hitchcock romances" are really their own special deal, even if "Rebecca" started as a Selznick project.

However, "switch male/female pathology" makes "Marnie" a virtual remake of..."Spellbound":

Spellbound: Professional psychologist Ingrid Bergman works with Gregory Peck to uncover the childhood trauma that damaged him(he accidentally killed his brother.)

Marnie: Amateur psychologist Sean Connery works with Tippi Hedren to uncover the childhood trauma that damaged HER(she intentionally killed her hooker mother's Sailor John.)



---

The Wrong Man is also a one off, with its neo-realistic style and "commited" non-glamorous setting and characters. I believe you've linked it to Psycho, and indeed it's Hitchcock's second to last black and white film. There are also ironies when one compares the two, as Manny is the wrong man, wrongly identified, Norman the right man, who comes off as so harmless. Manny's as in touch with others (co-workers, family) as Norman is out of touch. Even so, Manny's relative gregariousness doesn't help him, while Norman's isolation does help him

---

The Wrong Man and Psycho were movies that Hitchocck CHOSE to make in black-and-white when the times were demanding color as a "first choice." We know the reasons -- Italian neo-realism and "Marty" Kitchen Sink with "Man" and William Castle/Diabolique horror with "Psycho." But I think what "The Wrong Man" REALLY anticipates in "Psycho" is "Hitchocck looking at the dangers of economic desperation." The rich or well-off characters of Rear Window, To Catch a Thief(especially), The Man Who Knew Too Much '56 -- have been replaced by people who work hard and practically paycheck to paycheck. These are "workaday" characters -- middle-class on the edge. They are rather "trapped" to begin with...and then chaos enters their lives.

---

The "three star" Dial M For Murder (Milland, Kelly, Cummings) compares in that if in no other respect to the "three star" North By Norhtwest (Grant, Saint, Mason). The later film has hotter, better established stars, while the earlier one has the past their respective primes Milland and Cummings, the up and coming,--and just about "arrived"--Grace Kelly. Totally different films, with the later one as budget as the earlier one is small budget. Interestingly, Milland was a kind of second string Grant, while Eva marie Saint was presented as a sort of midwest Grace Kelly. Needless to say, James Mason and Bob Cummings have little in common.

---

I am reminded that Hitchcock's first choice for the elegant, witty -- and oh-so-cruel -- villain in "Dial M" was Cary Grant. It is said that Grant wanted to do it -- FINALLY play a murderer(or murder plotter) for Hitchcock, and that Jack Warner vetoed it("Either/or": Grant cost too much or Warner felt folks would not want Grant to play so evil.) I'm dubious about the whole thing: Tony Wendice is far too depraved and cruel a character for Cary Grant to have really agreed to play, even if the role was a visual/verbal "fit."

And so Hitchocck chose Ray Milland, a Best Actor Oscar winner who was indeed just about to begin a full decline...and weird re-birth in American International horror movies!

I am also reminded that the Eva Marie Saint role in North by Northwest was first offered to Princess Grace Kelly(trying to bring her back, failing.)

James Mason is perfect and "starry" in "North by Northwest," but his role could have been played by...Ray Milland. Or George Sanders. But in "caste system" Hollywood, in 1959, James Mason was a bigger star than either Milland OR Sanders(Sanders was now considered a Supporting Actor.)

The Robert Cummings conundrum: I can understand Hitchcock perhaps being "forced" -- after stars turned him down on a Lowly Universal Picture --- to use Cummings in "Saboteur," but it seemed so arbitrary to pick him for the hero in Warners' "Dial M." I suppose Hitchocck knew...its the villain's movie, no major star would want the Cummings part(which involved being an adulterer, not a good career choice in '53.) Still, we end up with the bland, TV-level Bob Cummings in significant roles in two Hitchcock pictures...and not helping either one at all.

A "parlor game" question: who else COULD have played Cummings role in "Dial M"? Second male lead, circa 1953. (We already know that Gary Cooper, Henry Fonda and Gene Kelly turned down "Saboteur.")

All too briefly...

How's about Farley Granger for Bob Cummings in Dial M. He'd have been a better fit for that particular role, which could have used a "darker" seeming actor than the song and dance Cummings, whom I like but who wasn't quite right for his part IMO.

James Mason was definitely higher in the pecking order than Milland for 1959 and NxNW works better with him as the suave villain than the more old hat Ray who by then belonged to another era. What a difference five years make!

I hadn't thought of a Spellbound-Marnie connection but that's a good call; and what's more, Bergman and Hedren made two back to back pictures for Hitch, unusual for any actress other than Grace Kelly (to the best of my recollection).

Black and white was in decline when The Wrong Man and Psycho were made, down but far from out, and many top directors, from Sidney Lumet to John Ford, continued to use, occasionally, for many more years.

All too briefly...

How's about Farley Granger for Bob Cummings in Dial M. He'd have been a better fit for that particular role, which could have used a "darker" seeming actor than the song and dance Cummings, whom I like but who wasn't quite right for his part IMO.

---

An excellent choice! It has been said that given that as Milland's Tony Wendice is an ex CHAMPION TENNIS PLAYER, who essentially blackmails another man into killing his unfaithful wife, it is as if Granger's character in "Strangers on a Train" has married and used Robert Walker's plan!(partially.) So how fun it would be to cast Granger AGAINST his old part (not to mention the fact that Granger was an established Hitchcock villain from "Rope," futher darkening his presence.)

Also: Granger simply projected a better sense of youth and sexuality than Robert Cummings(who, as Hitchcock said, had an "amusing face," especially in repose.) Granger would have made for a "younger lover"(ala Caine versus Olivier in "Sleuth") to drive Milland to murder. (And I know that Granger turned out to be openly gay, but this was the 50's at the movies. No matter.)

---

James Mason was definitely higher in the pecking order than Milland for 1959 and NxNW works better with him as the suave villain than the more old hat Ray who by then belonged to another era. What a difference five years make!

---

"That's show biz," literally. I think it was Alan Arkin in an interview who said we have no idea how quickly actors can move up...or DOWN..the "power list" in Hollywood. (Arkin called it "a caste system.") That's why so many of 'em go nuts.

Also: James Mason simply had more "gravitas" AS a villain than George Sanders(who had started getting "kinda amusing" in his roles) or the aging Milland had in 1959.) I haven't even gone to check what movies George Sanders and Ray Milland were making in 1959, but I doubt they were at the level Mason where was working.


---

I hadn't thought of a Spellbound-Marnie connection but that's a good call; and what's more, Bergman and Hedren made two back to back pictures for Hitch, unusual for any actress other than Grace Kelly (to the best of my recollection).

---

Seems about right to me on the back-to-back business. Even the oft-used Mr Grant and Mr Stewart didn't work back-to-back for Hitchcock.

Of course, Grace Kelly worked back-to-back-to-back for Hitchcock(three in a row, a record), and all reports are that if she had stayed in Hollywood, he would have cast her in all sorts of movies if he could -- The Trouble With Harry(actually, she was still working then, she turned it down), The Man Who Knew Too Much(not as a singer), North by Northwest, Marnie.

Meanwhile, back at the records. Ingrid Bergman didn't work back-to-back-to-back for Hitchocck, but she joins Bergman in "three Hitchcocks." Grant and Stewart tied at "four Hitchcocks." Odd how these things balance out.

--

Black and white was in decline when The Wrong Man and Psycho were made, down but far from out, and many top directors, from Sidney Lumet to John Ford, continued to use, occasionally, for many more years

---

Yes, that's true...at least until 1966, the last year of "Black and White" category Oscars(cinematography, art direction) and the year color TVs in homes sold enough for Hollywood to start shifting movie production to color whenever possible so TV networks would buy the product.

Billy Wilder clung to b/w as long as he could -- everything from "Love in the Afternoon"(1957) to "The Fortune Cookie"(1966) was in b/w, with the sole exception of "Irma La Douce" (which looks like it uses b/w art direction a lot of the time.) (Wait: when did he make "The Spirit of St. Louis"? Did I miss that color film in the sequence?) But "The Fortune Cookie" failed in that big year of 1966, and Wilder only worked in color thereafter.

I suppose with Hitchcock, the point would be that after "I Confess," he stuck to Technicolor as a first choice for his movies(often gorgeously so: To Catch a Thief, The Trouble With Harry, Vertigo) unless he really felt the movie HAD to be in b/w (The Wrong Man, Psycho.)

Thanks, EC. So much to do, so little time on-line. I hope this will change this month; the sooner the better.

The only problem with the alternate casting of Farley Granger in Dial M might have been the fact that he had just played a tennis player with wife murder issues two or three years earlier, and in a hit film for Hitch, thus it might have seemed a bit strange to see him pop up as the "other man" in a film with a similar plot, also about a tennis player. Still, Hitchcock could have done better than Cummings IMO, and I like the guy, but the part needed more gravitas than Cummings was able to handle, and he comes off as weak in the film, but then maybe that was Hitchcock's intention. It's not like he had to use Cummings, a Universal contractee hot off the success of Kings Row in 1942 but to the best of my knowledge with no contractual obligation to Warners in 1954.

BTW, as this is the Peter Gunn board, I saw two back to back episodes last night, both moderately satisfying, neither great. One dealt with a protection racketeer giving Mother a hard time. His thugs tore the joint apart at the end and Mother was played the wonderfully named Minerva Urecal (sounds like the same for a female catheter or something, eh? ), not the more monolithic Hope Emerson, but no matter. The second was about some clever but not clever enough bank robbers and featured a very young Ted (Psychio guard) Knight in a major role, looking not that different from his Mary Tyler Moore days.

All this goes to remind me that at least three Psycho people have popped up on PB. There must be more. That the series was filmed on the same U-I back lot as Hitchcock's series and Psycho makes more some interesting channeling of moods. I wouldn't call PG Hitchcockian, though, as it was more Cool Jazz Noir, very American and hip, with none of the stateliness one associates with Hitchcock at his most British. One episode did feature a British actor, Cyril Delavanti, who specialized in playing old, literally ancient looking men. He looked even older than Ian Wolfe, had the sort of face that makes one wonder if he could ever have been young.

Those black and white shows are so fun to watch, for me anyway. I'm watching Naked City and Route 66 regularly, when I can, and I'm struck by the much higher (than today's) caliber of writing and acting is on those shows. They were not high art, I suppose, but they were artistic and at times showed real artistry and ambition, sometimes too much for one episode, as happened in one which guest starred Lois Nattleton (remember her?) last night, and which featured Robert Duvall and, of all people, Harvey Korman, in supporting roles. It was a character study, and a good one, maybe crammed too much plot into its less than one full hour running time. I really miss character based shows, the absence of gimmickry, whether CGI or MTV style fast editing, that makes it difficult to impossible for me to watch current shows. Overall, for all the complaining of Newton Minow and others about television as a vast wasteland back fifty years ago it's start to look more and more like a golden age of sorts, or maybe my age is showing.

The only problem with the alternate casting of Farley Granger in Dial M might have been the fact that he had just played a tennis player with wife murder issues two or three years earlier, and in a hit film for Hitch, thus it might have seemed a bit strange to see him pop up as the "other man" in a film with a similar plot, also about a tennis player.

---

Possibly too "on the nose." On the other hand, Hitchcock later wanted to use Anthony Perkins as the hero in "Torn Curtain"...and that character has to kill a man in a manner that involves a big knife(wielded by the farmer's wife, however.)

And Hitchcock had famously shifted Granger into the "hero" role in "Strangers" after using him as a villain in the gay-pairing "Rope," thus creating some new vibes in the Bruno-Guy relationship.

---

Still, Hitchcock could have done better than Cummings IMO, and I like the guy, but the part needed more gravitas than Cummings was able to handle, and he comes off as weak in the film, but then maybe that was Hitchcock's intention. It's not like he had to use Cummings, a Universal contractee hot off the success of Kings Row in 1942 but to the best of my knowledge with no contractual obligation to Warners in 1954.

----

Word is that Hitchcock and Cummings were friends of sorts, Hitch would have the Cummingses over for dinner. It seems true that Hitchcock surely liked to work with some fairly bland "suburban" actors...MacDonald Carey, Robert Cummings, John Forsythe, even(at the star level), James Stewart and Cary Grant. Not for him the wildmen like Brando, Douglas, Lancaster, Mitchum...Monty Clift and Paul Newman were about as wild as he could take.

As I recall, though Cummings had a few notable 40's films -- "King's Row" is both Cummings AND Ronald Reagan's finest moment -- he shined mainly as a TV star("Love that Bob")...his smarmy features and amusing manner much more helpful to TV stardom than movies.

---

BTW, as this is the Peter Gunn board, I saw two back to back episodes last night, both moderately satisfying, neither great. One dealt with a protection racketeer giving Mother a hard time. His thugs tore the joint apart at the end and Mother was played the wonderfully named Minerva Urecal (sounds like the same for a female catheter or something, eh? ), not the more monolithic Hope Emerson, but no matter.

---

I didn't realize the actress in the role changed. A catheter indeed.

---

The second was about some clever but not clever enough bank robbers and featured a very young Ted (Psychio guard) Knight in a major role, looking not that different from his Mary Tyler Moore days.

----

It seems that Ted Knight just "struggled on" in the sixties until that big part finally came along in 1970 on "MTM." It was a big hit and it made him a name for later, lesser sitcoms, and most famously, "Caddyshack" as the villainous Judge.

On "Mad Men" this past season, they showed white-haired Roger Sterling thumb through a magazine in 1967...finding a REAL 1967 ad featuring Ted Knight, half Knight's hair black, half his hair white. The 2012 audience was meant to laugh in recognition(at home watching TV), I'm sure.

---

All this goes to remind me that at least three Psycho people have popped up on PG. There must be more. That the series was filmed on the same U-I back lot as Hitchcock's series and Psycho makes more some interesting channeling of moods.

---

Here's the place to note that Francois Truffaut said he didn't understand why America didn't appreciate Hitchcock until he stayed in America for a year or so in the sixties and noted(paraphrased) "There were nothing but mystery and suspense shows on every channel, shows filled with murder and crime, every night, all of them in the Hitchcock tradition but with none of his art."

Perhaps "Psycho" seemed less "strange" in its year of release, given how the occasional glimpses of Fairvale revealed their Universal Revue roots. On the other hand, Hitchcock was VERY sparing showing ANY of the Universal backlot. You can barely see it outside Sam's hardware store window, and shots of the Sheriff's house, or Marion's house in Phoenix were cut out. I think only the church scene really "gives away the backlot." The Bates Motel and House were their own grandiose things.

---

I wouldn't call PG Hitchcockian, though, as it was more Cool Jazz Noir, very American and hip, with none of the stateliness one associates with Hitchcock at his most British.

---

Nope. "Psycho" is, arguably, Hitchcock's most American film, with traces of the Western in Cassidy and Chambers and California Charlie(Chambers and Charlie were played by actors who often DID Westerns, John McIntire and John Anderson.)

As I noted somehwere around here, Hitchcock first asked Herrmann to give "Psycho" a jazz score. Perhaps Peter Gunn influenced Hitchcock on this point. Herrmann talked Hitch out of THAT...and made history.

And then the irony years later, of course: Hitchcock fired Henry Mancini -- the composer OF the massively famous and jazzy "Peter Gunn" theme -- off "Frenzy."

---

One episode did feature a British actor, Cyril Delavanti, who specialized in playing old, literally ancient looking men. He looked even older than Ian Wolfe, had the sort of face that makes one wonder if he could ever have been young.

---

I know him. He plays the Pope in the 1978 Hitchcock spoof "Foul Play" with Goldie Hawn and Chevy Chase, roughly a meld of "The Lady Vanishes"(nobody believes Goldie Hawn is in danger) and "The Man Who Knew Too Much"("Stop the assassination...of the Pope!)

---

Those black and white shows are so fun to watch, for me anyway. I'm watching Naked City and Route 66 regularly, when I can, and I'm struck by the much higher (than today's) caliber of writing and acting is on those shows.

---

That era came out of a different tradition, with plenty of stage and radio-trained writers and, I believe...a much larger pool of recognizable acting talent to populate the shows. (It seems like modernly, every character role is given to Philip Seymour Hoffman, Paul Giamatti, or William H. Macy.)

One character actor said that character actors declined in Hollywood once big stars commanded $20 million salaries..there was little money left to make a career for character guys.

Oh, one other unsung one I like very much is Bruce McGill. Years ago, he was "D-Day" in "Animal House," now he makes one or two movies a year and does TV like "Rizzoli and Isles." He was great as the judge in Runaway Jury and as the pissed-off lawyer in "The Insider" who comes to Russell Crowe's rescue. He will soon be in "Lincoln." I've met him a coupla times at golf tourneys(as a spectator). A nice man AND a good actor. Honestly, he's in everything. (He might have made a better Arbogast than William H. Macy.)

---

---

They were not high art, I suppose, but they were artistic and at times showed real artistry and ambition, sometimes too much for one episode, as happened in one which guest starred Lois Nattleton (remember her?)

---

Oh, yes. She had a great girl-next-door beauty, with sexy crossed eyes. Its an awful movie, but "Dirty Dingus Magee" with Frank Sinatra(a "sex comedy Western" of 1971) features Nettleton in a most sexy role. I believe Sinatra made her his "girl" for awhile.

---

last night, and which featured Robert Duvall and, of all people, Harvey Korman, in supporting roles.

---

Its funny how Harvey Korman did a few dramatic roles before latching onto Carol Burnett, Mel Brooks and Komedy Forever.

---

It was a character study, and a good one, maybe crammed too much plot into its less than one full hour running time. I really miss character based shows, the absence of gimmickry, whether CGI or MTV style fast editing, that makes it difficult to impossible for me to watch current shows. Overall, for all the complaining of Newton Minow and others about television as a vast wasteland back fifty years ago it's start to look more and more like a golden age of sorts, or maybe my age is showing.

---

Newton Minow didn't know what he was talking about. TV then is as TV now...hours and hours of time to fill, but always a few worth watching for the sheer dramatic power of them. Its just that there were MORE dramas back then....

True, EC. Cummings and Hitchcock were friends. I believe Cummings appeared in a Hitchcock hour. John Forsythe was similarly bland, though I prefer the more down to earth Cummings to the preppie-ish Forsythe, who, outside of his TV comedy series Bachelor Father and I suppose Dynasty, was seldom well cast; probably hard to cast. He had an upper class air to him similar to earlier big screen stars like Robert Montgomery and Franchot Tone, was born too late to make it in that era, did better on the small screen, which was a more place for favorable to retro types like Forsythe.

Psycho does slyly channel the western in its supporting characters, though not in the three leads, and certainly not in Arbogast and the shrink. Otherwise, it's a down home movie that just happens to be a horror. TV was funny that way. In its early days two of the more popular shows were The Cisco Kid and Hopalong Cassidy, neither of which would have "sold" as movies then, not after 1950. The same was probablt true for The Life Of Riley, certainly the American-Amglo-French Sherlock Holmes series featuring Ronald (son of Leslie) Howard.

I'm really sorry to have missed Mad Men entirely . Lois Nettleton was a Sinatra squeeze? Good for her (and him). Those TV actresses, more so than the actors back then, had a tough time transitioning to big screen roles. Once known for their television work, they tended to remain on television. Sally Field is an exception, as is (was?) Angela Cartwright. Remember such lovelies as Laura Devon, Charlene Holt and Joyce Jameson? Devon was a real looker, and a good actress. Howard Hawks' gave her a chance on the big screen but she didn't "take". PG's Lola didn't transition, either, but she was a veteran player by the time she did that show.

As to Cyril Delevanti, I saw him in a Twilight Zone I never cared for last night, the one with Barry Morse as a sadistic theater critic who gets his comeuppance. I only saw the end. Strangely, Delevanti, who looked ancient on PG, actually seemed to have aged over the years! Another ancient actor, a sort of French Delevanti: Marcel Hillaire. He was in everything back then. Of course we (Americans) had Burt Mustin, so I guess Methuselah-like character actors were popular back in the day.

Last night I saw an R66 guest starring Lew Ayres as a Nazi hunter masquerading as an oil rig worker to capture a Nazi war criminal. It was very good, not one of the best but high average, featuring a fine supporting cast of players you're almost certainly familiar with, including Michael Conrad, Bruce Dern and Ed Asner (both seen briefly, early on), Roger C. Carmel (a sort of lesser,--in all respects--Victor Buono) and Alfred Ryder, an excellent actor who had a spotty film career. You'd recognize the face if you don't recognize his name, He was rather like Norman Lloyd in being expert at playing odd, enigmatic, often seemingly "disturbed" characters.

Yet another comedian who did some TV dramatic work: Larry Storch, who appeared in a Hitchcock hour and who also did well by Kraft's suspense show prioer to F Troop. He was actually quite good, not so generically comedic, as, say, Joe Flynn. Storch showed some average guy Jack Carson potential, seemed at times to be consciously imitating Carson, especially in his use of his face. Another guy associated more with comedy, Jerry Paris, of the Dick Van Dyke show, later a director, did his share of dramatic roles, was even a regular on The Untochhables for a while, I prefer as a dramatic actor. He didn't have the charm for comedy. Peter Gunn's own Herschel Bernardi, who appeared in a lot of comedy, musical comedy included, could also play it straight. He's very good as Lt. Jacobi on PG, better I think than, say, Martin Balsam would have been. Bernardi had a light touch, could, as an actor, go with the flow, while I find Balsam's acting style, skillful as it is, somewhat monolithic (for want of a better word), lacking a certain easygoing-common touch quality that came naturally to Bernardi,--but that's ne.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
True, EC. Cummings and Hitchcock were friends. I believe Cummings appeared in a Hitchcock hour. John Forsythe was similarly bland, though I prefer the more down to earth Cummings to the preppie-ish Forsythe, who, outside of his TV comedy series Bachelor Father and I suppose Dynasty, was seldom well cast; probably hard to cast.

---

Cummings and Forsythe did the TV show; Forsythe appeared in the only Hitchcock HOUR directed by Hitchcock...and the last TV show Hitchocck ever filmed. A bit of Hitchcock History for Mr. Forsythe.

I assume Forsythe was younger than Cummings in the fifties and sixties, and so Forsythe was around to get that "brass ring in old age" in the 80's(when Cummings was dead?) on "Dynasty." Forsythe got the role for two reasons: (1) George Peppard had quit it and (2) Forsythe had just made a big splash in the Al Pacino movie "And Justice For All" decidedly "against type" -- as judge who is the epitome of corruption, evil, and sexual sadism. THAT toughened Forsythe's image up.

I might add I always found Forsythe nicely tough(enough) in "Topaz" when he snarled at a recalcitrant Soviet defector "C'MON, Kusenov!" and rushed at him. Seemed like real anger to me.

---

He had an upper class air to him similar to earlier big screen stars like Robert Montgomery and Franchot Tone, was born too late to make it in that era, did better on the small screen, which was a more place for favorable to retro types like Forsythe.

---

When Forsythe completed "The Trouble With Harry" for Hitchcock, Hitch took him aside and made exactly that recommendation: go to TV, young man. Interesting how the sudden appearance of television created whole new careers for handsome actors and actresses who weren't "movie grade." (I don't think radio quite had the same star-making machinery. I may be wrong.)

I remember a quote from a TV actress of the sixties named Ruta Lee, who said: "A lot of us were making a great living SOLELY as TV actors and then suddenly...movie actors were willing to TV. And we all lost our jobs." I suppose she is talking of the influx of folks like Rock Hudson and Tony Curtis and Shirley MacLaine to TV...though a lot of "star series" actually flopped.

---

Psycho does slyly channel the western in its supporting characters, though not in the three leads, and certainly not in Arbogast and the shrink. Otherwise, it's a down home movie that just happens to be a horror.

---

I'd say that's about right. I'm guessing your "three leads" are Perkins, Leigh and Miles; Gavin's character was MEANT to be rural, and few years later he played "Destry" on TV.

But honestly: you could put Cassidy, Lowery, the cop, California Charlie, Sheriff and Mrs. Chambers in a TV Western and they'd be right at home.

And here's something: in October of 1960, only a few months after the release of "Psycho," Martin Balsam appeared in the popular Western TV series "Have Gun, Will Travel" starring Richard Boone. Balsam played a crooked small town sheriff, and played him well. Seven years later, Balsam joined Boone in the Western movie "Hombre"(starring Paul Newman) with Balsam as a Mexican stagecoach driver and Boone as the badman who robs its passengers. So though Arbogast made not have been a Western character, the actor who played him could do Westerns.

--

I'm really sorry to have missed Mad Men entirely .

---

Well, there are ways to see it on DVD and computers, if you would like. I'll stick with it to the end, but the truth for a Hitchcock Fifties Era Fan is that its first three seasons(set in 1960 through 1963) are where the real nostalgia lies. I'm afraid that "Laugh-In" and Nehru jackets are right around the corner as the show heads for 1968.

---

Lois Nettleton was a Sinatra squeeze? Good for her (and him).

---

Yeah, I thought so. Nettleton plays a sex-crazed character in "Dirty Dingus Magee," never takes off her clothes or DOES anything. Still, pretty sexy...if alas, in a pretty stupid movie(it seems to be in perpetual rotation on cable these days.) The movie single-handedly drove Frank Sinatra out of movies. Oh, he made a coupla more...but his career ended with "Dirty Dingus Magee" as an accepted, regularly appearing film star.

---

Those TV actresses, more so than the actors back then, had a tough time transitioning to big screen roles. Once known for their television work, they tended to remain on television. Sally Field is an exception, as is (was?) Angela Cartwright.

---

And yuh know, even t hough she has two Best Actress Oscars, Sally Field STILL seems like a TV star to me(she went back to a TV series, but will play Mary Lincoln opposite Daniel Freakin' Day Lewis this year.)

---Remember such lovelies as Laura Devon, Charlene Holt and Joyce Jameson? Devon was a real looker, and a good actress. Howard Hawks' gave her a chance on the big screen but she didn't "take". PG's Lola didn't transition, either, but she was a veteran player by the time she did that show.

---

Funny you should mention Laura Devon and Peter Gunn. For Laura Devon replaced the older Lola Albright in the movie of "Peter Gunn," evern though Craig Stevens aged and got to stay in his part.

Holt has been immortalized in Hawks' "Rio Bravo remake" El Dorado, with Mitchum and the Duke, and Joyce Jameson is immortalized in one absolutely silvery-gleaming scene doing a Marilyn Monroe impression in "The Apartment"(Ray Walston in a phone booth coaxes/orders Jack Lemmono out of the apartment so he can tryst with her.)

---

As to Cyril Delevanti, I saw him in a Twilight Zone I never cared for last night, the one with Barry Morse as a sadistic theater critic who gets his comeuppance. I only saw the end. Strangely, Delevanti, who looked ancient on PG, actually seemed to have aged over the years! Another ancient actor, a sort of French Delevanti: Marcel Hillaire. He was in everything back then. Of course we (Americans) had Burt Mustin, so I guess Methuselah-like character actors were popular back in the day.

---

Marcel Hillaire was one of those "American Studio French Guys." I think he sacrificed being part of Truffaut and Godard in favor of being world-famous on "I Spy" and "McHale's Navy."

---

Burt Mustin. Burt Mustin. The man, the legend. HAD to have been born at the age of 65 and just kept aging for 50 years in movies.

I recall him being taken hostage by Baby Face Nelson in "The FBI Story"(1959) with Nelson yelling at him:

Nelson: Everybody into the car. You too, Uncle Fudd!

I'm afraid if ever an actor was born to play "Uncle Fudd," it was Burt Mustin.



Last night I saw an R66 guest starring Lew Ayres as a Nazi hunter masquerading as an oil rig worker to capture a Nazi war criminal.

---

Ironic, given that Ayres sat out "the good war" off WWII as a conscientious objector.

--It was very good, not one of the best but high average, featuring a fine supporting cast of players you're almost certainly familiar with, including Michael Conrad, Bruce Dern and Ed Asner (both seen briefly, early on), Roger C. Carmel (a sort of lesser,--in all respects--Victor Buono)

----

All those guys made it, for awhile. Dern rose the highest, Asner became perhaps the most famous. Conrad got one of those sadly "late-breaking" hit TV roles(Hill Street Blues) just in time to die while playing it. Carmel was the go-to guy for "exotic villains." Died young of drugs.

----

---

and Alfred Ryder, an excellent actor who had a spotty film career. You'd recognize the face if you don't recognize his name, He was rather like Norman Lloyd in being expert at playing odd, enigmatic, often seemingly "disturbed" characters.

---

I know Ryder from "Wild, Wild, West" villains and the like, but I will always remember him getting a great, great and almost touching line at the end of one of my favorite unsung movies "Hotel" of 1967.

He's a cop who has figured out that foreign diplomat Michael Rennie drunkenly killed a little boy in a hit and run and that Rennie's wife Merle Oberon covered it up. But Rennie is dead now(in the hotel elevator mini-disaster finale) and Oberon is crying, and the cover-up doesn't matter and Ryder walks out of Oberon's hotel room and has this dialogue with his assistant:

Assistant: Well, aren't you going to arrest her?
Ryder: Why should I? I think she's a nice, nice lady...

And he walks off. And the thing is...he SHOULD have arrested her...but I guess diplomatic immunity and all that.

One more thing: I always rather confused Alfred Ryder with that guy who played McCloud's boss, JD Cannon.

---



Yet another comedian who did some TV dramatic work: Larry Storch, who appeared in a Hitchcock hour and who also did well by Kraft's suspense show prioer to F Troop. He was actually quite good, not so generically comedic, as, say, Joe Flynn. Storch showed some average guy Jack Carson potential, seemed at times to be consciously imitating Carson, especially in his use of his face.


---

My trivia for you on Storch was that he was pals with Tony Curtis, who -- not very threatened by his pal Storch's looks -- cast him in a few Tony Curtis movies. They have a long scene in "Who Was That Lady?" in which Russian Storch interrogates Tony Curtis under truth serum. This was a b/w 1960 movie and...Storch's Russian spy boss is played by Simon Oakland, the FBI chief by John McIntire, and Curtis' wife by...Janet Leigh. Why, its almost Psycho. To look at, at least.

Guys like Larry Storch don't last all that long, but he WAS funny as a nerve-rattled driving instructor taking Peter Falk's Lt. Columbo for his driving test on an episode of that big seventies series.

----

---

Another guy associated more with comedy, Jerry Paris, of the Dick Van Dyke show, later a director, did his share of dramatic roles, was even a regular on The Untochhables for a while, I prefer as a dramatic actor.

---

All those things -- he was Van Dyke's dentist neighbor -- and yeah, I liked him on The Untouchables The Best.

---

Peter Gunn's own Herschel Bernardi, who appeared in a lot of comedy, musical comedy included,

"Fiddler on the Roof," yes?


---

could also play it straight. He's very good as Lt. Jacobi on PG, better I think than, say, Martin Balsam would have been. Bernardi had a light touch, could, as an actor, go with the flow, while I find Balsam's acting style, skillful as it is, somewhat monolithic (for want of a better word), lacking a certain easygoing-common touch quality that came naturally to Bernardi,--but that's ne.

---

Well, comparing Balsam to Bernardi finds us back at the old stand: the "precision" of casting the right man to the right part. Balsam was(in Psycho at least) a bit more dapper than the "regular guy" Bernardi.

I finished a book about Hitchcock making his 1972 "Frenzy," and when it came to casting the movie, you can feel the directors' pain: no major stars would take parts, so he literally interviewed hundreds of unknown actors and watched their film clips all day long,for weeks on end, trying to find the "perfect" versions of Richard Blaney, Bob Rusk, Brenda Blaney, etc. When you don't have the "crutch" of star casting, I guess you get to be more precise about who you cast. But it must have driven Hitchcock crazy trying to find the "precise" matches. Sometimes its beteter to compromise with a star.

And so it would go even with "names" like Balsam and Bernardi. They COULD play each others parts, but one was better than the other for the right role.

Good stuff, EC. I finally broke down and bought a new (well, used, but pretty good) monitor and it seems to be operational .

John Forsythe was a good decade younger than Bob Cummings and started much later in films and TV, was mostly a stage actor prior to 1950, while Cummings started out in films in 1935, enjoyed a career as a male ingenue type a la Ronald Reagan and, beelieve it or not, around the same time, Craig Stevens. Forsythe's rise, such as it was, was more "legit", thus he was sort of a star or at least a name with a measure of gravitas early on. A friend of mine put it nicely years ago when he said he never quite understood Forsythe's "prestige",--if that's the right word for it--since he's not that good an actor and it's not like he came up through the Old Vic or something . I hadn't quite thought about it before like that and there's some truth to it. Forsythe always seemed to carry more "weight" than talent and he did often seem to get a kind of royal treatment in films and on television (yes, I know he had hard times, too) like he was James Mason . Not quite. He had a good voice, though, and he used it well.

Larry Storch and Tony Curtis were friends. Okay, so that's what got Storch all those good roles in MCA shows! In the end he wound up on F Troop, which sort of "immortalized" him. I saw an interview with him years ago in which he said he thought he was going to great places and that F Troop was just another rung on the ladder, while in fact it was the peak of his fame, his career. He didn't come off as the least bit bitter.

Herschel Bernardi was apparently one of the most amazing casting coups in Broadway history, or so I remember reading at the time, as his Tevye was widely regarded by fans of the show as superior to Zero Mostel's. I think Mostel was the original, and he was a far bigger name than Bernardi at the time, widely known to the general public, thus he presumably "owned" Tevye in Fiddler On the Roof. Then Bernardi came along. My mother and aunt went to see the show and saw the Bernardi version, and they loved it! Sometimes when a star leaves a show it declines, loses steam, but not in this case. Ten years later, ironically, both actors appeared in the anti-Blacklist movie The Front, which Woody Allen starred in.

Indeed, Bernardi and Balsam were similar but different. The former had, like Bob Cummings, a more "comedy face", the latter had a more serious demeanor and, as you put it nicely, was more dapper than Bernardi. It was probably Bernardi's more average guy persona that helped put Peter Gunn over with, well, more average viewers. Balsam's more somber demeanor in the Jacobi role would have made the show feel more like 12 Angry Beatnicks (or something...).

An embarrassment of TV riches the past weekend, unusual for me, as I seldom watch TV more than an hour at a time, if that, starting with a mediocre Thriller episode that was none the less fun due to, interestingly, Robert (12 Angry Men) Webber being the male lead, noir icon his Jane Greer the female counterpart, plus a nice, brief performance by the show's director, John Newland, as a one-eyed artist killed by a stranger with a crossbow in his studio late at night. It's always fun to see those U-I sets recycled. I swear I sometimes watch those shows just to see what they'll do with the sets!

The previous day I'd seen Balsam in a R66 as a social worker, and it occurred to me that he was sort of the go-to guy for "caretaker" roles, often called upon to play a man in charge if a difficult situation, whether as therapist, friend, family member, lawyer, jury foreman, and that his (screen) business often had to do with him dealing with eccentric people, as in A Thousand Clowns. Early on, in Psycho, he seems to be in such a predicament with Norman, till the tables are turned .

Then, after Thriller, comes a Twilight Zone in which (deputy sheriff) John McIntyre played an offbeat role as a man who sells, among other things, love potions. After that was a Jack Klugman episode, the one in which he plays a despondant jazz musician who throws himself under a truck, only to be rescued by (California Charlie) John Anderson as the angel Gabriel. Earlier in the evening I'd seen Anderson as a campaign hat wearing seventy year old retired Arizona general on the warpath against a pair of killers in yet another R66. For once Anderson seemed cast as a character who seemed about the same age as he always came off as. Did the man ever look young? He wasn't ancient looking like Burt Mustin, he just seemed born middle aged.

Two good Peter Gunns, one, which I've read about, never seen, featured Shelley Berman as a very neurotic comedian who thinks his wife is out to kill him. It was very good and it reminded me not only how talented Berman was but also that Bob Newhart probably owed him the telephone schtick he made his own later which I'm guessing Berman got there first with. Sandwiched in-between was a Fugitive, very good, reminding me, uncomfortably, how the 60s changed on television, from the breezy (but dramatically serious, non-noir) Route 66 to another "road show", this one a noir about a man unjustly accused of murder, and watching them, not consecutively but over a 24 hour period reminds me that the mass media can be, at times, startlingly prescient. If R66 was the feelgood Peace Corps Camelot set in dramatic form, premiering even before JFK's election, The Fugitive was the missing link between that show and the later Easy Rider (whose co-star, Jack Nicholson, I'm in the process of reading a biography of), as the times were a-changin' on the small screen even before November 22, 1963. The Fugitive premiered just two months earlier,; and just as R66 struck a pre-Camelot chord before the event, The Fugitive struck a lost in the wilderness chord post-JFK assassination.

Good stuff, EC. I finally broke down and bought a new (well, used, but pretty good) monitor and it seems to be operational .

---

Good! Your time permitting, a few of your longer posts will be most welcome. "They got meat on the bones." Good reading.

---

John Forsythe was a good decade younger than Bob Cummings and started much later in films and TV, was mostly a stage actor prior to 1950, while Cummings started out in films in 1935, enjoyed a career as a male ingenue type a la Ronald Reagan and, beelieve it or not, around the same time, Craig Stevens.

---

There is an article in the The New Yorker this October 2012 week about, of all people, Lyle Talbot. It is written by one of his daughters(from Marriage Number Five, which actually lasted a coupla decades to his death) and points out to me that Talbot actually had a decent "male ingenue" role in movies(opposite Carole Lombard in one film) that petered out to Ed Wood movies(in which he was good and pretty much the biggest star in the movies) and a recurring role on "Ozzie and Harriet." Per his daughter, Talbot worked steadily, "never had to sell real estate on the side."

Its a good article about that kind of Hollywood actor.

---

Forsythe always seemed to carry more "weight" than talent and he did often seem to get a kind of royal treatment in films and on television (yes, I know he had hard times, too)

---

I wince when I recall witnessing part of the "hard times." It was in the seventies and I was watching TV just to watch. Afternoon TV. A game show called "Beat The Clock," and Forsythe was a celebrity contestant. He was dressed in slacks and a T-shirt that said "Beat the Clock." John Forsythe should NEVER have been dressed in a T-Shirt that said "Beat the Clock." And to beat the clock, Forsythe had to jump into a giant bowl of Jello and retrieve some object.

I've often wondered if producer Aaron Spelling saw that "Beat the Clock" humiliation of Forsythe for soon, Forsythe was cast as "The Voice of Charlie"(and nothing more THAN a voice) on "Charlie's Angels," which also(I forgot this) helped Forsythe get the lead on Spelling's "Dynasty."

--- He had a good voice, though, and he used it well.

Yes, Forsythe's voice probably was his claim to fame, the "Old Vic" fake-out. I'm reminded that Hitchcock used MANY actors for their great voices -- from the stars like Stewart, Grant, Fonda to the lesser knowns but distinctive Forsythe, Balsam, Perkins...Janet Leigh. (Actually, I'm not sure which of those latters should be up in the star category with Grant and Stewart. Maybe Leigh.)

Forsythe mainly did TV, but "lucked out" with roles in big movies like "In Cold Blood"(evidently because he looked like the real cop in played in the story), Hitchocck's "Topaz"(hell, he was the only identifiable face on the screen to most US audiences) and that Totally Evil role with Hot Young Al Pacino in "Justice for All."

And in 1984, came the re-release of the "lost" "The Trouble With Harry," just as Forsythe was a big TV star with "Dynasty" and just after Shirley MacLaine had won a comeback Oscar with "Terms of Endearment" so Universal could advertise:

"See Alfred Hitchcock's The Trouble With Harry, starring Oscar Winner Shirley MacLaine of Terms of Endearment and John "Dynasty" Forsythe!"

Why, they were bigger stars than when they made "Harry"!

---


Larry Storch and Tony Curtis were friends. Okay, so that's what got Storch all those good roles in MCA shows! In the end he wound up on F Troop, which sort of "immortalized" him. I saw an interview with him years ago in which he said he thought he was going to great places and that F Troop was just another rung on the ladder, while in fact it was the peak of his fame, his career. He didn't come off as the least bit bitter.

---

Well, he had his run, and "F Troop" DID immortalize him. You wanna see something weird? (I stumbled onto it looking at Hitchcock links.) On "You Tube," they have a clip of the old "Hollywood Palace" show fromt he mid-sixties. The celebrity host is a gorgeous, gown-wearing Janet Leigh, and the three F Troop male leads -- Big Forrest Tucker, funnyman Larry Storch, and handsome ingenue Ken Berry -- came on stage with Leigh in their F Troop costumes as their characters and did some silly comedy with her -- with Storch the most flummoxed by the gorgeous Leigh. It is silly stuff, indeed -- but a nice "time capsule" of mid-sixties TV entertainment programming.

---

Herschel Bernardi was apparently one of the most amazing casting coups in Broadway history, or so I remember reading at the time, as his Tevye was widely regarded by fans of the show as superior to Zero Mostel's. I think Mostel was the original, and he was a far bigger name than Bernardi at the time, widely known to the general public, thus he presumably "owned" Tevye in Fiddler On the Roof. Then Bernardi came along. My mother and aunt went to see the show and saw the Bernardi version, and they loved it! Sometimes when a star leaves a show it declines, loses steam, but not in this case. Ten years later, ironically, both actors appeared in the anti-Blacklist movie The Front, which Woody Allen starred in.

---

Yes, Bernardi had his day. Certainly on stage, and also as the "deep, bass voice" of the TV commercial cartoon character "Charlie the Tuna," a fish who WANTS to be caught and killed to be Chicken of the Sea tuna...but he just isn't good enough("Sorry, Charlie," said the announcer famously.)

Bernardi also had a brief run on a nice sitcom called "Arnie," about a factory worker who gets promoted to management. CBS had higher hopes for "Arnie" than it did for another show the same season about a working class man: "All in the Family." Oops.

---


Indeed, Bernardi and Balsam were similar but different. The former had, like Bob Cummings, a more "comedy face", the latter had a more serious demeanor and, as you put it nicely, was more dapper than Bernardi. It was probably Bernardi's more average guy persona that helped put Peter Gunn over with, well, more average viewers. Balsam's more somber demeanor in the Jacobi role would have made the show feel more like 12 Angry Beatnicks (or something...).

---

And though Balsam did plenty of TV in the sixties, I contend that "Psycho" put him up higher than Bernardi and some others. It was such a blockbuster, seen by so many millions around the world, with Balsam in such an unforgettable scene(his murder), that Balsam did plenty of major movies(Breakfast at Tiffany's, Seven Days in May), then copped an Oscar for "A Thousand Clowns" and was, henceforth, "prestige" in a way that other supporting guys weren't.

But nothing lasts forever. In the seventies, Balsam had to scramble for parts and did a few embarrassing Bs. (Like "Mitchell," with Joe Don Baker, where Balsam is a mobster shot through the face and doing his "Psycho death face" in the dying.) Still, also in the seventies, Balsam got over the title billing in "Catch 22" and "Murder on the Orient Express" and key roles in "All the President's Men" and "Pelham 123." His Psycho/Oscar boost served him well.



---starting with a mediocre Thriller episode that was none the less fun due to, interestingly, Robert (12 Angry Men) Webber being the male lead,

---

Robert Webber: one of the ubiquitous "Roberts" of his era(Robert Vaughn, Robert Conrad, Robert Wagner), and perhaps the most "seedy." Webber was a handsome guy, but he had a knack for playing bad guys -- he's a suave thug killed by private eye Paul Newman in "Harper" and memorably dies in a Dean Martin "Matt Helm" movie by firing a gun that fires BACKWARDS into his own chest(disbelieving the effect, he shoots himself AGAIN.)

In the seventies/eighties cusp, Robert Webber got two memorable roles from Blake Edwards: in "10," he is the gay friend of stars Dudley Moore and Julie Andrews and in "SOB", he is the "slapstick corner" of a three-guys comedy triangle of William Holden, Robert Preston, and Robert Webber. (A big deal for Webber, sharing the screen with Holden and Preston for so much screen time. Together, the three men steal the corpse of a movie director pal from the undertaker's office and drive him around til they can give him a Viking Funeral) "SOB" also has a role for Peter Gunn himself: an aged and gray-haired Craig Stevens. Blake Edwards remembered his roots. Oh...and Larry Storch is in it, as the Guru officiating at the film director's funeral even as The Three Stooges(Holden, Preston, Webber) are REALLY burying the director at sea.

"SOB": we must talk about that movie some time. Its really a weird artifact of its time, a "movie business comedy" that might be called "The Bad and the Beautiful Meets The Pink Panther."

Finally: in the 80's, Robert Webber and Hitchcockian Eva Marie Saint played the parents of Cybill Shepard on "Moonlighting."

---

noir icon his Jane Greer the female counterpart,

---

I found Jane Greer to have one of the sexiest, "knowingist" faces of the forties. Her most famous role is probably as the femme fatale in "Out of the Past" which was remade in the 80's with a younger woman (Rachel Ward) in the role, but Greer still regal and sexy as a rich older woman.

---

plus a nice, brief performance by the show's director, John Newland, as a one-eyed artist killed by a stranger with a crossbow in his studio late at night.

---

THAT's not something you see much today on TV!

---

It's always fun to see those U-I sets recycled. I swear I sometimes watch those shows just to see what they'll do with the sets!

---

Yes, they "did a lot with a little" back then. The first season of "Burke's Law" had this one interior set -- living room, staircase, second floor -- that they simply re-dressed each week with different curtains, lamps and flowers. For an episode where the victim was a Big Game Hunter, they put animal heads on the wall of that same set. And it worked. You imagined a different place each time.

I expect on Thriller you saw a fair amount of "Psycho" set recycling.

---

The previous day I'd seen Balsam in a R66 as a social worker, and it occurred to me that he was sort of the go-to guy for "caretaker" roles, often called upon to play a man in charge if a difficult situation, whether as therapist, friend, family member, lawyer, jury foreman, and that his (screen) business often had to do with him dealing with eccentric people, as in A Thousand Clowns.

---

Yes, though Balsam famously played a private eye for Hitch, he was really usually better in roles that called for easy-going professionalism, and a caring nature.

---

Early on, in Psycho, he seems to be in such a predicament with Norman, till the tables are turned .

---

Yes, the dynamic doesn't really show itself til the end, when we learn of Norman's decidedly savage side. Arbogast totally misread the seemingly timid fellow. But who wouldn't?

---

Then, after Thriller, comes a Twilight Zone in which (deputy sheriff) John McIntyre played an offbeat role as a man who sells, among other things, love potions.

---

I remember that one. McIntire was pretty much playing the Devil, and the gimmick was: for a man, for one price, he can make a beautiful woman fall in love with you with potion. But after that woman clings and clings and clings to you, smothering you with love and affection...you will want to pay a lot MORE for the potion that makes her go away.

---

After that was a Jack Klugman episode, the one in which he plays a despondant jazz musician who throws himself under a truck, only to be rescued by (California Charlie) John Anderson as the angel Gabriel. Earlier in the evening I'd seen Anderson as a campaign hat wearing seventy year old retired Arizona general on the warpath against a pair of killers in yet another R66. For once Anderson seemed cast as a character who seemed about the same age as he always came off as. Did the man ever look young? He wasn't ancient looking like Burt Mustin, he just seemed born middle aged.

---

Yeah, I just can't picture "young John Anderson." You'd be surprised how many actors only took up the trade when they GOT older. Often they were studio accountants or other personnel and some director told them when they aged a bit, "you've got a great look. Let me cast you in a show." And they were on their way.

---

Two good Peter Gunns, one, which I've read about, never seen, featured Shelley Berman as a very neurotic comedian who thinks his wife is out to kill him. It was very good and it reminded me not only how talented Berman was but also that Bob Newhart probably owed him the telephone schtick he made his own later which I'm guessing Berman got there first with.

---

As I recall, there was a bit of feuding betweent the two men about their similar acts. But Newhart had that deadpan, Middle America persona to put him over in the heartland.

I recall Shelly Berman in a famous "Twilight Zone" episode about a man who hates all other people and wishes everybody could be just like HIM. And at the end of the show, everybody IS just like him, via special effects and Shelly Berman masks. And it is a nightmare.

Berman worked in recent years as an old, bald man, but still with that Shelly Berman touch.

He played a judge on "Boston Legal" who would admonish lawyers: "I'll have none of that lawyerly fiddle-faddle in my courtroom!"

I think he is still alive.

---

Sandwiched in-between was a Fugitive, very good, reminding me, uncomfortably, how the 60s changed on television, from the breezy (but dramatically serious, non-noir) Route 66 to another "road show", this one a noir about a man unjustly accused of murder, and watching them, not consecutively but over a 24 hour period reminds me that the mass media can be, at times, startlingly prescient.

---

Yes, it can be. I suppose writers are among those who are most observant of the changing times and the need to reflect that in their stories. I read the phrase "the late fifties were pregnant with the rebellious sixties" and it all came true.

Speaking of The Fugitive, there are a few episodes on the internet. I watched the pilot, with Vera Miles and amiable Brian Keith most surprisingly as her psycho domineering husband. Miles, it is said, was a "lucky charm" for TV pilot episodes, and this was such a one.

Speaking of Vera Miles, she was great in a Hitchcock Hour of 1965 the other night. She played the sexy daughter of an old silent movie director played by John Carradine. Young James Farentino wants to marry Vera and kill Carradine, but after Farantino laughs hard at an old silent movie directed by Carradine and starring Vera's late mother("She's terrible," laughs a drunken Farentino) -- Vera and Carradine kill Farentino.

So far, so predictable. And then, in a truly amazing final scene, Carradine is on the phone to a young woman as Miles starts to take off her make-up. And Vera Miles turns into an old, wizened woman, before our eyes. The wig goes last.

Turns out Vera is Carradine's WIFE, the girl on the phone is their daughter, Farentino was laughing at Miles on screen in that silent.

Its the stunning visual of Vera Miles picking apart her face to reveal an old crone that was shocking.

---

---

If R66 was the feelgood Peace Corps Camelot set in dramatic form, premiering even before JFK's election, The Fugitive was the missing link between that show and the later Easy Rider (whose co-star, Jack Nicholson, I'm in the process of reading a biography of),

---

I'll be interested to hear what you think of Nicholson and his career. One thing I've read is that while he was handsome as a young man, he was just too strange in manner to get much TV and movie work as a struggling actor(hence all those Roger Corman movies) and that, when director Josuha Logan berated him in front of the rest of the cast of "Ensign Pulver"(1964) as having no talent and no future whatsoever as an actor in Hollywood, Nicholson told his fellow bit players, "well, I guess I'll just have to work harder at it."

Came the counterculture, Nicholson's weird manner(AND good looks, and great voice) were perfect for the times. The rest is history.

---

as the times were a-changin' on the small screen even before November 22, 1963. The Fugitive premiered just two months earlier,; and just as R66 struck a pre-Camelot chord before the event, The Fugitive struck a lost in the wilderness chord post-JFK assassination.

---

Yes, it did, didn't it? It was as if the 60's were already set in place and ready to arrive. All that was necessary was that final "push" -- JFK's shocking death.

Berman worked in recent years as an old, bald man, but still with that Shelly Berman touch.

He played a judge on "Boston Legal" who would admonish lawyers: "I'll have none of that lawyerly fiddle-faddle in my courtroom!"

I think he is still alive.

---------------------------------

Berman plays Larry David's father on Curb Your Enthusiasm, usually featured in one episode per season (at least through season 7, haven't seen 8 yet).

----------------------------------------------

Speaking of Vera Miles, she was great in a Hitchcock Hour of 1965 the other night. She played the sexy daughter of an old silent movie director played by John Carradine. Young James Farentino wants to marry Vera and kill Carradine, but after Farantino laughs hard at an old silent movie directed by Carradine and starring Vera's late mother("She's terrible," laughs a drunken Farentino) -- Vera and Carradine kill Farentino.

So far, so predictable. And then, in a truly amazing final scene, Carradine is on the phone to a young woman as Miles starts to take off her make-up. And Vera Miles turns into an old, wizened woman, before our eyes. The wig goes last.

Turns out Vera is Carradine's WIFE, the girl on the phone is their daughter, Farentino was laughing at Miles on screen in that silent.

Its the stunning visual of Vera Miles picking apart her face to reveal an old crone that was shocking.

----------------------------------------------------------

Somewhat, but in some ways also very different, like the storyline of Billy Wilder's Fedora a film that deserves a lot more attention.

Berman plays Larry David's father on Curb Your Enthusiasm, usually featured in one episode per season (at least through season 7, haven't seen 8 yet).

----------------------------------------------

Aha. Well, isn't it interesting that he's still working, all these years later? A few make it through.

---
.

Turns out Vera is Carradine's WIFE, the girl on the phone is their daughter, Farentino was laughing at Miles on screen in that silent.

Its the stunning visual of Vera Miles picking apart her face to reveal an old crone that was shocking.

----------------------------------------------------------

Somewhat, but in some ways also very different, like the storyline of Billy Wilder's Fedora a film that deserves a lot more attention.

---

Hmmm. I wonder if Wilder saw the Hitchcock episode...or more to the point, actor-turned-writer Tom Tryon (The Cardinal, In Harm's Way) who wrote the short story "Fedora."

"Fedora" is the only Wilder film from "Witness for the Prosection" on that I still have not seen. I really should.

EC: Once again I lost a lengthy response the other night , thus my tardy return. Fortunately I think I'm getting a new pc soon, depending on the timing. The old one just seems to conk out whenever I write long posts, messages, anything, and fails to respond to the preview and response buttons.

Surprisingly, to me, Vera Miles, Martin Balsam, Charles McGraw and many other actors better known for their film work did a lot of television in the 60s, obviously fussy about picking which shows to appear on. Fortunately, they often appeared on shows I like. Balsam was a somber fellow, Bernardi, more down to earth and easygoing. Other contrasting but similar guys: Jack Klugman and Norman Fell, with the former more aggressive and far edgier, the latter more subdued, almost passive.

Then there were the western actors, who were all over the place. John Anderson did his share but I don't think of him as western as, say, R.G. Armstrong or Warren Oates. Armstrong, recently deceased, could have switched roles with Crahan Denton (died a long time ego), as both had that Southern-country thing going for them, with Armstrong more soft-spoken and gentle seeming, Denton more cranky, more harsh. Strother Martin was in there, too, and Denver Pyle, who really came up the hard way via B pictures, kiddie action and western shows, then got bigger films, better quality material.

Shelley Berman was one of those hip comedians, not so hip as Lenny Bruce, more Out There than Bob Newhart. He was very funny, wasn't a wild man like Jonathan Winters or, to a lesser degree, later on, the pre-hippie, short haired George Carlin, who was brilliant back then. I never cared much for the envelope pushing Countercultural persona he developed after 1970. It was sincere enough but he was really too old for that, closer to a beatnick as a type than a hippie. He was one for the coffee clubs and jazz joints but he went for the college crowd later on.

TV reflected the changing times nicely back in the days of R66 and The Fugitive, even Dr. Kildare and Mr. Novak, the one sort of Jack Kennedy as a young doctor, the other Jack Kennedy as a high school teahcer. The influence on Kennedy on TV was tremendous, greater than any other president I can think of. Even Dick Van Dyke, who didn't resemble Kennedy at all had the Kennedyesque hair; and he and Mary Tyler Moore were rather the Jack and Jackie of sitcom stars. After the assassination it was never the same. First it was those sci-fi sitcoms of the Bewitched-Jeannie kind, then the spy and secret agent shows like UNCLE, I Spy, Secret Agent, even The Wild, Wild West, all influenced by the James Bond films. The more thoughtful, sensitive shows largely vanished after that, with the coming of all-color prime time the last nail in the coffin.

It's like the medium itself couldn't take itself seriously (so to speak). The Massage, as McLuhan nicely put it, it may have been, but the Massage of the 1966-70 period was a strange one, with, among dramatic shows, only the uber- straight Star Trek and Mission: Impossible seeming to attract younger views, to catch that "something in the air" that other shows missed. "That something" was there in comedy shows like Get Smart, Batman and Laugh-In, not in the serious ones. The "deadpan style" of Trek and MI was likely a factor in their popularity, reflecting the need to be cool, with, by implication, the more emotional aspects of many of the TV dramas that preceded them, while relevant in their day, with "their day" being in some cases only two or three years earlier, hopelessly unhip once the Counterculture was in full bloom. Another deadpan serious show (though a comedy to kids our age), Dragnet, retro with a right wing late 60s spin. Ten years earlier, in its previous incarnation, it was as mainstream as Perry Mason. By 1968 it had become almost surreal, To call it Out There would be an understatement, yet young people dug it. Those were mighty strange times.

EC: Once again I lost a lengthy response the other night , thus my tardy return. Fortunately I think I'm getting a new pc soon, depending on the timing. The old one just seems to conk out whenever I write long posts, messages, anything, and fails to respond to the preview and response buttons.

---
Mine's getting that way. The real problem is I can't "save and move" stuff. I pretty much post right to the screen and edit. I've lost a few, that's for sure.

--


Surprisingly, to me, Vera Miles, Martin Balsam, Charles McGraw and many other actors better known for their film work did a lot of television in the 60s, obviously fussy about picking which shows to appear on. Fortunately, they often appeared on shows I like.

---

I was thinking that many of those early 60's shows were "anthologies in disguise." David Janssen on The Fugitive and the Route 66 guys would pull up in some town and kind of "witness" that week's "stand alone story" about the people in that town. Thus, a Martin Balsam or a Telly Savalas would be the "star" of that week's episode.

---

Balsam was a somber fellow, Bernardi, more down to earth and easygoing. Other contrasting but similar guys: Jack Klugman and Norman Fell, with the former more aggressive and far edgier, the latter more subdued, almost passive.

--

You picture all these guys going into acting, and KNOWING that they are the same, but slightly different, from one another. And yet all four of those guys hung on, one way or the other. Klugman was a "late bloomer," landing first "The Odd Couple" and later "Quincy" and suddenly becoming a widely watched TV star. Martin Balsam never really got that kind of TV role; he had to rely on movies and guest shots until he got the lamented "Archie Bunker's Place," which, to my mind, never had the impact that "All in the Family" did.

Norman Fell had a face that played somewhat Droopy Dawg funny. He had some serious roles, but let's face it, his big movie moment is as the Berkeley landlord in "The Graduate" who doesn't want any "subversives" in his building(in BERKLEY?) Then he went on to a doomed role as the neighbor on Three's Company. I seem to remember a spin-off that I always turned off as soon as the credits came on, with Fell having to wave a toilet plunger like a baton.

Fell had good, small serious parts in two Don Siegel mini-classics: The Killers(as a crook; 1964) and Charley Varrick(as an FBI man; 1973.) I prefer to remember THOSE to the toilet plunger gig.

---

Then there were the western actors, who were all over the place. John Anderson did his share but I don't think of him as western as, say, R.G. Armstrong or Warren Oates. Armstrong, recently deceased, could have switched roles with Crahan Denton (died a long time ego), as both had that Southern-country thing going for them, with Armstrong more soft-spoken and gentle seeming, Denton more cranky, more harsh. Strother Martin was in there, too, and Denver Pyle, who really came up the hard way via B pictures, kiddie action and western shows, then got bigger films, better quality material.

---

Its interesting when you think of how many "Western TV actors" there were in the 50's and sixties...it was a good time to be from the South or the Southwest or homespun Midwest. And then suddenly, the Westerns were over and boy did those guys have to scramble for work.

Sam Peckinpah's 1973 "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid" is great for a number of reasons(though it has been released in about 15 versions) but one reason is Bloody Sam's nifty idea of casting practically every scene with famous Western character actors: RG Armstrong, Jack Elam, Chill Wills, Slim Pickens(absolutely magnificent in his brief tragic cameo as the husband of Katy Jurado.) It was great to see them but also kind of sad to see them because their kind of movies weren't being made much anymore.

Hell, Peckinpah was kind of a "one man employment" center for Western actors for awhile there. From "Ride The High Country" through "Major Dundee" to "Th Wild Bunch" and on to "Cable Hogue," "Junior Bonner" and "Pat Garrett" --- Sam employed Western guys. (Don't forget Dub Taylor!)

---
Shelley Berman was one of those hip comedians, not so hip as Lenny Bruce, more Out There than Bob Newhart.

---

Very deadpan, and Jewish in that New Age Sixties sort of way...not Jack Benny.

---

He was very funny, wasn't a wild man like Jonathan Winters

---

Who I just loved, loved, loved


---

or, to a lesser degree, later on, the pre-hippie, short haired George Carlin, who was brilliant back then. I never cared much for the envelope pushing Countercultural persona he developed after 1970. It was sincere enough but he was really too old for that, closer to a beatnick as a type than a hippie. He was one for the coffee clubs and jazz joints but he went for the college crowd later on.

---

It was odd how Carlin went from a short-haired guy in a suit and tie to the long-haired hippie freak he was in the seventies. Carlin almost went too quickly "in for the counterculture." It looked kind of fake to me.

His sixties TV character "The Hippy Dippy Weatherman" was classic for having a too-stupid TV monicker(which sixties TV often imposed on its comics) and a too-cool persona nonetheless.

Carlin was the first host of Saturday Night Live, and I recall reading that producer Lorne Michaels and Carlin debated what he should WEAR: Tee shirt or suit-and-tie? A compromise was reached: a suit over a tee-shirt.

---

TV reflected the changing times nicely back in the days of R66 and The Fugitive, even Dr. Kildare and Mr. Novak, the one sort of Jack Kennedy as a young doctor, the other Jack Kennedy as a high school teahcer. The influence on Kennedy on TV was tremendous, greater than any other president I can think of. Even Dick Van Dyke, who didn't resemble Kennedy at all had the Kennedyesque hair; and he and Mary Tyler Moore were rather the Jack and Jackie of sitcom stars.

---

I remember MTM being very associated with Jackie.

Tragic trivia: there was a comedian-impressionist named Vaughn Meader who specialized, in the early 60's, in playing JFK. He had a hit comedy album called "The First Family" that played in my parents' home. When JFK was killed, Vaughn Meader's career ended IMMEDIATELY. I'm not sure what happened to him.

---

After the assassination it was never the same. First it was those sci-fi sitcoms of the Bewitched-Jeannie kind, then the spy and secret agent shows like UNCLE, I Spy, Secret Agent, even The Wild, Wild West, all influenced by the James Bond films. The more thoughtful, sensitive shows largely vanished after that, with the coming of all-color prime time the last nail in the coffin.

---

They are saluting 2012 as the 50th Anniversary of the James Bond films and I read something pretty amazing: Goldfinger and Thunderball would have been "One billion dollar worldwide" earners today with inflation(and the lesser Thunderball was the bigger hit.) THAT explains that sudden infusion of spy shows on American TV(and a few more British ones on top of The Avengers.) NONE of the Bond movies after those Connerys made that kind of money, ever again.

We talk about how the movies changed in the sixties, but yeah, TV did too. I think we can figure that a lot of folks who wrote and produced fifties/early sixties TV came out of (a) radio and (b) New York stagework and writing but...the sixties crowd was younger and different.

Steve Martin gave an interview just the other day where he said wryly "I got hired to be a comedy writer in the 60's because I was young. Suddenly the orders were to fire older writers simply because they were old. Even if they wrote the greatest stuff ever for Jack Benny."

Interesting: Joseph "Psycho" Stefano bailed after doing a treatment of "Marnie" to produce, story-edit and sometimes write the TV series "The Outer Limits" instead. Think about it: he ditched Hitchcock to do TV. But Stefano had seen how rich Hitchcock had GOTTEN in TV, and seemed to have figured out how to make some cash for himself, too.

---




It's like the medium itself couldn't take itself seriously (so to speak). The Massage, as McLuhan nicely put it, it may have been, but the Massage of the 1966-70 period was a strange one, with, among dramatic shows, only the uber- straight Star Trek and Mission: Impossible seeming to attract younger views, to catch that "something in the air" that other shows missed. "That something" was there in comedy shows like Get Smart, Batman and Laugh-In, not in the serious ones.

---

I'm guessing the shows "skewed young and urban." Recall that CBS eventually made a clean sweep of high-rated shows like "The Beverly Hillbillies" and "Green Acres" because they skewed too "rural and old."

The "deadpan style" of Trek and MI was likely a factor in their popularity, reflecting the need to be cool, with, by implication, the more emotional aspects of many of the TV dramas that preceded them, while relevant in their day, with "their day" being in some cases only two or three years earlier, hopelessly unhip once the Counterculture was in full bloom.

---

Interesting: when "Star Trek" went off the air, Leonard Nimoy segued over to "Mission:Impossible." (Replacing Martin Landau, who had turned down..Spock!)

I supppose Trek and MI had an "intellectual" pretension that appealed to the college and/or educated adult set. I recall that NBC did research on The Man From UNCLE and found its main audience wasn't college(as thought) but...12 year old boys(count me in.) Those boys wanted "training" on the action and women waiting for them when they got older. Maybe.

---

Another deadpan serious show (though a comedy to kids our age), Dragnet, retro with a right wing late 60s spin. Ten years earlier, in its previous incarnation, it was as mainstream as Perry Mason. By 1968 it had become almost surreal, To call it Out There would be an understatement, yet young people dug it. Those were mighty strange times.

---

The Mystery that Was Jack Webb. Did he KNOW that his "Dragnet 1968" was considered a campy hoot by the counterculture? I think not. I think he stuck to his 1953 muse as if the world had not changed at all. (Well, Webb know it HAD, but he was gonna fight those punks all the way.)

I was watching a repeat of "Adam 12"(Webb's "Dragnet in uniform" show) just the other day and the "druggies" being frisked by the cops were middle-aged men who had appeared on the fifties "Dragnet."

I'd read some years ago that Jack Webb was offered the villainous Dean Wormer in "Animal House" first(John Vernon took the role.) I read more recently that Webb actually took lunch with director John Landis to discuss the role...smoking and drinking Scotches all through the lunch. Webb read the script, called Landis, said "You are out of your BLANKin mind"...and died a few years later, of a heart attack evidently brought on by that 1953 lifestyle.

Great guy, though. Jack Webb was a Hell or High Water, My Way or the Highway, Bona Fide Auteur. And though it wasn't that great a movie, the Dan Ackroyd/Tom Hanks "Dragnet" spoof of 1987 did a good job of Getting Jack Down.

(Trivia: Jack Webb produced the Richard Boone "detective Western" Hec Ramsey...and shut down the show and fired Boone after Boone allowed an episode to go on the air "about the occult.")

(Trivia: Jack Webb came up with the idea for Hec Ramsey after seeing "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" about which Webb said: "I had no interest in those two villains...I wanted to do a show about the frontier lawman who brought them to justice." Which, actually, he didn't. The Bolivians did.)

Time for bed, EC (but here goes): thanks, first off, for the lengthy reply.

I think it was common knowledge in ther "industry" the early 60s that those dramatic shows featuring regulars such as the ones we've discussed were essentially "underground anthologies", a way for creative writers, actors and directors could keep their hands in, so to speak, the television biz, a hedge against the smaller number of feature films being made at that time, plus the new actors that kept on turning up with whom they had to compete, of the actors--the Derns, Nettletons, Shatners, Dillmans, Rip Torn and all the rest who were horning in on their territory.

I do wonder about why some players went into acting at all. Norman Fell's face and personality were his "fortune", so to speak. He had little talent to speak of and yet he worked steadily. A somewhat similar, more dandyish, livelier actor: Milton Selzer, who was actually quite versatile. Dillman was competent but meh so far as I'm concerned, sort of an upscale (Peter) Mark Richman, somewhat less intense. Selzer, like Fell, had a sad sack air to him but could rally when given a good assignment.

Peckinpah loved those western guys, of which at the time James Coburn was one. He continued to use them to the end. I've never seen Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, am not surprised he used many (most?) of those guys. It's the younger guys who seemed headed for western stardom who got hurt the most when westerns began to slide; guys like Jeremy Slate, Tom Simcox and Andrew Prine. It's such a pity that Peckpinpah went out as he did. If anyone could have kept the western going it was him; and he was hip, too. As hip as Sergio Leone, just a different type. He directed a lot of TV before and between features. His Ride the High Country, which I saw first run, is one of the best, most moving westerns I've ever seen. Deep down, I sensed that Peckinpah, a very anti-Eastablishment guy, was a sort of cowboy beatnick, not a "straight" like John Wayne and Randolph Scott.

Briefly: I love Jonathan Winters every much as you do. He was the greatest "voice genius" of comedy and no one can come close to him. His nearest rival was probably the more erratic, less deeply creative but at his best just as wild Doodles Weaver.

Another comedian like Shelley Berman: Louis Nye. They could have been brothers, and they had similar schticks. Sort of weeping willy types.

I'd forgotten how much money the first few Bond pictures made. They were truly the Star Wars and Indiana Jones pictures of their time, blew away the competition. The series has proved durable but it kind of slipped over the years, as the Charlie Chan pictures did, with Warner Oland passing the baton to Sidney Toler, who then made way (by dying!) for Roland Winters. Connery and Moore were much bigger names and the Bonds double AA features, yet the persistance and decline of the franchise does remind me a little of the Chan series, with the difference being that the producer don't know when to quit...

Time for bed, EC (but here goes): thanks, first off, for the lengthy reply.

---

Thanks for checking in before "checking out." I return:

---

I think it was common knowledge in ther "industry" the early 60s that those dramatic shows featuring regulars such as the ones we've discussed were essentially "underground anthologies", a way for creative writers, actors and directors could keep their hands in, so to speak, the television biz, a hedge against the smaller number of feature films being made at that time, plus the new actors that kept on turning up with whom they had to compete, of the actors--the Derns, Nettletons, Shatners, Dillmans, Rip Torn and all the rest who were horning in on their territory.

---

Interesting analysis. It IS interesting to me how, once the studio contract era started falling apart, all sorts of new actors started replacing all sorts of old actors. A rather constant churn.

And a tough one. We talk elsewhere of 1960's Psycho, with this group of stars

Anthony Perkins
Janet Leigh
Vera Miles
John Gavin
Martin Balsam

All of them were good enough for movies for awhile, but notice how it didn't take too long for many of them to segue to television. By 1970 -- only ten years later -- none of those five could really "headline" a movie again. Only Perkins and Balsam by then were really relevant to "contemporary film."

And try this group of 1970 leads for the movie of MASH

Donald Sutherland
Elliott Gould
Tom Skeritt
Sally Kellerman

All stars of a sort for a time -- especially Gould. But not THAT long. But 1980, those folks couldn't really headline a movie either.



---

I do wonder about why some players went into acting at all. Norman Fell's face and personality were his "fortune", so to speak. He had little talent to speak of and yet he worked steadily.

---

One actor who never rose too high -- Larry Linville of the TV show "MASH" said -- "you become an actor because you HAVE to." It was some sort of drive, Linville suggested, and whether that drive took you to movie stardom or TV guest shots, you evidently had no choice in the matter. Instinct drove you.

--

A somewhat similar, more dandyish, livelier actor: Milton Selzer, who was actually quite versatile.

---

And he gets to "mysteriously bother" Tippi Hedren at the race track in "Marnie." And then get chased off by Sean Connery. His Hitchcock moment.

---

Dillman was competent but meh so far as I'm concerned, sort of an upscale (Peter) Mark Richman, somewhat less intense.

---

Dillman ended up with two points in his favor: (1) he came from Santa Barbara wealth, and he returned there(to Santa Barbara AND the wealth) in his later years as an actor and retiree; and (2) he married the absolutely gorgeous supermodel Suzy Parker, who had a brief and unlamented movie career for awhile(Kiss Them for Me, The Best of Everything.) They stayed married til her death.

--

Selzer, like Fell, had a sad sack air to him but could rally when given a good assignment.

---

Yep. And I think Selzer could play "foreign"(on TV at least) a bit better than Fell.

Norman Fell was a Burt Reynolds co-star on Dan August and I recall reading that when Reynold became a movie star he helped get Fell some work on some game show as a celebrity contestant...and Reynolds actually showed up on the game show a time or two in exchange for getting Fell the gig.

So there's a NICE Burt Reynolds story for once.

------

Peckinpah loved those western guys, of which at the time James Coburn was one. He continued to use them to the end.

---

Oh, yes. Coburn was a "co-star"(under Charlton Heston and Richard Harris) in "Major Dundee"(1964) and the lead as Pat Garrett, which has been called "The definitive James Coburn movie" by David Thomson(perhaps because Coburn plays his part at times with a moustache and at times not, but also because of the power of the role.) Coburn also took a role in Peckinpah's 1977 WWII movie "Cross of Iron" as the star, helping Peckinpah when the latter was having career trouble. I see James Coburn as "starrier" than most of Peckinpah's character guys, though.

---

I've never seen Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, am not surprised he used many (most?) of those guys.

---

Its worth a watch, and the story of its making is one of the great Hollywood stories. They'd shot about 1/3 of it when they found out a broken lens had turned all the footage blurry(they couldn't see dailies for WEEKS; the footage was shipped from Mexico to LA and back). MGM Studio head James Aubrey refused to let them re-shoot the scenes(he felt they were blurry but legible)...but they snuck in re-shoots anyway. A big feud began between Aubrey and Peckinpah and that's why there are so many different versions of the movie..Aubrey sent a "butchered" version out in 1973 first run.

---

It's the younger guys who seemed headed for western stardom who got hurt the most when westerns began to slide; guys like Jeremy Slate, Tom Simcox and Andrew Prine.

---

Yeah. They really got trapped in the end of the TV Western era.

Prine is memorably "the first to get killed" in the pop 1968 Western "Bandolero" with James Stewart and Dean Martin(as brothers!), Racquel Welch, and George Kennedy. Prine plays Kennedy's faithful deputy and his killing(he is holding a water bag in front of him and it explodes in bullet leaks) as the start-off of the final "Wild Bunch lite" slaughter is well-known in lesser circles. Ha.

---

It's such a pity that Peckpinpah went out as he did. If anyone could have kept the western going it was him; and he was hip, too. As hip as Sergio Leone, just a different type. He directed a lot of TV before and between features. His Ride the High Country, which I saw first run, is one of the best, most moving westerns I've ever seen. Deep down, I sensed that Peckinpah, a very anti-Eastablishment guy, was a sort of cowboy beatnick, not a "straight" like John Wayne and Randolph Scott.

---

I"ve read a couple of books on Peckinpah and his is a wild, sad story. He WAS a Beatnik...almost a preppy...and from a well-to-do(but NOT rich) Fresno, California family of lawyers. Fresno hunting trips in the "high country" rather helped turn him into a Westerner when he wrote Western TV shows to "break in", but he was never really comfortable in the guise.

Ride the High Country IS great, IS moving(the final scene is a "tearjerker without tears," just sad and poignant) and then he made his Gigantic Bloodbath Classic "The Wild Bunch" seven years later(after suffering about three or four years in Malibu exile after getting fired from "The Cincinnati Kid.")

Peckinpah got caught in the "death of the Western" in the seventies, but went ahead and cast those Western actors in modern comedies and thrillers like Junior Bonner, The Getaway, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, Convoy, and The Killer Elite(Bo Hopkins is in there -- ANOTHER Western young guy.)

The "wild, sad" part of Peckinpah's story is simple: drinking and drugs took him down, kept him near unemployable, probably killed him young of a heart attack.

But: he did it "his way," and his short reign produced several great movies and a lot of distinctively good ones.

Peckinpah is also famous for a short-lived 1960 Western TV show called "The Westerner" with Brian Keith. I managed to see the most famous episode at the TV museum: "Jeff." Its quite stark and sexual(showing nothing) for a 1960 TV show, with a sad plot:

Brian Keith enters a desolate bar where an old girlfriend -- "Jeff" -- is pretty clearly a hooker, with a brawny Englishman pretty clearly her pimp. Keith tries to get Jeff to leave with him, but must first fight her British pimp. Keith beats the pimp...but Jeff won't go with him. "Once a hooker, always a hooker." Again, 1960 TV. "The Westerner" was defeated in the ratings by "The Flintstones."

And maybe also by "Route 66."


---




Briefly: I love Jonathan Winters every much as you do. He was the greatest "voice genius" of comedy and no one can come close to him. His nearest rival was probably the more erratic, less deeply creative but at his best just as wild Doodles Weaver.

---

Funny about Jonathan Winters. Funnier than hell on talk shows and variety show appearances. But he couldn't make a movie career work(despite stealing "Mad, Mad, World" from about 80 other comics) and his one TV variety show hamstrung him(he had to "act normal" too much and introdce musical acts.)

But when that man was ON...watch out. Try him on YouTube on a "Dean Martin Roase" roasting Frank Sinatra "in character" as Sinatra's old bus driver from the Tommy Dorsey days. Hilarious.

I got to see Jonathan Winters in person with my parents at a concert he did in the 70's. I can genuinely say this was one of the two or three times in my life where I laughed so hard...it almost killed me. Honest. Couldn't breathe. And Winters told no jokes, he just "went off."

Robin Williams "rescued" Winters for "Mork and Mindy" but it seemed like a real improvisational mismatch. Williams always seemed to have a mincing-mime aspect to his work. Winters liked to use Southern accents and play things a little tough and menacing -- dumb but not THAT dumb. Williams became the bigger star(for awhile); but Winters is much funnier. IMHO.

---

Another comedian like Shelley Berman: Louis Nye. They could have been brothers, and they had similar schticks. Sort of weeping willy types.

---

True. You can find them BOTH on "Burke's Law" as suspects, and one time, Louis Nye was the KILLER at the end. But kind of a weeping willy killer.

Louis Nye also had that "too upbeat" character he played on the Steve Allen show, who would always greet Allen with "Hi-ho, Steverino!" I thought it was lightly a gay send-up back when that was allowed.

--

I'd forgotten how much money the first few Bond pictures made. They were truly the Star Wars and Indiana Jones pictures of their time, blew away the competition.

---

Yep, that's what they did. Some of the modern-day Bonds have been called "the top grossers," but take away inflation and population and NONE of them have beaten the Connery era -- for earnings, for influence and for the very adult sensibility of the Connerys(he had a license to kill, he could be a sadistic killer, and he had lots of sex -- bye, bye, Hayes Code.)

---

The series has proved durable but it kind of slipped over the years, as the Charlie Chan pictures did, with Warner Oland passing the baton to Sidney Toler, who then made way (by dying!) for Roland Winters. Connery and Moore were much bigger names and the Bonds double AA features, yet the persistance and decline of the franchise does remind me a little of the Chan series, with the difference being that the producer don't know when to quit.

---

The franchise has been all over the place and folks forget...a couple of times it was almost ended due to low grosses, and a couple of times it went "on hiatus" for a few years or more while rights got litigated (six years between the final Timothy Dalton and the first Pierce Brosnan.)

Daniel Craig has been pumped up as a "Bourne Identity Bond for the 21st Century," but he's not REALLY Bond. He's not sexist or sadistic and not that big on his martinis. "Skyfall" better be good -- the last one ("QUantum of Solace") was not. The Craig opener -- "Casino Royale" WAS good, though.

Just not as good as a Connery in its time. And not close at all in grosses.