I don't know if this episode is on the DVDs, but I remember one in reruns many years ago which climaxed with a helluva fistfight between Gunn and some other guy. I mean it was brutal, like the other guy was hellbent to kill Gunn with his bare hands. They seemed to be in a nice living room of big house, crashing over furniture, and I recall somebody throwing a tall book case down on the other guy.
Ring a bell?
P.S. I assume Gunn won, of course.
A wild guess: Death Is a Four Letter Word, from season three. I remember the fancy living room, and Patric Knowles was more of a middle-aged dandy of a villain than a two-fisted tough guy, but the climactic fight was quite elaborate, with Knowles resorting to a sword and maybe even a crossbow to dispatch Peter Gunn. It was a fun, typically stylish PG episode. As I recall, Knowles did not survive the altercation. I saw this ages ago, and the ending was exciting and offbeat even for this offbeat show.
shareSounds about right, I think I remember the sword. It was quite memorable.
There was also an episode that climaxed with a fight in a Chinese restaurant where one fellow ended up with a meat cleaver in the chest.
What I'm getting at: TV shows like "Peter Gunn" maybe didn't used to be as graphic and gruesome as today ("CSI") , but they had more of a head for violent action and the fatal dispatch of villains. A kind of casual approach to death.
Thanks very much, for the likely heads-up, telegonus.
I'm reminded of a TV crime show that played a few years after "Peter Gunn," called "Burke's Law," with Gene Barry. Like Craig Stevens in "Gunn," Barry was a suave "Cary Grant lite."
"Burke's Law" had several great gimmicks. One was the premise: Barry's Amos Burke was a Beverly Hills millionaire who just happened to be a Captain on the LAPD. Each week's show would open with the discovery of a body, then a cut to Burke at his mansion, romancing some gorgeous woman -- whom he would leave behind to drive to the crime scene in his Rolls-Royce!
The second gimmick: "Burke's Law" was a whodunnit, with a weekly "guest cast" of stars from which Burke would have to find the killer. The suspect mix was of old-time movie actors(Steve Cochran, Stephen McNally, Gloria Grahame) and newly minted TV people (Paul Lynde, Barbara Eden, the Smothers Brothers.) Ronald Reagan was a suspect once -- a TV used-car salesman like Cal Worthington. Each episode was called "Who Killed ---?"
The third gimmick: if the killer turned out to be a man, Burke and that guy would usually engage in a big fistfight. It was funny -- as with Patric Knowles in the "Gunn" episode above, the killer could be a very wispy or older man (Billy de Wolfe, Reginald Gardiner as examples), but they would just put a stunt man in there and suddenly the foppish fellow would be punching out Gene Barry's stunt man with vicious abandon. Of course, Barry always won the fight.
Ah, those were the days: nothing like a good furniture-wrecking fist-fight to bring an episode to a satisfying end. They were legion; no killer gave up without a fight, sometimes to the death. Stunt men were fully employed.
You're most welcome. For some reason I'll always remember Patric Knowles with those archaic weapons. Another show that had a lot of violence, implicit and explicit, was the 1960-62 horror anthology, Thriller, which featured such grisly deaths as a man ripping his face off in front of a mirror when he doesn't like what he sees; an elderly woman who turns out to be a witch torched by her family and sent screaming into the night; a young man killed by a hatchet in the forehead descending a flight of stairs in an old gothic mansion; and an unfortunate fellow kicked to death by a vengeful scarecrow. As you can see, this show wasn't for the faint of heart, and it still works if you can find some old episodes. The mood was often as tense as in Psycho, whose house, btw, figured in a few episodes, as the series was filmed on the Universal lot and used standing sets to save money. Most of the Bates house interiors were used used at one time or another, though I don't remember the fruit cellar ever showing up.
Yes, TV was more fun in those black and white days; better written and more imaginative. The Outer Limits was also outstanding, especially when a certain Mr. Stefano had a thing or two to do with it during its first season. Some of the episodes he wrote were extraordinarily good. I missed those days, especially those anthologies, a staple on network TV till they went all color in 1966-67, which ruined everything.
The coming of color TV shows pretty much ended that whole sweet era (roughly 1957-1966) of atmospheric mystery anthologies, along with the William Castle-style horror films in theaters, which looked rather like "TV on the big screen".
This particular black and white era is own very flavorful "sub-genre," -- more contempo-modern than noir -- and, very good writers were hired to write it. "Psycho" was part of it. "Peter Gunn" (with that GREAT opening theme, rich, jazzy, exciting) was part of it. "The Outer Limits" was part of it.
"Thriller" was very much a part of it. I've seen some episodes on the U.S. Sci Fi channel. Karloff made an excellent host, and the way the screen would "crack" into a web around his face as he said, "This one's a real...thriller," was part and parcel of the FUN of that era.
"Pigeons From Hell" had the guy with the hatchet in his head. Quite scary for TV.
And I did see a "Thriller" episode in which the interior of the Bates house was clearly used. The EXTERIOR was used for decades (and, I suspect, largely rebuilt over the years.) But this was a rare look at the foyer and staircase. Weird: by putting the interior in a different story with a different setting, one practically forgot this WAS the "Psycho" interior.
I can only guess that Universal eventually trashed that "Psycho" interior in the 60's. Studios tend to strike sets quickly. They're not history to the moneymen -- they take up space. Unless its like a "White House interior" set, needed for various political shows.
What replaced all that atmospheric 50's-early 60's stuff was the flat and tacky color of the "TV Movie of the Week" and "Rod Serling's Night Gallery." A few good ones "snuck through," but for the most part, those programs had a factory-built, clunky look that was only accentuated by poor 70's fashions, decor, and hairstyles.
And the fist-fighting violence of "Peter Gunn" (and "The Wild Wild West," and "The Man From UNCLE") was eventually ruled out of bounds in more peaceable times (somebody thought they helped create the atmosphere for assassinations and riots. Come on!). Today, that kind of TV violence has been replaced by gore and very realistic crime stories. Just no fun.
I'm glad that a few other people remember that distinct era as fondly as I do. Hitchcock's show (or shows) were in that same period, gone just the year before the all-color era began. One Step Beyond and The Twilight Zone are from that period as well.
The mood of many westerns was similar to the thriller-anthology=detective shows, as with the black and white Gunsmoke, which was like western noir, with The Rifleman not far behind. Boone's Paladin was like a black-clad private eye of the sagebrush. Dramatic shows like Naked City and Ben Casey (but not Kildare) drew on that same mood; darkish, moody, lots of unbalanced people, weirdos who throw a monkeywrench into everything, an emphasis on the insulted and the injured of society rather than the rich and priveleged.
Agree totally about Burke's Law, a lighter version of the same thing, with the then new multi-guest star gimmick (and remember, always in alphabetical order). It sort of carried on the Peter Gunn-Richard Diamond tradition with, as you mentioned, that sleazy sixties "Rat Pack" feel, complete with the greasy-sounding brass in the opening music. That was an awfully fun show. I remember when it was being previewed by ABC and watching the first episode, altogether surprised to find that the usually loveable Bill Bendix was the killer!
Another important show in a darker but not dissimilar vein stylistically as the others was The Fugitive, which premiered the same year as Burke's Law, on the same network, and also featured a novelty: a protagonist on the run from the law, and for four seasons! Worth mentioning: the ratings for this one began to fall after the show switched to color, hence the fourth season cancellation (helluva sendoff episode, though).
Those movies of the week from the late sixties through the early seventies were sort of the anthology shows of their era. I always hated the movie of the week idea. It seemed stupid to call a ninety minute show a movie. Why not just make longer anthology shows? There were some excellent ones, though, but you're right about the tacky color, which made television in general so ugly in those years. Night Gallery tried to uphold the anthology tradition but Serling had little control over his material and the writing wasn't as good as in the TZ. The very idea of a Serling show in color seems wrong anyway. He was a guy who cried out for black and white, rainswept streets, pawn shops, newstands, pool halls and rooming houses.
Had Gene Barry chasing after Cesar Romero on the beach and neither used a pinch runner. The show was the first Aaron Spelling all-star guest list vehicle and was based on the first episode of The Dick Powell Show in which Powell played Amos.
It ain't easy being green, or anything else, other than to be me
Yes, I saw that "Burke's Law" episode. I guess stunt men are more useful for fake punches and the like -- so nobody gets hurt. Barry and Romero were fit men at the time for running.
I have also seen the "Dick Powell" show pilot, and I do like to point out that "Burke's Law" was likely the BEST of the Aaron Spelling all-star shows, because the mystery writing was often quite good (people like Harlan Ellison and Levinson/Link contributed scripts) and the stars were rather directly tied into a particular "grade" of 1940's noirish near-B people (Steve Cochran, Stephen McNally) which gave the show a certain flavor. Somewhat bigger old stars like Betty Hutton and Lizabeth Scott also appeared.
"Burke's Law" was also rather racy for its time. Topics like sex, extramarital adultery, alcoholism, and drug use were hinted at,or even openly discussed. The show had a certain Rat Pack/Hugh Hefner early sixties sleaziness to it that was most atmospheric for a crime show -- perhaps more formulaic than "Peter Gunn," but in the same ballpark.
Paul Lynde guested three times -- and was the KILLER each time (but without fistfights, as I recall.) Best: the mystery was -- how was a magician shot to death when he was locked in a coffin in a swimming pool? Answer: his doctor, Lynde, did it, when he opened the coffin on land in front of spectators and checked the magician's heart ("This man's dead"). Silencer in his doctor's bag. Cool.
"Burke's Law" ran two seasons as a crime whodunit, and then somebody (Barry? Spelling? ABC?) turned the show into "Amos Burke, Secret Agent." Bad idea. Worse idea; no more all-star casts (maybe they were too expensive for the ratings received). The spy show tanked in less than a season.
Maybe I'll move some of these posts over to the "Burke's Law" board. It was a fun show. I'm not sure of DVD availability. I do know that the "TV Land" cable channel in the US showed the series about 8 years ago, which is when I caught up on it again.
It premiered airing on a Friday night, it followed the retooled 77 Sunset Strip which now had Bailey working out of the Bradbury Building if I recall correctly.
Didn't Burke come back in the late 80s or early 90s?
It ain't easy being green, or anything else, other than to be me
Yeah, they tried to re-do "Burke's Law" in the 90's. All-star cast suspects, again, but more modern. I think George Segal and Elliott Gould (sadly) made appearances. Gene Barry was still suave but white-haired and old, so they gave him a grown son to do the chasing and fist-fighting, etc. Of which, I think, there was less. It had a "Murder, She Wrote" vibe -- I think that was the actual greenlight-inspiration to bring it back.
I recall sampling a few episodes of the 90's version, but "you can't go home again." "Burke's Law" was indeed a Rat Pack era artifact, and the 90's version was rather sterile and plastic -- you couldn't really do "fun" anymore like that. The show lasted only one season.
In between the two "Burke's Laws," Aaron Spelling took another stab at the format with a detective show called "Matt Houston" in the 80's. James Garner-soundalike Lee Horsley played a multimillionaire detective, and the all-star whodunnit format was used for awhile -- before the show turned into a straight actioner without so many stars. I can only assume it was a budget thing.
Another gimmick: on the old and new shows, Burke would often utter some fortune cookie-expression, and then say "Burke's Law."
Like: "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. Burke's Law." OR: "When two people commit murder together, they get caught sooner or later. Usually sooner. Burke's Law."
SO:
Accept no substitutes: The sixties is when these shows matter... Burke's Law.
Rather than start a new thread, this seems like a good one to re-join the topic, as follows:
I've rented some of the Peter Gunn DVD's. 8 episodes per. Thoughts:
1. It looks like I won't be getting to see "Death is a Four-Letter Word" with Patric Knowles going Medieval on Peter Gunn anytime soon. It seems all they've got right now is the first season on DVD. The Knowles episode is in Season Three. Though I trust eventually they'll get all the episodes out. Somebody listening?
2. "Burke's Law" was influenced by "Peter Gunn" in one big way. Most of the "Peter Gunn" episodes I have seen thus far open with a murder, often with a screaming witness, but sometimes not. And -- and this is the cool part -- the second after the victim dies, BOOM, we get the "Peter Gunn" theme song and cool-weird splatter-art background titles. Note: the theme doesn't open with its famous "throbbing bass chord lead in" -- it starts right on the muscular first melodic notes. And soon, Peter Gunn is on the case (just like Amos Burke would be a few years later.)
My favorite opening murder thus far has a carny magician opening a case and his beautiful assistant falls out dead into the camera as the weird magician's eyes bug out at her -- BOOM! "Peter Gunn" music and logo comes on.
3. The format of the show is surprisingly similar to "Have Gun Will Travel." A potential customer looks up Gunn at "Mother's bar" -- just as Paladin would be looked up at the Hotel Carlton in San Francisco, pitches the job and the pay, and we're off (both shows were 30 minute quickies.)
4. But occasionally -- just like Paladin -- Peter Gunn takes a case for free, to help a friend, or a damsel in distress, or a penniless poor soul. Also like Paladin, the big-paying customers subsidize Gunn's pro bono work.
5. Craig Stevens as Peter Gunn: an interesting contradiction. He's clearly indeed an all-American Cary Grant clone -- somewhat in looks (he even has a cleft in his chin), but definitely in VOICE, and Stevens rather seems to push a long vocal Grant-like drag on his lines, like he's doing an impression.
Gunn is tall and handsome and elegant but -- and this is where it gets interesting -- far more brutal and two-fisted in his fighting style than Grant ever was. Creator Blake Edwards seems to have come up with a bizarre hybrid that really WORKED -- Cary Grant as Mike Hammer. I've seen no episode on Gunn's back story, but the private eye seems equally well-versed in martial arts (I'm guessing a Korean War b.g) and meat-and-potatoes slugging. In a fistfight against a giant mute brute in one episode, Gunn seemed to make a "strategic fighting decision" on the spot -- clenching both hands together as if in prayer and beating his opponent with a "two-hand hammer" to the face.
6. Lola Albright as Gunn's lady fair, the beautiful bar singer "Edie Hart." They make a great couple -- the sexy chaunteuse who willingly loves a suave man who is thisclose to getting killed in every episode, sometimes with her almost getting killed, too, just because she's with him when the killers show up.
Since Gunn has a regular lady, the show can only "tease" about the other women coming on to him. He let's them -- usually to get information -- but he NEVER lets things get out of hand. He's a loyal guy. It add sexual tension to the tale. In one episode, however, Gunn seemed to almost fall for a female he was investigating -- until she was killed, and he extracted lethal vengeance.
In another episode, Strapping Offbeat Fifties Television Beatnik Dame Nita Talbot demands that Gunn take her to dinner at Mother's -- where Lola Albright has to sing and watch her man under amorous attack attack from another woman. This is an amusingly sophisticated scene (Gunn tries to convince Nita to dine anywhere but Mother's: "The food is lousy...the drinks are watered down...the glasses are dirty.")
7. Herschel Bernardi as Gunn's long-suffering police lieutenant of a friend. This is a standard-issue private-eye show relationship (James Garner had that cop friend on "The Rockford Files"), but Bernardi plays his cop as the thin, sleek Gunn's interesting polar opposite: rather paunchy, sleepy-eyed, and shambling. Still, Lt. Jacoby gets Gunn out of a few fixes. They're truly a buddy team. (Bernardi would soon go on to voice "Charley the Tuna," who was never good enough to get caught on a fishhook and killed for a "Chicken-of-the-Sea dish," and felt bad about not getting chosen to die. Weird. A tuna death wish.)
8. Modernly, our TV shows are pretty gruesome -- CSI and its tour of rotting corpse innards -- but the investigations usually lead to arrest and trial. Not so on "Peter Gunn." Most episodes end with bad guys dead, dead, dead. Usually shot, sometimes by the twos, threes, fours. Those were the days...
9. "Peter Gunn" was shot on the Universal backlot, and, it seems, on two exterior street sets, period. One street with some businesses (a street seen in "Harvey" and "Psycho" as well); one street with some brownstones. Week after week, show after show, hordes of hoods would show up for a fatal showdown with Gunn on the SAME BLOCK of the unnamed "river city".
10. Tying it all together: Henry Mancini's music. Its no wonder Mancini was given a movie scoring career ASAP after he hit with this show. "Peter Gunn" has the coolest, hippest, most atmospheric theme song ever. It's almost too bad a classic movie didn't get it first.
And: every episode I viewed starts with the same Mancini riff over the "opening murder of the week": a quick jazzy strum of a bass fiddle, as if a solo jazz musician is jamming with one string, eyes closed and joint in his mouth. Then the victim dies and the "Peter Gunn" theme kicks in. Oh, for the Kabuki-like ritualistic quality of a 30 minute TV show.
Too many "Peter Gunn" episodes in a row rather dilute the quality of the show, but I think what sticks is this: how Mancini's music enwraps everything with cool, and how Peter Gunn himself is such a supersuave yet brutal and murderous operative. It's very adult material from a very innocent time.
Herschel Bernardi's Lt. Jacoby was sort of a precursor of Ed Asner's Lou Grant character on Mary Tyler Moore's show and later on Asner's own LG show. Bernardi was, though sloppy in appearance, hipper than Asner as a type, at least as I remember him. The Gunn show must have been in in its day a nice alternative to all those "juvenile" Warners detective shows of the same period. Craig Stevens, like Lloyd Bridges, parlayed some two decades of being a minor Hollywood movie player into becoming a genuine TV star. Though many have commented on Stevens' resemblance to cary Grant, physically and vocally, I get Fred MacMurray vibes, too, as I can easily see MacMurray doing a movie version of the show. BTW, as I recall, PG was shot on the MGM backlot for a season. At least that's what some of the credits read.
shareAsner inherited the role of Jacoby in the 1967 movie which seems to have disappeared.
Craig Stevens would go on to having starred in two series in the 1964-65 season - the syndicated Man Of The World and Mr. Broadway on CBS.
It ain't easy being green, or anything else, other than to be me
That's right. I forgot about Asner as Jacoby, or maybe remembered it unconsciously. Bernardi is my preference, though. I remember Asner in the role and didn't care for him. Good actor, but too mannered. Bernardi was more of a natural.
shareFred MacMurray as Gunn? An interesting concept, but surely the toughness of his "Double Indemnity" character (and the surprising sexual suaveness of his villain boss in "The Apartment," who threatens Jack Lemmon with a Gunn-like "You dig?") would give MacMurray a shot at it.
I believe MacMurray was also the first choice for Perry Mason?
Too bad MacMurray elected to go the "nice dad" route in "My Three Sons" instead, but then we never knew exactly what that dad DID, did we? (Sell insurance? Murder people?) No, wait, he was an engineer. It was Beaver's dad we knew nothing of.
Craig Stevens had a body that was perhaps a bit too tall and thin to match Cary Grant -- it was more of a "Jimmy Stewart stringbean look." And alas, nobody was QUITE as handsome as Cary Grant, as his many TV knockoffs demonstrated (Stevens, Gene Barry, Robert Wagner, etc.)
But Stevens did get Grant's voice down perfect on "Peter Gunn" (in a far more subtle manner than Tony Curtis' comic gig in "Some Like It Hot"), and I wonder:
Shortly after hitting with "Peter Gunn" on TV, Blake Edwards got to work with the REAL Cary Grant on "Operation Petticoat" as a director.
Perhaps Cary Grant was impressed with Edwards ability to "recreate him" as a TV character?
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Peter Gunn is definitely cooler than the Warner Brothers shows (which were syndicated on cable a few years ago). Meaner and tougher,too.
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Herschel Bernardi' Lt. Jacoby is, indeed, a rather special character. His character plays the guitar in his squad room office, and suggests a rather Jewish-Bohemian world-weariness that makes this cop different. You figure maybe Jacoby digs having the cool and WASPY Peter Gunn as a friend.
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The credits say "Peter Gunn" was filmed at Universal (though there is no Revue tag at the end) but looking at more episodes, it is possible that the MGM lot was used sometimes.
Some episodes of Peter Gunn use this one "block of houses neighborhood" that has a house that looks rather like the "Psycho" house, but on a block with other homes.
This block is where Cary Grant crashes his car early in "North by Northwest," which was filmed for MGM.
Hard to tell how these different studios were used for different shows. Loan-outs?
The problem with MacMurray was that he was at fifty a bit long in the tooth to be playing a suave, sexy private eye. Ten years earlier, in a movie version, of Peter Gunn he'd have been perfect. I'm glad that Raymond Burr got the Perry Mason role, which which gave him a level of stardom he'd in all likelihood have never been able to achieve otherwise.
PG was unique as a private eye show, by far the most sophisticated of its era, though the Four Star-David Janssen Richard Diamond was a decent show in its way but not so stylish as the Edwards PG.
As to the studio business, that's a tricky one for those early TV years. Prior to Desilu's purchase of the RKO lot its shows were filmed various places. I believe that Four Star and Jack Webb's company shared a lot, or so I've read, though I believe that the early series that Dick Powell and Webb produced were filmed all over town, as they used to say. The Universal lot was used a good deal in those days, and the Columbia's Screen Gems series used that studio's lot, and indeed their fifties shows are visually suggestive of their mid- and low-budget films from the same era, right down to the lighting.
That cool jazz noir look of PG, not a million miles from the Warners 77 Sunset Strip, was like the death knell for the older noir style one associates with fedoras double-breasted suits and brownstones. I've discussed this with Clore before, and we both believe that between them these two shows set the stage for the later Frank Sinatra detective films of the sixties, with their palm trees, convertibles and high rises, plus the Dean Martin spy Matt Helm spy series, also from the middle and late sixties. By that time movies had changed a good deal since the Bogart and Ladd days. As you mentioned in your Burke's Law post, one has to add the Hugh Hefner influence as well, indeed, the whole nine yards of the sixties-for-the-unhip-and-middle aged, as much a part of the era as SDS, bra burning, folk rock and mescaline, though not talked about nearly so often. One often forgets that during that tumultuous decade there were Bob Dylan and Andy Williams, Julie Christie and Raquel Welch. The Sound Of Music and Midnight Cowboy. But I digress....
It has been rather funny to grow up "away from the sixties" and see how that cosmic decade is treated now.
The Rat Pack who were considered so cool and suave (if not really THAT sophisticated) in the early sixties were rejectedly rather ruthlessly when the counterculture music came in.
But somewhere around the 80's, the Pack Came Back, and they've remained an influence ever since with SOME parts younger generations. The long hair, tie-dye shirts and love beads of 1969 may have been necessary to take a piledriver to years of repression, but Cool is Cool....
I also take your point that different cultural references in the sixties could co-exist at the same time. Example: Hollywood was turning out many Giant Musicals in the Late Sixties to try to make "Sound of Music" money, even as "Easy Rider" and its spawn played down the street.
"Peter Gunn" and "Burke's Law" rather reinvented noir for the time of Playboy pin-ups and the Pill. "Tony Rome" was a rather decent last gasp for this sort of thing (I post on it over at its board), but even Sinatra got tired of trying to pull off the same stuff in the late sixties. Tellingly, Sinatra quit "Dirty Harry." Had he made it, it probably wouldn't have had any sequels...
It's funny how historical eras acquire and maintain their images (or "images"). The 20's has the Gatsby-speakeasy-Charlestown thing going for it, yet nearly half of America lived on farms and in rural areas in those days. Did Amish folk engage in taxi dancing or Vermont farmers drink gin out of hip flasks? Unlikely, but this is how we view the decade, and there is of couse some validity to the popular view of the so-called Jazz Age.
When people talk or write about the sixties I have to smile. Yes, some of it's true, sometimes more than some of it, but it's a big country, and not everyone under thirty was smoking dope and dropping out, or even most people. Eventually the so-called sixties lifestyle did trickle down, so to speak, but that was after 1970, in the "dazed and confused" 70's. That's when you began to hear of teen pregnancies in Sioux City and cocaine use in small town high schools across the country.
Okay, back on topic (sort of): Walter Disney's movies and TV show were big business throughout the sixties. Totally anti-hippie and anti-countercultural, retro in appeal, deeply, unapologetically "square". I remember even as a teen hearing that Disney stock was about as sure a thing as there was in those days. It just kept on rising; as with Microsoft and Cisco in the 90's, you just couldn't go wrong if you bought Disney. And this was when Disney was just a movie-TV studio and cartoon factory with just one theme park to its name, Disneyland, in California.
Peter Gunn and later, Burke's Law, were sort of bridges between the 50's beatnick jazz era and film noir, suggesting a hip future of equal parts Hugh Hefner and Raymond Chandler. This never quite happened outside of Hollywood, but it was a pleasing aesthetic while it lasted. In the end it was just a fad, but the Rat Pack did take notice. Their films, and Sinatra and Dino's later ones, were like dupes of the real thing, though; more daring in conception, they lacked the sophistication and stylishness of the originals. As far as TV was concerned, this was much more the era of rural comedies of the Beverly Hillbillies-Green Acres sort and big westerns focusing on ranches and families. There was a "Camelot blip" in the first half of the decade. You can see it in certain popular shows of the period,--Route 66, The Defenders, the Casey and Kildare series--but these were gone by mid-decade. An interesting bridge between the "alienated 60's" and noirish TV: The Fugitive. This was TV noir with a vengeance, and a damn good show in the bargain. It began near the end of the JFK era, ended in 1967. The show was/is very evocative of its time; its ambiance really captures the wanderlust-soul searching side of the decade, managing to capture, stylistically, something of the spirits of Jack Kerouac and Diane Arbus. Not too shabby for a weekly TV show. The series' star, David Janssen, had some of the Cary Grantish good looks of Craig Stevens and Gene Barry, but in a very different context. His Richard Kimble character was like Grant's Roger Thornhill from North By Northwest, stuck in that cornfield,--forever--pursued by crop dusters on a weekly basis.
The Fugitive was a good show with an idea that had been advanced by "Route 66," -- the main character travelled the country and effectively hosted an "anthology series" in which different stories would be related each week.
"Route 66" would likely not play today without a fair amount of snickering: the show was about two guys, friends, who travelled the country together in a sports car, rooming together most of the time on the road. A male couple could be friends then, but today -- different connotations apply.
The Fugitive had just one guy travelling the country. And the Hitchcockian "wrong man" theme to power it on -- Dr. Kimble was running from the police while chasing the one-armed man who REALLY killed his wife -- and the show came to a ratings climax in August of 1967, when Kimble finally caught up with the real killer and fought him on a tower high above Pacific Ocean Park in Santa Monica, with the nemesis cop Girard shooting the villain down. It was a ratings milestone, and a very odd one today: the final episode of a long-running show appeared in AUGUST? That's TV rerun dog days, today.
David Janssen was Cary Grant-like (suave, cool), but he also had a bit of a Clark Gable thing going,with his big ears, his macho manner, and his growly voice. It was all-purpose TV star charisma,and Janssen had a smallish movie career, too (the 1967 private eye noir "Warning Shot" is very Peter Gunnish -- I remember Janssen's quiet last lines to a villain who thought that Janssen was training a toy gun on him -- "It's a real gun," Janssen calmly replied. The other guy pulled his gun. "It's real," Janssen said one more time. The other guy aimed his gun. Janssen then shot him, as if in resignation. His gun WAS real).
I remember being amused to see Janssen becoming best friends in the 70's with then hard-rocker Rod Stewart; the two men were real womanizing party animals and Stewart was a pall-bearer when Janssen died young of a heart attack rumored to have some roots in his hard-partying ways.
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Indeed, no decade really probably matched in real-life what the "take" was in media. I remember living in a suburb with a lot of short-haired, white tee-shirt wearing guys when the "hippie craze" was on TV and the movies,and we joked: is THAT what the late sixties were going to be shown as in the future? As it turned out,yep.
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Moreover, decades don't begin and end neatly. The fifties continued on roughly to JFK's assassination in '63, though the "late fifties/early sixties cusp" was fairly cool and modern, with Peter Gunn, "Anatomy of a Murder," "Some Like It Hot" "Ocean's Eleven" and "Psycho" setting the pace.
The countercultural sixties went some distance into the seventies, probably ending with Nixon's resignation in 74 and Vietnam's end in 75. Then came disco.
Speaking of which: a few days after viewing these "Peter Gunn" repeats, I stopped in amusement on a TV channel showing an old "Charlie's Angels" episode. This one was from thick in the disco era, and had our jiggling girl detectives chasing a bad guy -- with EVERYBODY on roller skates -- into a "roller disco" for a final shootout and capture.
It was atrocious, and the memory came back: it was as if all that cool, bleak noir of the fifties and early sixties had given way to the most bubble-headed, blown-dry silliness in TV detective work imaginable in the 70's. At least on TV.
Believe it or not I remember that roller disco episode! I didn't watch the show much but that one sticks out. The 70's was such an airhead decade for TV, especially considering how much good stuff there was in the previous two decades. The angels were considered hot back then, probably wouldn't be today. Farrah got the most mileage out of the show, though she's aged badly. Of the later ones only Tanya Roberts had the goods IMO, but her crudeness as a person rather ruined her striking looks. I hear her do commercials for Las Vegas junkets on the radio and her voice is irritating as hell.
Route 66 seems in limbo now. Almost but not quite fifties and too straight and moralistic (some of the time) to be truly sixties. The Fugitive is heavy sixties. Its "city" episodes capture the urban mood of the time to a tee. Their tone weirdly anticipates that of the movie Midnight Cowboy, with all those cheap diners and blowsy women; the walk-up apartments in then abandoned cities, now million dollar condos.
Janssen managed to be retro and hip at the same time. He was a regular guy, almost a generic Hollywood leading man in some respects yet he had that vulnerability, the slurred diction, the haunted and hunted look, that made him a kind of touchstone of the era. Like so many big TV names of the sixties his career lost steam later on. I think of Rowan and Martin, Dick Van Dyke, Barbara Eden, Richard Chamberlin.
You're right about the 60's sensibility lasting into the early 70's, but post-Woodstock-Manson-Altamont-Kent State things were different. Then the draft was abolished, or rather modified, with the lottery, and then that was abandoned, which took a lot of steam out of the counterculture. 1970-73 was a "limbo" period similar to 1960-63; superficially it seemed as if the previous decade's culture would just roll on, but in each case things came to a stop gradually. The 60's tone began in earnest between JFK's assassination and the arrival of the Beatles on our side of the pond, late '63-early '64. I think of the 70's beginning to settle in gradually with Watergate in the spring of '73, then gaining a head of steam through the Nixon-Ford transition, finally flowering with the Jaws-Springsteen-disco spring and summer of '75. But these are pop cultural and personal references. Others would surely disagree. I think we can all agree that the eighties began with Reagan's election in November, 1980. It took a couple of years for the decade to catch fire, but by '82-83 one could feel a new era dawning. Disco was gone, Belushi was dead, night-time soaps were all the rage on the tube; Prince, Madonna and, especially, Michael Jackson, were all making waves. God, I hated that decade. I grew up in the 50's-60's era, became a grownup, rather quickly, in the early 70's, and could relate to those years, but the Reagan era took me by surprise. It went over my head. I never got it and still don't.
We are of similar generations and roughly of the same attitude, it seems, about these timelines.
The "boomer" generation sometimes takes hits for its "infatuation" with the 50's/60's/70's, but I think we were young enough to experience the 80's and 90's pretty well too, and they were simply a more straightforward couple of decades that the three that came before.
The fifties were "pregnant with the sixties." You can see it in "Peter Gunn," which had a number of amusing episodes featuring the "Beatniks" who would pave the way for the hippies.
The sixties were...well, the sixties. A great big explosion necessary to evoke massive change. A few assassinations, riots, Vietnam, the Beatles, civil rights for races and sexes...we were on our way.
American movies changed on November, 1968, when the ratings code allowed cussing, nudity, fake sex and ultraviolence where once none of those had been allowed -- except that filmmakers had been pushing hard for this kind of freedom since the fifties on.
In 1968, American television was caught in a weird "time warp" -- TV censorship remained even as the movies were set free, and so suddenly movies went roaring off into hard-R directions while TV still showed "Mayberry RFD" and "The Brady Bunch" and other such things. Even the most risque jokes on "Laugh In" paled to what could be said and done in "MASH: the movie."
Movies got more violent in '68, but political pressure turned TV shows LESS violent. U.S. Congress hearings looked into "TV violence" The wholesale killings of "Peter Gunn" , "The Untouchables" (admittedly long off the air in '68, but re-running in some places) and their ilk were forbidden; the violent "Wild Wild West" (fisticuffs and karate, mainly, but endlessly) was taken off the air. "Gunsmoke" no longer opened with Matt Dillon gunning down an opponent; now he just rode his horse on the prarie.
No room here to cover the variations on TV show types in the 70's and 80's and beyond. Suffice it to say that once the paroxyms of cultural revolution had been shaken off in the 70's, TV moved rather rapidly to the production of cookie-cutter entertainments. There were about 25 major cop/detective shows in the 70's, but none of them sported the nasty, brutish cool of "Peter Gunn."
Modernly, TV often looks as good as movies ("CSI") but the gratutitously violent fantasy noir world of "Peter Gunn" is long gone.
My memory isn't too deep on "The Fugitive," but I feel confident in saying that its kind of show -- character-driven and focussed more on drama than action -- isn't really so "doable" today. We need more flash and sex and "heat" on the TV screen nowadays than a more dramatic series like "The Fugitive" could provide. In fact, it just hit me: they tried a new "Fugitive" a few years back, and it died -- the same year that the first "CSI" on the same network HIT.
"Fugitive" tidbit: in 1965, Martin Balsam won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for "A Thousand Clowns." He gave an interview about how the Oscar wasn't really going to change his plan of getting acting where he could find it. His next role: guest star on "The Fugitive."
Those were the days. An Oscar winner immediately signs up for a TV guest appearance?
P.S. David Janssen was delightful as a rumpled private eye on the short-lived "Harry-O" of the 70's.
P.P.S. Remember how producer Quinn Martin tried to duplicate the success of his "Fugitive" show with a new twist?: It was called "The Invaders," and starred Roy Thinnes as a guy who saw an alien spaceship land and travelled from town to town every week, trying to run from the human-form aliens and convince anybody about the invasion. But "Fugitive"-like dramas occurred.
To keep this thread somewhat focused on TV, I wholeheartedly agree about thge cluelessness of that medium, especially during the counterculture era. I've joked about this with Clore often over the years. Movies moved, in their own way, more in sync with the times than television. Even anodyne musicals like Dr. Doolittle and Camelot each in their way represented something larger than themselves. In the former case, one can see the fondness for nature, albeit in a light, Hollywoodized form, that would eventually evolve into the ecology and Green movements; while in the latter Richard Harris looks awfully cool in his droopy way, and the whole old Celtic-British tone had its folk and rock correlatives, in, for instance, Donovan's more esoteric songs and albums, and of course the Tolkien craze was just starting around that time as well. Young film-makers on both sides of the pond were very aware of the "youth movement", more so in Europe than here, but we were getting there, albeit slowly, as seen in Francis Coppola's often hilarious You're a Big Boy Now and, a couple of years later, Putney Swope.
As to the small screen, well, there were such super-relevant personalities as Carol Burnett, Jim Nabors and Mike Douglas, and cutting edge fare like The Flying Nun and Petticoat Junction. When TV tried to "go mod" it was pathetic, literally The Mod Squad! Yet that show did well, lasting several seasons. Such victories, such as they can be called, were pyrrhic in the long run, as the less hip the medium got the more young people kept away. Bonanza and Gunsmoke both lasted into the 70's, but by God by that time the only people who watched them were middle-aged or ultra-straight young people, not the kinds of people the networks were aiming to keep glued to the tube. For me, TV became irrelevant around 1965-66, with the switch to all-color. We'e discussed this before but it's worth bringing up, as this shadow line would define the medium for many years to come. Non-west coast big cities were out, palmy suburbs were in. Arguably most sitcoms, going back to the fifties, were filmed in Hollywood, but they weren't necessarily set there. Father Knows Best, Leave It To Beaver and many others were deliberately set in a kind of Middle American "netherworld", maybe Cali, but maybe also Ohio or Pennsylvania. Even many dramatic shows were a little fuzzy as to locale. I never quite "got" where Doctors Kildare and Casey practiced. Maybe it was L.A., but it could just as easily have been Chicago or New York. By the late 60's Cali ruled. Mannix, Ironside and Marcus Welby were all obviously filmed and set there. So were The Name Of the Game and The Bold Ones. Even shows that were more vague as to where the action was taking place, such as The FBI, had that Cali sensibility. Small wonder that two shows that managed to find younger, somewhat hipper than usual viewers, Mission: Impossible and Star Trek, were as often as not set in far off places; in the latter's case very far off.
No, there were no Peter Gunn-like shows in this period. That cool jazz thing was considered almost old-fashioned by the end of the 60's. The nearest thing to that was, oddly, the later incarnation of Dragnet. Producer-star Jack Webb was a big jazz fan, and straight arrow type though he was (on camera anyway), he had an obvious fondness for the down and out and the eccentric, as one can see in his line-up of "usual suspects". His deapan way of interrogating a nervous hotel clerk or an apathetic hobo was priceless. Those shows hold up very nicely. Webb was himself was west coast as you can get, but he had his own take on L.A., quite different from the Martins and the Spellings. The mainstream guys went for stucco homes, swimming pools and shopping malls, while Webb, though he often visited such places, seemed to have a greater fondness for railroad yards, seedy motels and out of the way eateries and watering holes, like a Cali Edward Hopper.
As to the networks, they cancelled, as the saying went, every show with a tree in it in 1970-71, which paved the way for the new kinds of shows one associates with the 70's. That was a huge opportunity for Norman Lear and MTM to strut their stuff, as they didn't have to compete with rural sitcoms. The sitcoms were the best thing on the tube in the 70's, and the only shows I watched. Those elderly-fat-eccentric detective series didn't do it for me. The writing was atrocious, the settings always the same. There was a Quinn Martin uber alles feeling to all of them, regardless of whether QM produced them. Yes, Columbo was different, several cuts above the rest, but it too had that generic L.A. mood. It had some of the uniqueness of Peter Gunn, but lacked the atmosphere. Kojak was New York, but though I liked Telly Savalas as a bad guy I didn't care for his arrogant, lollipop sucking detective. Also, I found the angry ethnic, "it's about time" aspect of the 70's, whether in movies or on the tube, alienating. Okay, by all means let Greeks and Italians be good guys for a change, fair enough, but they kept shoving it down the viewer's throat, with attitude, always attitude. Whatever happened to those suave guys, I wondered, like Ben Gazzara and the Richard Conte? The gross, unsubtle populism of that era never appealed to me.
Not much I can add to that excellent Cook's Tour, but a little:
Television programming may have been so massively "out of whack with the times" (vs. movies and records) in the 60's and 70's because it was, to a large extent, a monopoly of production. Lew Wasserman's Universal programming (NBC, mainly), Aaron Spelling's programming (ABC, mainly) and Quinn Martin's programming (well, CBS and ABC as I recall) -- these were where the lion's share of cop and detective shows came from, and there was little room for sophistication or advancement of the medium in those factories. I believe Stephen King called the writing of these shows "the writing equivalent of loading cases of Coke in a truck for a living." (And remember Buddy Ebsen as "Barnaby Jones," the world's only 101-year old detective?)
"Columbo" (which I did make time for regularly) broke the mold mainly in its writing, and in the often delightful casting of elegant villains (Robert Culp, Jack Cassidy...Dick Van Dyke !, Janet Leigh!) against whom rumpled Peter Falk would verbally duel. But it LOOKED like a typical flat Wassserman Assembly Line production (when "Columbo" came back in the nineties, it was "stylized" with a smoky, gauzy look more in line with movie cinematography.)
"The Rockford Files" benefitted from the Movie Star Who Should Have Been One Longer (James Garner) lending his great personality to a show with a little "edge" sometimes (David "Sopranos" Chase wrote a few shows, though not with the freedom he has today.) But it too, had that Malibu-LA familiarity to it.
And those were about it. (I had friends who liked the buddy-act of "Starsky and Hutch," but I had trouble staying interested in the plots of any of those shows. I guess I found other things to do.)
Came the 80's and "Hill Street Blues" and the like, TV started to catch up a bit with the times. Censorship remained (and REMAINS) the enemy of realism on network TV, but we now have cable and Pay cable and most TV can play at the level of PG to R, depending on the channel. Network shows play like movies circa, oh, about 1967.
Creative writers have broken through in the TV medium -- these are likely good writers who simply can't get the movie gigs they deserve, and make good money at TV anyway -- and dramatic TV production LOOKS like movie production a lot of the time (Jerry Bruckheimer can be thanked for this, I guess.)
One of my jokes is that now a lot of TV is so good I can't possibly watch all of it.
I suspect my liking for "Peter Gunn" (this thread) and a few other cool oldies like "Burke's Law" "I Spy" and "The Man From UNCLE" reflect the fact that TV was more central to my leisure time as a kid (as a KID, I preferred that mystery-spy stuff to "Gentle Ben" and "Lassie"), and those shows retain enough adult sensibility that one can watch it for the nostalgia without too much shame.
(Speaking of adult sensibility, one "Peter Gunn" episode I watched ended with a sexy conversation between Gunn and his girl Edie, at her apartment, where we couldn't see them and it seemed clear she was talking about having just had sex with him -- "That was good; I wish you hand't finished. Can you do it again?" -- turned out the were playing the card game of gin. But still: that dialogue was quite racy!)
Still, something went VERY wrong in dramatic-action TV in the 70's and 80's, from "McCloud" to "The A-Team," and I think modern TV benefits from that kind of lazy production being pretty well eradicated.
P.S. Indeed,the very special world of Jack Webb was its own L.A. universe. Interesting that he pulled off "Dragnet" TWICE, once in the fifties, and once in the cultural war of the 60's/70's. Movie men kept trying to cast Webb in movies during that time -- as Dean Wormer in Animal House; as a cop in Billy Wilder's "Buddy, Buddy." He never bit. Wish he did. Especially Dean Wormer!
I gave up on Tv series quite a long while ago, though I do remember Hill Street Blues quite well and enjoyed it despite my dislike of the lead actor. Even that one irritated me now and again with its almost self-pitying liberalism. My memories of Naked City are much fonder, but I haven't seen that one in ages. Interestingly, when NYPD regulars were asked what TV show best caught the spirit of their world they overwhelmingly responded that it was Naked City, not HSB, though that might be unfair, as the former was filmed in Manhattan, the latter the west coast. Still, I find the real world grittiness of the older show more appealing, at least in my memory, than the later show's what to me seemed like gimmicky-ness. Also, Naked City emphasized the people its stories were about, HSB was about the cops themselves, their trials, tribulations, affairs and whatnot, which I found less interesting. At times the show almost seemed to be patronizing the "little people" of the real world it was, putatively about (or was it?), as if they were an afterthought. This was typically 80's TV: all about power. I have to hand it to the writers of the older shows. They were much more concerned with characterization, and those shows that had artistic-social relevance ambitions realized them with a humanity that TV lost, for the most part, when the anthologies and anthology-like dramatic series of the 60's ended.
Since I don't have cable right now I don't have access to all the HBO stuff or even old movies, on a regular basis. From what I remember of cable in the 90's through 2002, roughly, it was a wasteland aside from the movies and, for my money, its "salvation channels", whether about history, nature, war or art. I've heard great things about The Sopranos and 24, have seen neither. Actually, I have caught bits of the latter in reruns and found it awfully grim, appropriately enough, I suppose. The characters talk awfully fast on that one, as I recall, much faster than in real life, or at least real life as I know it. This is the problem with so many movies and so much of TV these days: little sense of pacing, of "proportionality", appositeness, nuance. This is what makes many older films so precious. Hitchcock's best work is loaded with these things,--and then some. He knew just when to speed things up; also when to slow them down.
I miss the variety of the TV of yesteryear, but I guess that's my middle age showing. They had Jungle Jim and Studio One, Howdy Doody ad Science Fiction Theater, I Love Lucy and Ernie Kovacs. A lot of diverse personalities as well: Garroway, Godfrey, Paar, Garry Moore, Steve Allen, Edward R. Murrow, Ed Sullivan. Johnny Carson may well have been the last of the "mainstreamers", the sort of personality who could appeal to a very wide spectrum of viewers. The Rosies, Oprahs, Jerrys and the like aim lower and wider.
This is the problem with so many movies and so much of TV these days: little sense of pacing, of "proportionality", appositeness, nuance. This is what makes many older films so precious. Hitchcock's best work is loaded with these things,--and then some. He knew just when to speed things up; also when to slow them down.
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There was a screenwriter, now deceased, named Jeffrey Boam, who wrote some "Lethal Weapon 2" and I think a draft of an Indiana Jones movie, and some other big-ticket fast-paced stuff. He said his scripts were based on the fact that "old movies always had those two or three "good fast scenes" that we waited out the "boring" rest of the movie to see, and that he tried to write scripts with nothing BUT good fast scenes, one chase or fight right after the other, wall-to-wall.
Well, too much candy can give you a stomach ache.
Hitchcock and other filmmakers of his era knew the strength of "downtime," of developing character and building up narrative suspense so that when the "good fast scenes" showed up, they payed off with maximum emotion, and likely, we never forgot them.
But, oh, this is a "Peter Gunn"-TV thread.
I'm not one to "dump" too much on TV shows. When I was a kid, TV action shows got my blood running faster than they ever could had I been an adult (body chemistry and interests change), and they were great fun.
For adult viewers, the value of most TV shows is to provide a modicum of fantasy release from a grim day of hard work before the next morning. On that count, I support any and all TV shows that have ever entertained anybody coming off an eight-hour day desperate for "a little break".
But still, good TV entertainment, like good movie entertainment, can have that "something extra".
"Peter Gunn" had the then-historic Mancini score and a nice mix of two-fisted private eye action and sophisticated kissy-face for romantic fantasists. It was a notch or two above what one USUALLY got from a TV cop or detective, in any era.
"Hill Street Blues" was historic in breaking the "Quinn Martin cop-formula fix" -- its major breakthrough was the creation of the "long-running story" or "arc" (which had been in TV all along in daily soap operas, but not in prime-time cop dramas.) "Hill Street Blues" led to the more surrealistic and movie hospital show "St. Elsewhere" (hello, Denzel!) and the smoother "L.A. Law," and eventually to "The Sopranos," which is simply a great epic gangster movie of character and nuance, in 70-some hours.
I suppose one's age today has something to do with it, but fifties/early sixties TV WAS different. Maybe because of all those "slumming New York method actors" who were available for TV at the time. Walter Matthau, Martin Balsam, Jack Warden, Robert Duvall -- all were working their particularly engaging magic on the small screen. Maybe because of some of the fine dramatists working in the medium(Reginald Rose, Rod Serling, Paddy Chayesfky.) Plus all those "personalities" on the variety/comedy side -- Steve Allen was quite witty, and he found Don Knotts AND Louis Nye AND Tom Poston to play with.
Eventually, all the production moved to L.A. ,everything was filmed and "IN COLOR!" and the nature of the product changed. Even today's very well-produced stuff seems similar: Law and Order/CSI/Without a Trace/Cold Case -- its all pretty much the same.
Those reality shows, whether "reality" or not, do tend to look the same. Sometimes it's difficult to tell which is fact and which is fiction. It almost doesn't matter anymore. I do miss good character development, and I don't mean the standard lesbian subplot, the closet case, the HIV sufferer, the abused kids. God knows, these are not things to make light about, and I don't mean to sound insensitive, but great characterization is more than picking a personality type out of the DSM or ripping a story from the headlines and inserting it into the script, however sincere one's motivations. There's a kind of aesthetic laziness to this; writing to type rather than personality, which makes for easy surface identification on the part of certain viewers but leaves the rest of us cold, or at best lukewarm. Try doing this with the great characters in Chekhov or Tennessee Williams. Yes, one can come up with a reasonable diagnosis, but borderline personality disorder combined with chronic alcoholism just isn't enough to explain Blanche du Bois in Streetcar Named Desire. Williams gives us too much of her; little hints at her early vulnerability as a child, long before she began to unravel; her genuine romanticism, however bent and pitiful it may seem, is none the less touching. No, a neat diagnosis won't quite do for Blanche. There's too much to her. She's a truly tragic character, brought down by her own excesses, and Williams never loses sight of her participation in her rush to the final degradation and madness. Blanche is more than just a victim.
Ah, getting a bit far afield from TV and Peter Gunn. The beauty of those old shows is that their writers, while often quite creative, also knew their limitations. Many came from radio, and a lot of them had some background in journalism. There were no film schools then, so most writers, unless extraordinarily lucky, came up through the school of hard knocks. So when they finally got to writing TV series they knew their way around their "blocks", whether western, detective, sci fi or horror. One thing that always impresses me about those old shows is their humility, or rather the humility of the writers, directors and the other creative people involved in them. They were out to produce a product, in PG's case a detective show, so they rolled up their sleeves and did the best they knew how, like good, honest workmen. Even their journeyman efforts at their most mediocre were always professional, and when a script or an idea rose above the norm and something wonderful happened the result was like a small miracle; a perfect little piece of art, humble and beautifully put together. The problem with so much TV and moviemaking today is that just about everyone involved in the business is a film school grad, well versed in the ways of film noir and action pictures, not so well versed in, say, the works of Henry James. What we wind up getting is movies that are based on other movies, on film technique, rather than films that come from life and can teach us something new. Also, the bottom line in the old days never bottom fed like it does today. The old-time studio chiefs, whatever their personal shortcomings, were very status- and prestige-conscious. They wanted to leave a film legacy and make money. Nowadays, it's all about money.
Okay, too much ranting. One last stab at keep this post as Peter Gunn-focused as possible. What made that show so engaging, and what still charms us about it is today, is its subtle and stylish way of channeling the beatnick mood of the fifties into the button-down world of the late Eisenhower period. In this, producer-director Blake Edwards succeeded magnificently. Edwards managed to do for the coffee houses and jazz clubs of the time what W.S. Van Dyke and the Hackett-Goodrich team did for Dashiell Hammett when they made The Thin Man in 1934. In that case one had a movie made just after the repeal of Prohibition, in the depths of the Depression, that showed us a rich happy couple who drink to their hearts' content, trade wisecracks and solve murder cases, with nary a mention of the economic upheaval of the time. One can only imagine how removed from the world of Nick and Nora Charles the average moviegoer was in the 30's, but I'm sure that few of them looked, acted or dressed like William Powell and Myrna Loy, but if only they could, now that would be a cure for the unemployment line blues. Similarly, Peter Gunn showed us a guy (and a gal) who lived the sort of racy lifestyle most Americans could only dream of in the 1958-61 years. Edwards, like Van Dyke and MGM before him, beautifully realized the imaginary world his characters moved through, and the public bought it. In each case there's a touch of the subversion of morals (booze, sex and crime are fun!), but not so much as to disturb the censors, thus the audience could remain comfortable in their own real world while dipping into the rich dreamworld of life on the screen, whether big or little.
And now a word from our thread sponsor:
Before responding to the post directly above, telegonus, I shall now reveal that I have discovered the episode which I viewed so long ago with the extended fight scene at the end:
"The Family Affair" from Season One, available on DVD.
It seems to track with your Patric Knowles episode memory, except: no cross-bow. But the villain -- indeed a somehwat dandyish Alan Hewitt (who, a few years later, would play the nemesis of "My Favorite Martian") -- came at Gunn with all manner of broadswords, spears, and medieval ball-and-chain weapons of war in their knock-down drag-out in the "War Room" of a rich old man's mansion.
It was when the villain threw the bookcase down on Gunn that I knew I had my winner! And he ended up impaled on a spear after Gunn punched him the 17th time.
Given that the villain didn't use a crossbow, I suspect it is possible that "Peter Gunn" a coupla seasons later may have elected to "repeat the glory" of this fight, again, with Knowles and a crossbow. Someday, I'll find that one...
And now, back to our show...
You're dead-on, I think, with the fact that modern crime shows have rather, for lack of a better word, disgustingly elected to wallow in realistic tales of sexual abuse and social disases to seem "adult" enough to entertain jaded modern TV audiences. Censorship allows technical/scientific explications of these ever more decadadent and appalling psychological crime stories, if we SEE little and "experts" do the talking. Most appalling (and I'm pretty much just going from promotional commercials), crimes against children seem to get dramatized a lot.
Conversely, "Peter Gunn" and its 50's/60's ilk carried the adult FEEL of noir and fantasy adventure. Men and women being adult, drinking -- smoking (a LOT on "Peter Gunn"). Murder most foul. But all in fun. No clinical details about the worse that real life sex criminals are capable of.
Judiciously skipping or speeding through some scenes, I've about finished the DVD collection of Season One "Peter Gunn" episodes, and it remains a fun nostalgia run.
Recent discoveries:
--That big final fight episode from my youthful memories ("The Family Affair")
--A funny episode where Craig Stevens puts on a bumpkin's suit and bow tie, modulates his acting style to Early Ralph Bellamy to play a "sucker" to a blackmailing femme fatale played by pretty Mara Corday (a 50's horror movie staple and Clint Eastwood pal) Lt. Jacoby dutifully suits up as a co-conventioneer to make the "sting" of Corday and her deadly pals stick. Interesting: Stevens removes all of Gunn's cool and is MOST convincing as a rube, with his stringbean physique and pleasant face.
-- In another episode, a sexy babe in skintight clothes with a Paris Hilton poodle negotiates in a small diner booth with Gunn for information about hidden loot whereabouts. The babe sexily smokes all the time. The dialogue, roughly:
Sexy babe: My associates are prepared to adequately compensate you for your information.
Gunn: How much?
Sexy babe: $100,000...
Gunn: Nope.
Sexy babe: ...and ME. (Sexy look.)
Gunn: Now, THAT's adequate.
("And ME" has gotta mean, like, sex, right? But in '59, maybe it suggested a date and some necking. Hah.)
Gunn still refuses, and the sexy babe oh-so-sexily exhales her cigarette smoke, looks disappointed, shakes her head "no" to her thug associates...and Gunn gets beat up and kidnapped.
-- Two old ladies (including the old grannie from "The Waltons", Ellen Corby) and their elderly, frail male lawyer, hire Gunn to help their sister. Gunn asks the frail old lawyer what his name is. He feebly responds, "...uh...James Bond." Bond was in books in the 50's, but not in movies yet. In-joke?
-- In a few episodes on the final volume, Lola Albright and Mother are missing. It allows Gunn to romance some babes, and changes the tone of the show. I wonder if the networks wanted Gunn to be "unattached" for awhile? But Lt. Jacoby's with him all the way -- buddy-buddy is forever.
Anyway, it was a fun ride.
And I in no means wish to "close down"this thread as I conclude my look at some episodes.
The Beatnik-Eisenhower crossover of "Peter Gunn" does seem to sum up its appeal. "The fifties were pregnant with the sixties," and Peter Gunn was one of the Storks.
I've really had it with social worker TV crime shows. Anyone with either experience in the field or a knowledge of psychology (as in 101) who's read through the DSM IV a few times, plus watches the local evening news, in which every night a soccer coach from Mapleton (I'm making this up) has just been exposed as a pedophile with 8,000 pages of kidporn on his computer can (gasp!) probably write an episode of Law and Order or any number of other true life crime shows. Makes me pine for the good old days of Perry Mason, when the murderer (just a murderer, he didn't sodomize twelve year olds), the guy with the bow-tie and moustache sitting in the third row, jumps up and confesses in open court, "I did it...I did it...I can't stand this anymore!". I'm so thankful for having grown up in simpler times. Never even heard the word "marijuana" till I was thirteen. We should probably both get down on our knees every night and thank God we were born in simpler times. Whatever else has happened in my life aside, I'm deeply thankful for that. Captain Kangaroo, the little "Golden Books", tales of elves and fairies, Robin Hood, board games rather than the computer kind, a piece of rope, a ball, a bat, a railroad bridge where you could toss coins into the smokestacks on passing trains, these are the kinds of things I cherish. For the sake of this thread, I should toss in having grown up on black and white television of a certain kind. God help kids who grow up on what they broadcast today.
Now back to our regular programming: I haven't seen Peter Gunn in a dog's age, but I do remember Alan Hewitt in the show. He was a dandyish character actor, as I recall, sort of a balding, older, more authoritative Tony Randall, but not funny,--though he could be. There was another actor, James Lanphier, who was somewhat similar, though more epicene, who played an obviously gay character named Leslie in one episode! I remember this from watching the show in reruns as a teenager. Was there a mild gay subtext in the show? I do remember a kind of smokey, ambiguousness to it, I mean beyond the cool jazz and all that. One can feel it a little in Mother's character, more than a little on the butch side. I think that many of the villains were elegant, stylish types, not queens exactly, but they could be. One could, in other words, see the show in that light, at least as I remember it. This may be part of its appeal. A "coded" aspect in other words. PG is himself definitely hetero, with a double whammy phallic name, yet even then there's an oedipal undercurrent at times between PG and Mother/Jacoby on the one hand, and his affection for Edie on the other. Food for thought, anyway.
I'm glad you found the right episode, btw. Now on to the Patric Knowles one, to see if it's a replay.
I'm with you on the Law and Order issue. Particularly the "Sex Crimes" show, which is a big hit. Nuff said.
Alan Hewitt was rather Tony Randall-ish, with just a touch of David Ogden Stiers to follow. He was quite good, btw, in his final exchange with Stevens' Gunn before their big punch-out in "The Family Affair." Hewitt is playing a rich man's elegant, stately "secretary," and as Gunn (stupidly) lays out how he screwed up his double murder scheme, Hewitt's eyes tell the story: you can tell he's thinking "Uh oh. This guy's on to me. Well, let's see how much he knows. Too much. Gotta kill him." Nicely calibrated, and then this upper-class fellow unleashes brute fury. Murderers do that, I suppose.
James Lanphier appears in one of the DVD's of "Peter Gunn" out right now. He's a villain. Blake Edwards would use him in at least two of movies I can remember -- "The Pink Panther" and "The Party," where Peter Sellers finds him doing body-builder poses in the bathroom.
Lanphier gave off a gay presence (real or acted, I have no idea) and I suppose Blake Edwards knew of that world and how it could make "Peter Gunn" just that much more provocative -- Mother certainly had an edge. As we know, Edwards would later put significant gay characters in "10," "S.O.B" ,"Switch," and, climactically, "Victor/Victoria."
About Edwards' Hollywood farce "S.O.B." (1981): Blake Edwards used Craig "Peter Gunn" Stevens' in that film, and in an amusing role. Still elegant but nearly white-haired, Stevens played the ...probably gay...husband of a battle-axe Hollywood gossip columnist played by Loretta Swit. Stevens' played the part for tweedy comedy, and played it quite well. When his already-injured wife is further injured in her hospital traction bed, the sweetest smile of satisfaction briefly passes on Craig Stevens' face.
...and in 1962, Alan Hewitt would play Jack Lemmon's cruel P.R. firm boss in "Days of Wine and Roses," who practically forces Lemmon back into alcoholism to "do the PR job."
Blake Edwards remembered his actors.
Good that you spotted Lanphier. An obscure actor even when active, he died young, and like another interesting player from the same period, Theo Marcuse, he's forgotten now. Another interesting player from that same era, David J. Stewart, also died at an early age. You'd recognize him from gangster films and crime shows of the late fifties-early sixties; homely, pock-marked face, like a Marc Lawrence from hell.
As to Hewitt, you're absolutely right. He's more like Stiers than Randall. The latter is more middle class and regular, along the lines of Jack Lemmon, but even more neurotic. Hewitt, like Stiers, is really in the Clifton Webb-George Sanders tradition, without the saving grace of charm, which is probably why he never became a major name. I vaguely remember him from Days Of Wine and Roses, a movie I'd been dying to see for years and when I rented it I was hugely disappointed. Lanphier, I believe, has an uncredited small part in that one, too. Jack Klugman was badly miscast in the film. Good actor for Serling and Chayefsky material, hopelessly out of his league as a west coast, non-ethnic recovering alcoholic. The three major actors were all fine, however, and all, interestingly, from my neck of the woods (Boston). Lemmon was game but I think that Edwards let him down. He'd done better work for Wilder. Remick was solid and credible, and it was daring for such a beautiful actress to play the role of a degenerate alcoholic. I'm a sucker for Charles Bickford's rugged authenticity, which brought the story down to earth, where it needed to spend more time.
Whether "gay coded" or not, Peter Gunn was a sufficiently sophisticated, well oiled slice of TV noir not to care. One could spend hours guessing, looking for clues. I'd doubt they'd yield anything substantial. It was that kind of show.
A show that aimed for sophistication and maybe ambiguity was the syndicated western Bat Masterson, which I despised, though I did watch a few episodes. The idea of an unarmed westerner was anathema to me as a child, and I didn't care for Gene Barry's ladies man as maybe he's a sissy and maybe he isn't routine. I wanted a real western, real men, real heroes,--Boones, Bonds, Paynes, Arnesses, Ansaras, McQueens. Heck, I'd have taken a six-gun toting Babs Stanwyck over Barry, who at least redeemed himself a few years later with a show in which he was perfectly cast, the stylish Burke's Law.
Maverick, with its con men-gambler heroes tended to gently spoof the western genre, not to the extent of, say, F Troop, but in a cool way, not unlike Peter Gunn in the sagebrush, with some Damon Runyonish fun and games thrown in. A nice balance. I haven't seen it in ages, but have fond memories of it, even remembering its sunday night airing and its sponsor (Kaiser Aluminum, with lots of Willys Jeep ads). When the show began Garner and Kelly were given equal time. It was a Warners western, not a star vehicle, but as time went on it became clear that Garner was the bigger attraction (rather as Maharis overtook Milner on Route 66). Garner was indeed excellent as Bret Maverick, but I liked Jack Kelly's Bart, too, and looked forward to Bart-centered episodes much as I looked forward to Adam-centered episodes on Bonanza. Bart was quieter and more circumspect that Bret; more of a gambler than a con man; and much more of a ladies man. Some very funny episodes along the way. Their send-up of Gunsmoke, Gunshy, is a classic.
Theo Marcuse, I remember -- bald, indeterminate ethnic origin, and on practically all the 60's TV shows. And some fifties ones: yes, he's a villain on "Peter Gunn" in this first season DVD package.
Interesting about "Peter Gunn": it's essentially a late fifties show, but you do see those "60's TV people" starting their careers. Theo Marcuse, Alan Hewitt...John Abbott (remember him?), Philip Pine, etc.
This nostalgia trip raises a "nuts and bolts" question I've often wondered about, that is rather specific to sixties action shows and sitcoms:
It was a given that there was "an available pool of talent" to play the villains in shows like "Peter Gunn," "The Man From UNCLE," "The Wild Wild West." Guys like Theo Marcuse, Oscar Beregi, Leon Askin, Roger C. Carmel, and bigger TV names like Victor Buono and Martin Landau (pre "Mission Impossible").
Let's say you're Theo Marcuse, looking at the 1966-1967 TV season. You know you're gonna be the villain on "I Spy," "Man From UNCLE," "Wild Wild West," and maybe Westerns like "Gunsmoke" and "Bonanza," too. Your whole year is probably booked in advance.
How on earth did all the CASTING AGENTS of those shows get all those guest villains properly booked for the year? I can only assume it went like this:
A "Wild Wild West" casting agent called Theo Marcuse's agent and said: "We need Theo to play the bad guy in an upcoming episode." Theo's agent says, "well, you have to get in line. He's got a 'Bonanza,' a "Monkees", a "Get Smart" and a "Man From UNCLE" to do first. You can have him in, oh, six weeks."
Must have driven those casting directors nuts. And I'll bet: unlike in movies, they just cast WHOEVER in those villain parts. If Theo Marcuse wasn't available, just put Leon Askin in there.
I've always wondered...
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"Maverick" was part of the "Warner Brothers Westerns" (Cheyenne, Sugarfoot, Bronco) to match the "Warner Brothers Mysteries" (77 Sunset Strip, Hawaiian Eye, Surfside Six, Bourbon Street Beat.) But "Maverick" was the best of BOTH bunches. I have vague memories of it in my parental household, and I caught reruns.
The handsome and amiable James Garner was the key -- he fought hard to get to movies. But Jack Kelly seemed very pleasant as an alternative, indeed. As I recall, Kelly ended up doing more and more episodes as Garner left for movies. They had to add brothers -- to Garner's Bret and Kelly's Bart were added Robert Colbert's B--something and Roger Moore's Beau(!). Or was it the other way around?
I also liked the snappy "Maverick" theme song: "Riverboat ring your bell, furthermore fare-thee-well, luck is the lady that he knows the best..."
The "Encore" Western channel in the U.S. has actually started showing "Bat Masgterson" episodes -- and they showed the pilot. It was an odd thing, based on the real Bat Masterson's showdown with a crooked town boss in a poker game. They showed the "true ending" -- the town boss was exposed, quit and left -- and then Gene Barry addressed US personally and said, "but maybe it happened like this", and we got a new ending with Bat and the town boss shooting it out to the death. I guess the message was: from now on, "Bat Masterson" was gonna be fantasy-action all the way.
But Barry was much better in "Burke's Law."
"Gunsmoke" and "Bonanza" were the high-rated war horses, but I'm partial to "Maverick," "Have Gun, Will Travel" (with the great, rugged, suave Richard Boone) and "Wanted Dead Or Alive" with McQueen.
I'm glad that someone else remembers Theo. He tended to shave his head,--right?--a la Telly Savalas, but his presence was more subtle and refined, almost European in manner, along the lines of Herbert Lom. He was, for his brief time in the sun, a kind of small screen George Zucco. Such a pity he died young.
Victor Buono's career is a mystery to me. He began in small parts, like the others, but got Oscar-nominated for Whatever Happened To Baby Jane?, which made him a major character actor in the movies for about three years. It seemed that he was turning into a latter day Laird Cregar, or the Sydney Greenstreet of the 60's, and what's more, he had the talent to back up his "image". I suspect that Roger Carmel got a boost from being a kind of Buono light. Then Buono, who was everywhere, plays King Tut on Batman, starts appearing in lesser quality films, and by the end of the 60's was practically a has-been. He lived another decade and then some, always looking much older than he was, but he never developed into the major character actor/star he seemed destined to become during his brief window of opportunity. I suspect that the changing times had something to do with it. Buono's appeal was that his persona was redolent of old-time movie character actors, and for a while it was hip to cast him in films, but then the times change, and with the Bonnie and Clyde-The Graduate-Midnight Cowboy "revolution" of the late 60's, soon followed by the "movie brats" that emerged early in the following decade, Buono came to seem old-fashioned, maybe even Old Hollywood. The young guys wanted types like Duvall and Hackman, Ned Beatty and Harvey Keitel, not a guy whose career seem modeled more on someone like Vincent Price. I remember Buono doing poetry readings on Johnny Carson in the 70's, and being quite the entertaining guest, but the Spielbergs, Lucases Friedkins and Coppolas didn't want him for their movies.
More excellent character players: Harry Townes, peerless at playing educated men caught up in circumstances beyond their control; Sebastian Cabot and Jonathan Harris, both starting out as minor character players in the Old Hollywood vein of Buono, both "saved" by popular TV series in which they played prominent supporting roles; Jeanette Nolan, wonderful, chameleon-like actress, the Agnes Moorehead of TV; average guy Ed Binns, live TV vet and Sidney Lumet fave, very busy on the tube, often cast in serious, dramatic shows; homely, intense, hyper-emotional Mike Kellin, who always came off (to me) like a victim even when playing bad guys; Gerald Mohr, who looked a lot like Bogart, a radio and movie veteran, he was quite busy on the tube in the 50's and 60's; John Dehner, another radio and movie vet, he had a beautiful voice and, when moustached, looked a bit like John Barrymore. Then there were the better known actors, the Wynns, Rooneys and Whitmores, but I preferred the lesser known ones known primarily for their TV work. These players and many others like them added a great deal to those quality black and white shows we've been discussing. They seemed less active, on the small screen anyway, when color came in and the tone of television changed. Those older shows were, among other things, great showcases for gifted actors who never quite made the top cut in the movies. There seemed less of that, Columbo and a few others aside, after 1970.
Show business is,as we know, a tough business, subject to "earthquake shifts" every few decades.
I suppose part of the nostalgia of watching the 50's and 60's shows we grew up on is seeing that gallery of VERY interesting "second level character actors" (BELOW the Lee J. Cobbs and Martin Balsams) who made their bread and butter on all the TV shows. Indeed, came the seventies, they were all virtually wiped out. New faces were deemed necessary -- "real" faces. But Victor Buono (and John Fielder and John McGiver) had "character" faces -- you never really forgot them when you saw them. Modernly, I see lots of the same people guesting on TV shows like "CSI" and "Law and Order" -- but I can never really tell most of them apart. Pretty career women and potato-faced middle-aged men.
Gerald Mohr was quite good -- and he had been good in the movie "Detective Story" with Kirk Douglas back in 1951.
John Dehner had a radio announcer's dulcet tones, but a dashing bearing. He had a recurring role on the Sam Peckinpah Western series "The Westerner" (duh) as a con man/card sharp type opposite star Brian Keith. He played two separate villains on "The Wild Wild West," only a few weeks apart, totally differently (the second one was a Civil War vet half made of steel -- that character made it into the ill-fated movie of the show, merged with Michael Dunn's midget "Dr. Loveless.")
It's perhaps too bad that Victor Buono didn't live longer and prevail -- Spielberg and Lucas might have found room for him in "Raiders of the Lost Ark" as the movies took on the look of: sixties fantasy TV!
Buono's Syndey Greeenstreet presence was used to best effect playing "the Sydney Greenstreet role" in the sublime 1972 TV movie "Goodnight, My Love," bedevilling tall Richard Boone and short Michael Dunn as a Mutt-and-Jeff team of private eyes in 40's L.A. Worth a see, if you can find it. Modernly in the world of the internet -- you can.
I remember when Goodnight, My Love was first broadcast. It looked interesting, especially with Boone in it, but alas I missed it. There were so many good movies of the week in those days. They replaced not only the anthology shows that were gone by the early 70's, they were the B movies of their day as well. Spielberg's Duel, which I saw when it was first aired, helped put him into the major leagues as an up and comer.
Some of the "old regulars" got lucky, like Jack Klugman and Norman Fell. George Kennedy, a quite minor player prior to Cool Hand Luke, was a very lucky fellow indeed. Strother Martin, from the same film, also did better than most, almost becoming a cult figure for a time. Warren Oates lucked out, too.
I remember John McGiver well. Never cared much for him. His affectations got on my nerves. James Millhollin, the Franklin Pangborn of TV, was more fun. When Millhollin wasn't available there was always Dan Tobin. Many of Psycho's supporting players did better than most: Simon Oakland and John Anderson lasted longer than many of their era. Martin Balsam was hugely fortunate in having his talent recognized by the industry.
Remember discovering actors before they became famous? I noticed Tim O'Connor and Ed Nelson well before their Peyton Place days. James Coburn made the rounds of TV shows, mostly westerns, but there was the air of an up and comer to him, so his success with the Flint movies didn't surprise me. Linda Evans had a solid four years on The Big Valley long before her night-time soap days. Or do igenues not count? Same with Mariette Hartley, to the extent that she became a star, many years before those Polaroid commercials (or was it Kodak?) with James Garner. My first recollection of George Segal is from an episode of a Hitchcock's hour. Steven Hill and Robert Loggia were making the dramatic TV rounds decades before they became prime time stars, rather late in their careers. A favorite of mine, James Griffith, who ought to have been a Peter Gunn villain, specialized in playing seedy dandies. He worked less as an actor after the 60's, though I believe he wrote for many series.
As to John Dehner, he was an immensely gifted man; starting out as a cartoonist, he was good enough for work for the Disney studio back in the forties. He also wrote episodes of many radio series, including the excellent Escape!, some of which are excellent. Meanwhile, he was making a decent living as a radio actor and sometime B movie supporting player. He did have a dashing quality, and was the of sort actor I would imagine Errol Flynn might have become in middle age had he stopped the drinking-partying and lived longer. It took Hollywood forever to recognize his talents as an actor, it seems, but he kind of crashed through with the 1958 western The Left-Handed Gun, a strange movie, directed by Arthur Penn, with a very Methodish lead performance by Paul Newman in the lead. Dehner walks off with the film's acting honors as far as I'm concerned, and he wasn't even Oscar-nominated for his efforts. At least he found regular work on the small screen, often doing excellent work; alas, he got typed as a TV guy and never really got another chance to shine in a major film.
That's a lot of fine actors -- one realizes that there are always probably too many interesting looking/sounding people to maintain long time careers in TV or movies (though Paul Giamatti recently said, before he became a bit of a lead, that his career was great: "Every show or movie needs a middle-aged character man sometime.")
I thought I'd take a run at a few more of your mentions:
Jack Klugman, it seems to me, really needed to AGE to become an effective character actor. He's powerful in "Twelve Angry Men," but he's not terribly charismatic -- his character is moody, emotional, with a chip-on-his shoulder. And Klugman's young looks weren't terribly handsome. Martin Balsam actually WAS handsome, for awhile.
"The Odd Couple" TV show made the middle-aged Klugman famous and accessible. I disagree with those who say that Klugman was better than Walter Matthau in the part -- Matthau was tall, deadpan, reasonably handsome, and had the timing that he himself said made him "the Ukranian Cary Grant." But playing Oscar to Tony Randall's sublime Felix (but again, not quite as nuanced and movie-lead-ish as Jack Lemmon) gave Klugman a new "comic gravitas" -- if that's possible. And then Klugman got to play "Quincy, M.E." and got that "mystery lead aura" that made Dennis Weaver and Raymond Burr instantly charismatic, too.
Big George Kennedy said that he got hired fast in Hollywood movies and TV series because "the physically big Western stars needed physically big guest villains to effectively look good beating them up." Kennedy was a fairly grim-looking man in his early years without a hairpiece (he wasn't bald so much as baldISH.) Around the time of his fine work in "Cool Hand Luke," Kennedy started wearing a hairpiece and matured into a big Teddy Bear of a man that women could love and men could like (especially playing working class and authoritative in "Airport.") He'd keep playing villains too, but now the "nice guy" would always seep through.
Dehner was good and "a real actor" in "Left-Handed Gun." I guess he felt forced to go for the steady pay of lightweight TV work thereafter. You can get trapped that way.
James Coburn spent a surprisingly long time as a "young character guy" -- rather a contradiction. I think he needed a few years to age into his looks: the big choppers, the somewhat long and simian face, the voice that ranged from deep to high-pitched. I sometimes think he should have been a bigger star, but came up right when Hollywood was falling apart. He just couldn't land enough "prestige movies," and too often took the easy roles in things like "The Carey Treatment" and "Harry in Your Pocket." (Remember them?)
But Coburn was fine in "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid" and "Cross of Iron." Peckinpah seemed to get Coburn's potential for greatness.
I'm one of those who prefers the TV actors of The Odd Couple to the movie's one. That I saw the TV series first is undoubtedly a factor. Lemmon's Felix is a more complex, shaded performance than Randall's, but it seemed almost too much so for me, as I found myself feeling sorry for the character too much, not laughing at him. Randall struck me as much funnier, albeit more one-dimensional. Klugman's Oscar was, I think, as good as Matthau's. I like Klugman better, though, for his air of the small time loser or near loser, while the taller, more commanding Matthau comes off as more of a winner. Klugman hit the lottery with that one, though arguably his "ascent" began the previous year with his portrayal of Mr. Patamkin in Goodbye, Columbus. His career is rather like his fellow 12 Angry Men alumnus Jack Warden, with the latter doing better on the big screen, Klugman on the small one. Other, similar actors of their generation,--the Opatashus and the Persoffs--had to work harder to stay employed at all on either TV or the movies in the 70's.
I suppose it's a cliche to call Coburn Lee Marvin lite, but let's face it, that's what he was. Yes, he was a different guy with his own personality, but these two were easy to confuse even before they made it big on films. Coburn seemed so much older than he was. Even as early as The Magnificent Seven he seemed like a twenty year Hollywood veteran rather than the virtual newcomer that he was. He seemed middle-aged to me even then. His rise to film stardom with the Flint pictures was well timed, but again, he had to compete with Marvin, a bigger name and more powerful screen presence. Coburn didn't always choose his vehicles wisely. He would have been wiser to have gone the Michael Caine route and moved away from action-adventure stuff once his secret agent days were over, preferably moving toward more dramatic or "prestigious" material. I think that Coburn was also bedevilled by health problems, which slowed him down somewhat. He was a good actor but got stuck in a rut, relying too much on his teeth and voice later on. I agree that he looked somewhat simian in his early days, suaver and more distinguished as he got older.
He of the dark glasses as the luckless Henry in "The Vampire", who later appeared as a Thrush confederate on "The Man From Uncle"...in dark glasses. I had a soft spot for him because of his association with the former (possibly the first horror movie I ever saw) and reveled in his appearance on "Perry Mason", in "The Case Of the Frightened Fisherman" as the eponymous flycaster, seedy, venal, but decked out in a loud Hawaiian shirt.
Richard Erdman, distinguished member of the "3 times the killer" club on "Perry Mason" specialized in near invisibility, but the one time he played a victim on that show he got to show his chops as a foppish blackmailer.
Was Tim O'Connor ever young? Always the handsome grey eminence, even when doing silly things like whistling on "Wonder Woman". Marvelous "watch it, pally boy" sort of voice.
Richard Anderson, now 80, but still tall and commanding, ever the senator/CEO, even when playing Lieutenant Drumm on Mason, is a grand old regular. His Kolchak villain, Dr. Richard Malcolm/Malcolm Richards, was every bit as good as Barry Atwater's Janos Skorcezeny (vampire), but is less well remembered as "The Night Strangler" wasn't as exciting as "The Night Stalker".
I don't know Davies, alas, but am glad to find another Griffith fan. That Perry Mason episode is one I remember quite well. Echt-Griffith, perfect casting, He was a favorite of mine from his uncharacteristic "leading man" performance in a Thriller episode, Parasite Mansion, in which he almost got the girl! The lovely, talented Pippa Scott no less. That too was typical Griffith, as he was boozing it up most of the show, egged on in his drinking by nasty granny Jeanette Nolan. Griffith, sadly, was second to third tier as far as TV character people went, seldom appearing in major roles in top shows, he was as often as not cast as hotel clerks or oddball suspects in detective series, seldom a major part. There were many others who started out the same way but "graduated" and got better roles later on, like Denver Pyle, who was a Lone Ranger villain who enjoyed the distinction of working his way up to becoming a Gunsmoke villain. John Doucette was another like that. Griffith seemed to lose interest in acting after the mid-60's, moving on to other things. His demeanor was memorable, though, with that long neck, pop-eyes and those quick, bird-like mannerisms, accompanied by a surprisingly deep, cultivated-sounding voice. He reminded me a bit of John Newland, somewhat darker, more sinister in appearance but otherwise the same type. Like John Dehner, he was a talented man, not just an actor but a professional musician and sometime writer. He was maybe a bit too eccentric to become a major name, even at the character actor level. There was that oddness to him, the unique combination of refinement and down and outness, that was maybe a little too offbeat for prime time. Had they done a movie biography of William Burroughs, he'd have been the perfect man to play the lead.
shareyou don't know Ryss-Davies? I may be mangling his name, but he's the portly Soviet spy in "The Living Daylights" and Indiana Jones's buddy in "Raiders of The Lost Ark".
Cultivated, mannered, and probably could've played Leo, "The Strangler", but not as well as Buono did.
nt
shareYes, I was thinking of Buono in Davies part in "Raiders" when I posted that Buono might have fit in there.
But Davies didn't have the constant career of Buono, actually. From "Raiders" to "Lord of the Rings" with little famous in between. Although those are famous ENOUGH.
All I have to say is I love each and everyone of you who have posted on this thread. Such intelligent comments reflect well on all of you. You could take this thread and write a history of American thought from the 50's forward.
shareYes, your description fits perfectly to the ending of "A Family Affair". Peter Gunn was fighting with Mr. Collins, who shot and killed his boss. Mr. Collins wanted to get the inheritance he hoped his boss had maybe willed to him. The fight ends (after Mr. Collins tried to throw down a tall bookcase on Peter Gunn), among other stunts; your're right, it was quite a fight - then Mr. Collins accidently backs into a large knife of some kind which sticks into his middle upper back, and that's it for Mr. Collins, he falls over dead! This episode is on the set of 2 DVD'S that are out now and can be purchased.
shareWorth watching.
share