This week in TV Guide: August 22, 1959

Wo there's a little something for everyone this week, and there's no better place to begin than at the beginning!

Saturday night football! The NFL preseason continues with a game between the Pittsburgh Steelers and Chicago Cardinals from Austin, Texas (9:00 p.m. CT, ABC). The appeal of this game would have been obvious: Bobby Layne, the star quarterback of the Steelers, was a native of Texas and an all-time great at the University of Texas (which, of course, is in Austin), while John David Crow, star halfback of the Cardinals, had won the Heisman Trophy at Texas A&M. In these days before widespread coverage of pro football, when Texas didn’t have any professional football of its own, I imagine the chance to see two of Texas’ greatest football stars live and in person made for quite an event in Austin.

The Chicago Cardinals were nearing the end of their run as the Second Team in the Second City. Their history in Chicago dated back to 1920, but those years were spent mostly in futility and by 1959 the team had had only one winning season in the decade. There was no way the Cards could compete any longer with the Bears, and as the Bidwell family (which had owned the team since 1932) looked for options, a number of businessmen sought to buy the team and relocate it. Those attempts failed due to the family’s insistence on maintaining majority ownership of the team, and eventually the NFL allowed them to move the team to St. Louis.

Among those businessmen seeking (separately) to buy the Cardinals were Lamar Hunt and Bud Adams. When those efforts failed, they joined forces with others to form the American Football League, Hunt owning the Dallas Texans (which eventually moved to Kansas City) and Adams the Houston Oilers. I can’t help but wonder if the scheduling of this game was perhaps a trial run to test out the Texas market. In any event, by the next year the Lone Star State would have three professional teams: the Texans, the Oilers and the Dallas Cowboys. Of the three, only the Cowboys remain where they started. If, that is, you count Arlington as being part of Dallas, which I can assure you they don't in Arlington.

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On Sunday afternoon at 4:30, Arkansas Senator J. William Fullbright* (listed in TV Guide as “James W.”, which is technically correct but not the way he was usually referred to) is the guest on CBS’s Face the Nation. I’ve frequently mentioned how sports was not always wall-to-wall on the weekends, and stations generally filled the time with public affairs and documentary programming. At various times this Sunday we have Open Hearings (hosted by ABC’s John Secondari), College News Conference, Victory at Sea, Conquest (a science program on CBS narrated by Eric Sevareid), NBC’s Meet the Press (with this week’s guest, Erwin D. Canham, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and editor of the Christian Science Monitor), The Twentieth Century (CBS), and Chet Huntley Reporting (NBC). Religious programming, such as This Is the Life, This Is the Answer and The Gospel in Art fill out the schedule, along with Quiz a Catholic, which I guess would be both religion and public affairs.

*Fun fact: Fulbright’s sister Roberta is the maternal grandmother of political pundit Tucker Carlson.

There is some sports on Sunday; both NBC and CBS have afternoon baseball (Red Sox vs. Indians on CBS, Orioles vs. Tigers on NBC), but the games are blacked out in the Twin Cities, as the Triple-A Minneapolis Millers are hosting the Kentucky Colonels. WCCO fills the time with more auto racing from Shakopee’s Raceway Park, a place that I visited several times during my youth (with the souvenir checkered flag to prove it).

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The American Legion is holding its national convention in Minneapolis, and on Monday at 9:30 a.m., both Channels 4 and 9 will offer coverage of the Legion’s parade, which is expected to last eight to ten hours and feature 7,500 marchers, floats, bands, and delegations from nine foreign countries. Channel 4, the CBS affiliate, breaks away from the coverage from time to time for local news, soaps, and game shows; Channel 9, the independent station, actually begins its broadcast day 2½ hours earlier than usual, and only breaks for an afternoon movie. Can you imagine a local station doing this now? A few years ago, when we were living in Minneapolis, the Legion returned to the city for its convention, and I can testify that the parade is very long and very colorful, though I don’t think it attracted the crowd it did in 1959.

One thing I really like about the listing for this is the reference to representatives from “the 49 states.” That’s right, we’re in that one year when Alaska’s achieved statehood, but not yet Hawaii. That we’re able to capture a reference like this in writing, from such a relatively short timeframe, is just a very cool cultural reference.

At 9:00 p.m., CBS’ Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse presents the story of famed gangster Al Capone in part one of the two-part “The Untouchables,” with Neville Brand as Capone and Robert Stack as Eliot Ness, the G-Man who helped bring Capone down. The show was a hit when it was originally broadcast in January, and in October it premieres as a weekly series on ABC, where it remains for four successful (and extremely violent) seasons.*

*Fun fact: Desi Arnez, whose Desilu studio produced The Untouchables, went to high school with Al Capone’s son.

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Tuesday features a David Brinkley report entitled “Back to School” (7:00 p.m., NBC), which takes advantage of the upcoming start of the school year to examine the problems faced by America’s public schools. Not surprisingly, they’re some of the same problems that exist today, particularly financial ones: crowded classrooms in New York, no money for school construction in New Orleans, no funds for facility maintenance in Los Angeles, and desegregation problems throughout the South. But if you look closely, you’ll notice something strange. Many of those challenges facing American school systems in 1959 are the result of overcrowding. New Orleans, Los Angeles, Oklahoma City, New York—all face a need for more school buildings to house additional students. The school I attended for grades K-6, built early in the 20th century, had temporary classrooms built to accommodate the growing student population. And that’s not happening today. The baby boom is over, and in many places the increase in student enrollment comes from immigration, from people moving to a community from another state or country. Some school systems may be looking at expansion, but in how many situations is this anything other than a zero-sum game, with enrollment increases in one area coming at the expense of another?

So many things have changed since 1959, but the decrease in population growth is one of the most significant, and I think one of the saddest, of all. Maybe Bishop Sheen’s Live Is Worth Living (7:30 p.m., KMSP) has some insight into what plagues us today. The topic: "Cure for Selfishness. To do great deeds, we must supplant self with the Divine Will." But Bishop Sheen won't have much of a chance to say anything about it, not if the world of tonight's David Niven Show episode "The Last Room" comes to pass. (9:00 p.m., NBC) "In a totalitarian country where religious worship is a crime, a brutal inquisitor attempts to force prisoners to name the leaders of a group of citizens who are secretly attending church services." But that can't really happen here, not today. Can it?

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Wednesday: One of the more unique programs on television is Court of Last Resort (7:00 p.m., ABC), based on Erle Stanley Gardner’s organization, devoted to investigating cases in which reasonable doubt about the original verdict exists. Gardner, the creator of Perry Mason, started the actual Court of Last Resort in 1948 as a column in the popular magazine Argosy, and the program’s 26 episodes are based on actual cases investigated by the Court. The show ran for a single season in 1957-58 on NBC, and the broadcast in this week’s TV Guide is part of the series’ rebroadcast on ABC in 1958-59. Actors played the principals, but the real members of the Court appeared at the end of each episode.

Gardner believed that, because of "the exceptional nature of American liberty," no actual court could ever truly be a court of last resort; instead, that verdict could come only from "the people themselves." As opposed to today's organizations, which often work to free the unjustly convicted through DNA and other scientific findings, Gardner's cases were driven by polygraph tests, and augmented by findings from the Court's staff of investigators; the results would then be published in Argosy in hopes of creating a groundswell of public opinion. "Public opinion must be molded," he was once quoted as saying, "but it must be an enlightened public opinion based on facts, otherwise we would be charged, and justly charged, with the tactics of the rabble rousers."

One of the cases investigated by the real-life Court was that of the accused murderer Dr. Sam Sheppard in the late 1950s, with Gardner believing in Sheppard’s innocence even though nothing came of the Court’s investigation. Had The Fugitive existed in the same universe with Court of Last Resort, I suspect they would have investigated Dr. Kimble’s case as well. And isn’t that a meta conversation: a TV show about a fictional character from another TV show being aided by a fictional version of a real organization started by the creator of a different fictional character in an unrelated TV show. Makes your head spin, don't it?

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Thursday: Now here’s the type of local programming you don’t see anymore: at 7:30 on WCCO, Operation Southdale presents a fashion show in the Garden Court of the famed Southdale Center in Edina, Minnesota, the nation's first enclosed shopping center, and a mall in which I spent many, many hours over the decades. “For the men’s benefit,” an auto show is being held in the parking lot. And a musical group called the Jimarlen Trio provides background color for the show. For this, WCCO pre-empts a rerun of Yancy Derringer.

Later, Playhouse 90 (8:30 p.m., CBS) presents a curious drama, based on the true story of the first hydrogen bomb test. In “Nightmare at Ground Zero,” starring Barry Sullivan, the scientists behind the development of the bomb discover that they’ve made a few miscalculations, and that the bomb is really many times more destructive than they’d anticipated. Whoops!

On the face of it, this sounds like all the makings of one of those 50s sci-fi movies that winds up on MST3K. You know how it goes: the bomb goes off, much more powerful than they’d thought, with the result that people or insects or vegetation (or all three) are turned into mutants 50 feet tall. And it was written by Rod Serling. But it’s also directed by Franklin Schaffner, who would eventually win an Oscar for Patton, and the true story of the blast, which went off at 15 megatons rather than the expected five and vaporized three coral islands, in the process raining the fallout over a 7,000 square foot area , is remarkable.

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A big matchup for NBC’s Friday night fight on Gillette Cavalcade of Sports (9:00 p.m.), as Gene Fullmer faces Carmen Basillo for the world middleweight championship from the Cow Palace in San Francisco. There’s one thing that never changes in boxing, and that’s politics. The reason Fullmer and Basillo are meeting for the title is because the National Boxing Association (which would have been the bigger “NBA” at the time), had stripped Sugar Ray Robinson of the title, leaving the top two contenders, each of whom had both won and lost title fights to Robinson in the past, to settle the score.

Fullmer wins on a 14th round TKO.

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On the cover this week is the cast of I've Got a Secret, the long-running panel show on CBS. Inside, we read about some of the wackier secrets that have involved members of the panel through the years. There was, for instance, the time that Paul Newman appeared on the show. His secret was that, a few weeks before, he had appeared at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, disguised as a hot dog vendor, and sold an unsuspecting Henry Morgan a hot dog. It was hilarious stuff; Morgan might not have recognized Newman, but some in the crowd did, and by the time Newman reached Morgan's row he had already sold $25 worth of hot dogs. Well, acting is an uncertain occupation.

Among the more mundane and intriguing secrets which people both ordinary and famous bring to I've Got a Secret, it has become increasingly popular to involve the panel in the stunts. Host Garry Moore once wrestled an alligator (and did pretty well at that), while Ernest Borgnine, taking lessons from Newman, dressed up as a taxi driver and drove panelist Jayne Meadows to the show. By consensus, the butt of most of these "secrets" is Morgan, the acclaimed satirist and humorist who manages the almost impossible feat of simultaneously being witty, urbane, and charming, all the while remaining vaguely unlikable. In addition to his encounter with Newman, he's also wrestled a female judo expert and spent an entire day entertaining three women, ages 10, 20 and 30, whose identical secrets were, "I want a date with Henry Morgan." Ah, but then, the name of the show is I've Got a Secret, not I've Got a Neurosis.

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She's not exactly a starlet, but this week's profile is Diana Lynn, who's personal trademark is that of a "shrinking tigress." You know, the "brave but frightened girl, torn by conflicting emotions." Says a director of her characters, "Diana either can't scream above a whisper or is murmuring 'I love you' at the top of her lungs." She's a hard worker who's spent 20 years in the business; "I had no training. All I had was a kind of desperate, honest quality" that's taken her from a Hollywood career in movies to New York where she's done live TV on the major dramatic series, hit Broadway with Maurice Evans, and recorded an album of piano music—her dad's a piano teacher in Los Angeles, and she was considered a prodigy.

The last couple of years she's concentrated on her family and community work, with most of her appearances coming on Playhouse 90 (she's starred in it five times). She enjoys her work, wants to keep working, but appreciates the good life she has as a wife and mother. Remarkably, when this article comes out she has only a dozen years to live; while getting ready to do the movie Play It as It Lays, she suffers a stroke and dies in December, 1971.

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Finally, on Monday night there’s this ad from Channel 4 for a “Girl Reporter.” We're all familiar with the “Today Girl” on The Today Show, so the term wasn’t terribly unusual; still, it’s another of those things that reminds the reader that they’re in a different place and time. Naturally, the Girl Reporter’s job is to cover the unveiling of CBS’ daytime television schedule.

I wonder who the winner was, and if she ever went into the media business? TV

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Philip Marlowe on the small screen

POWERS BOOTHE AS PHILIP MARLOWE, CIRCA 1983

Seeing as how I've got a new book coming out in a couple of months, it's probably no surprise that I've got books on the brain. So when I get the chance to talk about both television and books, it's a good day. This usually happens when I'm reading (or writing) a book about television, but on occasion a show will draw me to a non-television book. And that's my inspiration for this week.

For reasons that don't bear repeating at the moment, a viewing of a particularly unsatisfying detective program drove me to our library, where I pulled out my copy of Raymond Chandler's The Simple Art of Murder. I found what I was looking for there (something that proved the point I was trying to make to myself), but instead of putting the book back when I was done, I started leafing through it. I've read it before, of course, but there was something so satisfying, so spare and pure about Chandler's prose, that it helped me get the bad taste from the program out of my mouth. And it got me to thinking, not for the first time, how we've never had a really great version of Chandler's most famous character, Phillip Marlowe, on television. There have been many superior versions of him on the big screen, most notably from Dick Powell, Robert Mitchum, and Humphrey Bogart, but on the small screen, we haven't been quite so successful.

Marlowe is, to my mind, the prototype of the private detective as we have come to see him, a knight both noble and tragic. And so much of the appeal of Marlowe stories lies in Chandler's way with words, from his dingy description of Los Angeles to the utter futility that Marlowe sometimes experiences, and those are moments that simply can't be captured on screen. In fact, the most famous passage from Chandler's classic The Big Sleep, the concluding line that explains the title of the book (and is the only time the title is used in the manuscript) never even appears in the most classic version of that story, the Bogart/Bacall movie.*

*It does, however, make an appearance in voiceover in Robert Mitchum's 1978 version. Mitchum makes for a compelling, older and tired Marlowe, but stick to his first of two Marlowe turns, 1975's Farewell, My Lovely.

Marlowe's made it as a regular on the small screen twice. The first time was a 1959-1960 series on ABC, starring Philip Carey. I liked what I've seen of it, although, as the always-reliable Wikipedia points out, the show wasn't very true to the character.  Check it out for yourself and see what you think.

The more successful version aired on HBO from 1983 to 1986, starring Powers Boothe in the title role. Booth did well; he certainly carried more gravitas than Carey, although he very much lacks the charm of Bogart in The Big Sleep, or especially Powell in Murder, My Sweet (the renamed Farewell, My Lovely).* It's difficult to picture Boothe playing chess or reading the classics, as Marlowe was known to do under the spell of Chandler's typewriter; actually, he might have been better cast as Mike Hammer. Still it's a significant upgrade in both style and substance from the previous effort.

*Powell would play Marlowe again on television a decade after Murder My Sweet, on the dramatic anthology series Climax! in 1954. Nobody seems to have a copy of it, though. Pity; his Marlowe is, in my opinion, the definitive version.

I've written before of my disappointment that the private detective, once a staple of television, has pretty much disappeared from the airwaves. One of the reasons, I suspect, is that procedurals have become so completely reliant on technology, the type that goes far beyond wiretapping in its intrusiveness. Sure, private detectives can (and do) engage in this kind of work as well, and can be very effective doing it, but you have to admit it doesn't quite have the romance of the fog-shrouded, rain-slick streets, the lonely truthseeker with the brim of his fedora worn low and the collar of his trenchcoat pulled high to keep the chill away. After all, he's a knight, not a technician, remember? And as for the detective's traditional antagonism with the police force (every private eye had a frenemy in the department), just make him a rebel within the force itself; all the procedurals are full of quirkbots like that.* Heaven forbid he should show too much individualism, though. We don't seem to like that much.

*They don't come much quirkier than Elliot Gould's big-screen portrayal in The Long Goodbye, a reimagination that calls for much more space in a blog devoted to movies. Like this one.

Another reason might be that detective fiction seems to work best in a period atmosphere. One of the challenges with Stacy Keach's Mike Hammer series was that it tried to tell the story within a contemporary time period (a flaw inherent in James Garner's otherwise perceptive Marlowe, an adaptation of Chandler's The Little Sister), which merely solidified Hammer as a desperate anachronism, a character that was resolutely not of this time. To the extent that it worked, it was due to Keach's ability to see the anachronism, but the detective as we know him—the Marlowe prototype—seems to thrive more in the noir grime of the last century's first half.

The most recent big screen adaptation of Marlowe, 2023's eponymous version starring Liam Neeson, was not successful, possibly in part because it was adapted from a Marlowe novel that wasn't written by Chandler in the first place; both the book and movie suffered from what one critic described as being "irksomely postmodern in its audience pandering," and that sounds about right to me.

At any rate, from Philip Marlowe to Jim Rockford, from Richard Diamond to Peter Gunn, from Darren McGavin's Hammer to Stacy Keach's, the private detective has been a welcome presence on television. You'd think it might be about time for "prestige" television to revisit Marlowe, or some of the other great literary detectives of the past. A revival of The Rockford Files is on the way, and while there's some apprehension from fans, James Garner's daughter is quite excited about it, and that doesn't count for nothing. At any rate, let's hope that's part of a comeback, one that's a little grittier than, say, Moonlighting or Remington Steele, hmm?  TV

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This week in TV Guide: January 12, 1974

Looking back through the years, I have, more than once, used the terms "Super Bore" or "Stupor Bowl" to refer to the Super Bowl. The game is only a small part of what has grown to encompass special commercials made for the occasion, pregame and halftime concerts featuring superstar artists, and marathon analysis both before and after the game. (It doesn't hurt that there have actually been some pretty good games the last couple of decades, but face it—that's just a bonus.)

Back in the 1970s, though, the game was the thing, to paraphrase Shakespeare, and over the first seven editions, the "ultimate game" hadn't really delivered much. Several of them had been blowouts, the two games won by the AFL had been huge upsets but not all that interesting, and the closest game—Baltimore's 16-13 victory over Dallas three years ago—had been so full of mistakes by both teams pit was called the "Blunder Bowl."

Al Stump uses the "Super Bore" line in his preview of Sunday's Big Game between the defending champion Miami Dolphins and the NFC champion Minnesota Vikings, from Rice Stadium in Houston (3:30 p.m. ET, CBS). Even in its infancy, the game had a feeling approaching "near-lunacy," with the game being the last thing on anyone's mind; Washington defensive back Mike Bass recalls having to attend three team press conferences, photo events, program signing parties, team busses stalled in traffic jams (last year's game was played in Los Angeles), besides practicing for, you know, the game. "Things are so wild that you're distracted—to the point where you can't perform normally on the field. At the kickoff, those 22 cats out there are in trouble, man." Not surprisingly, the game itself was "dull and a letdown, with some spectators walking out before the Dolphins finally beat the skins 14-7."

Stump calls these past games "a bore, and, at times, a farce," where the teams "make an abundance of errors and do little scoring." Coaches, feeling the pressure and fearing defeat, run ultra-conservative game plans and use even tighter defenses than the regular season. There have been few spectacular plays in Super Bowls (only four times has a runner gained 20 or more yards on a single run), and no last-minute comebacks. And in those seven games, a total of only 12 touchdown passes have been thrown. (In fact, there have only been 25 touchdowns in total scored in the game's history.) 

That doesn't stop CBS from offering up today's contest as the "ultimate game," utilizing 14 color cameras and six miles of cable, and "[n]o fewer than 15 experts will be trotted out, or roughly one expert for every five players who'll see action." But, then, who says it's about the game? "The past seven Super Bowls have sold 543,852 tickets, taken in $25 million and paid $8.7 million to the athletes. NBC and CBS, investing $17,750,000 for telecast rights since 1967, now reach 28 milion homes and some 75 million people. A cool 10 million words have been filed from Super Bowl press boxes." That's what the Super Bowl is all about, Charlie Brown. 

As I mentioned at the outset, the Super Bowl has come a long way since these early days. The networks spend more and more money to broadcast the game to more and more viewers, while commercials sell for extraordinarily obscene amounts of money (in 1974, 30 seconds sold for $103,000, while last year, a half-minute commercial would cost you $7 million.) The game was played in the afternoon back in 1974 (preceded by an NBA game), and the pregame show was only 30 minutes long. The half-time entertainment was provided by the University of Texas Longhorn Band, with Miss Texas, Judy Mallett, playing the fiddle. Networks didn't bother to try and introduce a promising show in the coveted post-game timeslot; Super Bowl VIII was followed by the local news. 

As for Super Bowl VIII? Well, it fit the pattern to a T; the Dolphins dominated early and often with its ground game; Miami quarterback Bob Griese through only seven passes (completing six, for 63 yards total), while the Dolphins rushed for almost 200 yards on 53 attempts. No touchdown passes were thrown by either team. The final score was Miami 24, Minnesota 7, and it wasn't even that close.

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From 1963 to 1976, TV Guide's weekly reviews were written by the witty and acerbic Cleveland Amory. Whenever they appear, we'll look at Cleve's latest take on the shows of the era. 

James Stewart's transition to television as star of his own series has not, Cleveland Amory says, been a smooth one. In his previous try, the "unlamented" Jimmy Stewart Show, he played a college professor "with all the authority of a nervous giraffe." Now, as a high-powered country lawyer in the 90-minute Hawkins, airing as part of CBS's new Tuesday Night Movies wheel series, he returns to "the kind of role that made him famous—the barefoot boy with chic." And while he has all the gestures down pat, it's the kind of character that has always had a limited range; "At its best, it makes you nostalgic for some of Mr. Stewart's old films. At its worst, it makes you wonder what you ever saw in them."

We could just stop right here, because this gives you the jist of Cleve's thoughts on Hawkins, but we continue because 1) he has more to say about why he feels this way, and 2) I have two more paragraphs to fill. The problem with a series like Hawkins, is that it plays to all the cliches we've come to expect from shows with a cornpone sense of things. Take Stewart's character, for instance, whose name is Billy Jim Hawinks. (He has a cousin, "R.J.," played by Strother Martin, and a nephew, "Jeremiah," in case we didn't get the point.) As the series is structured, Hawkins is often retained to travel to the big city to defend big shots, which gives it the fish-out-of-water trope of McCloud, plus the aw-shucks jurisprudence that Andy Griffith would put to more effective use in Matlock. Hawkins plays up this angle, which we know is false to start with because otherwise he wouldn't have such a reputation that the big shots hire him instead of, say, F. Lee Bailey. 

The plots don't help out. One involved one of Billy Jim's kinfolk who's killed in a Civil War recreation, and Hawkins not only has to defend the man accused of the crime (who happens to be thoroughly unlikable) but also has to prevent an old feud from flaring up. Even Lew Ayres, who played a Civil War historian, couldn't save this one. Neither could Julie Harris, in another episode that involves a rich old man who's murdered by his much younger wife; "there is," Amory observes, "one time when Billy Jim gets driven off the road," but as far as suspense goes, "that was it." It's all too bad, because James Stewart, throughout his career, gave ample evidence of being able to play a character with a very sharp, and vary dark, edge. Something like that might have helped Hawkins make it past one season, although Stewart himself asked that the show be cancelled becaue he didn't believe the scripts could measure up to the quality he'd been used to working with. It's another case, I fear, of what might have been.

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Two of television's definitive rock music shows, NBC's The Midnight Special and ABC's In Concert, faced off on Friday nights in the early '70s. Whenever the two slug it out, we'll be on hand to see who's better, who's best.

Midnight: Host Smoke Robinson welcomes blues group Paul Butterfield's Better Days, soul artists Eddie Kendricks, Johnny Taylor, Edwin Starr and Ann Peebles, and rock group Grin. Smokey sings "The Tracks of My Tears," "The Tears of a Clown," "Mickey's Monkey," "Show and Tell."

Concert: An all-oldioes show featuring Jerry Lee Lewis, Del Shannon, Little Anthony, Freddie Cannon and Rufus Young. Songs include "Great Balls of Fire," "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On'" (Lewis), "Runaway," "Handy Man" (Shannon), "Hurt So Bad" (Little Anthony).

The emphasis is on the oldies this week, and the winner depends in large part on what suits your taste. As for me, it'll be tough to beat Del Shannon and The Killer, so the summary is short and sweet: Concert has the fire this week.

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Having looked back at last Saturday's writeup, I think I fell short when it came to looking at what was actually on TV. That doesn't mean it was bad; I wouldn't have given it to you if I'd thought that. But let's see what's up besides the Super Bowl and our rock shows.

It's a big week on the movie front, dominated by a trio of John Wayne classics, foremost among them being with the second showing of The Duke's Oscar-winning turn in True Grit (Sunday, 7:30 p.m., ABC). Judith Crist finds it irrestible, "one of the rip-roaringest, snortingest (and belchingest) entertainments in a long time." It is, she says, "early John Wayne in spirit, the latter-day Wayne in the flesh." The previous night, on the same network, we're treated to the fourth telecast of The Sons of Katie Elder (Saturday, 8:30 p.m.), "still as good-natured and simple-minded as ever," with Wayne as the eldest of the Elder boys, and Dean Martin next in line, "and you can write the script yourself." The week wraps up with the third showing of The Undefeated (Friday, 8:30 p.m., CBS), with Rock Hudson sharing the bill. It's "spiced by brawls, massacres, murders and executions. Just a good clean all-American entertainment." Hey, it works for me. 

It's a tribute to John Wayne's star power that this triple-header relegates to second place the network television premiere of From Russia with Love, the second of the James Bond adventures (Monday, 9:00 p.m., ABC, and what a movie week they're having!), with Sean Connery as dynamic as ever as the superspy, Robert Shaw and Lotte Lenya as the heavies, and Daniela Bianchi as "the major sexpot" (although I don't think that's how she appears in the credits. Crist calls it "vintage grown-up nonsense," which is a compliment coming from her. And as if it weren't already a big week for ABC, Wednesday night sees a repeat of 1972's The Night Stalker (8:00 p.m.), "that diverting tale of a vampire stalking Las Vegas," starring Darren McGavin, Simon Oakland, and Carol Lynley in the first of two TV-movies leading to the much-loved Kolchak series. 

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And now for the rest of the week, and though I've mentioned this before, I'll say it again: Saturday night used to be a prime night for television, and on a week-to-week basis nothing surpasses the Murderer's Row CBS schedule, with All in the Family at 8:00 p.m., M*A*S*H T 8:30, Mary Tyler Moore at 9:00, The Bob Newhart Show at 9:30, and The Carol Burnett Show at 10:00; Carol's guests tonight are Eydie Gorme and Paul Sand. Add to that The Sons of Katie Elder on ABC and another Western, The Way West, with Kirk Douglas, Robert Mitchum, and Richard Widmark on NBC 9:00 p.m.), and you can see why people used to stay home. Why that changed, I'm not sure.

Sunday features one of the most popular episodes of Columbo, "Publish or Perish"  (8:30 p.m., NBC), in which the consummate Columbo villain, Jack Cassidy, returns as a publisher who hires a hitman to bump off his his leading writer (Mickey Spillaine!), who's preparing to move over to another publishing house. Meanwhile, Watergate is going to play out in a big way in 1974, and on Firing Line (10:00 p.m., PBS), host William F. Buckley Jr. and presidential aide Patrick Buchanan discuss the subpoenaed White House tapes, plus media coverage of the scandal.

Avid readers (as well as fans of Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry) will remember P.G. Wodehouse as the author of the wonderfully witty Jeeves and Wooster stories (35 short stories and 11 novels, written between 1915 and 1974). Despite their being set in a world that is long gone, however, Wodehouse is still alive and writing at age 92, and on Monday night he's the guest of Bob Cromie on Book Beat (10:30 p.m., PBS), where he reflects on the disappearance of humorous writing and recalls some of his contemporaries, including James Thurber and Dorothy Parker.

The Super Bowl isn't the only stare-studded sports event this week; Tuesday night sees the NBA All-Star Game, live from Seattle (9:30 p.m., CBS). The West Coast locale is, in part, responsible for the late hour of the game's start, but it's also true that the low-rated NBA is no substitute for CBS's regular prime-time lineup, and so the start time allows the network to fit in episodes of Maude and Hawaii Five-O. I doubt that most people remember the game (it was won by the West, 134-123), but they will remember the series that premieres that night on ABC as part of the network's second season: a 50's-inspired sitcom called Happy Days (8:00 p.m.). That's followed at 8:30 p.m. by yet another ABC TV-movie, Mrs. Sundance, a sequel to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, starring Elizabeth Montgomery in the title role, with future husband Robert Foxworth as the man trying to track her down. 

We'll turn to late night for Wednesday's highlight, a 90-minute roast of Steve Allen on ABC's Wide World of Entertainment (11:30 p.m.). The occasion is Allen's 25th year on television, and many former co-stars from his various shows are on hand, including Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme, Jayne Meadows, Louis Nye, and Tim Conway; George Burns, Buddy Hackett, Rowan & Martin, Jack Carter, and Zsa Zsa Gabor are also on hand. Milton Berle is the roastmaster. I'm happy to report that you can catch it all here.

Thursday sees the debuts of two half-hour dramas on ABC; first, it's Chopper One (8:00 p.m.), with Jim McMullan and Dirk Benedict playing cops in helicopters, and Ted Hartley as their boss. It's a formula good for 13 weeks. That's followed by Firehouse (8:30 p.m.), a modification of that formula, starring James Drury, Richard Jaeckel, and Michael Delano as L.A. firefighters; think Emergency! without the paramedic bit. It's also primed for a 13-week run. Better, I think, to go local with WKBG's airing of the political thriller Seven Days in May (8:00 p.m.), starring Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster, Frederic March, and Ava Gardner.

If you're looking for an alternative to The Duke on Friday night, you can return to ABC for the premiere of The Six Million Dollar Man as a weekly series (8:30 p.m.); formerly, it had been a rotating part of ABC's Movie of the Week, with three telemovies airing in 1973. And, speaking of roasts as we were a moment ago, the final season of Dean Martin's weekly variety series, now on Friday, is best known for the "Man of the Week" celebrity roast; this week, the honoree is baseball's Leo Durocher, with Maury Wills, Dizzy Dean, Bobby Riggs, Alex Karras, Gene Kelly, Chuck Connors, and Foster Brooks among the roasters (10:00 p.m., NBC). Gladys Knight and the Pips are the musical guests. Next season, the celebrity roasts will expand to a full hour and appear as occasional specials.

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The Woman's Lib movement is in full swing in 1974, and perhaps the most dramatic television example comes on Friday, when Boston's WBZ devotes the entire day—not just prime time, but 16 hours, from 7:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m., to a live special, Yes, We Can!, "entirely produced and staffed by women, with only women appearing on air, discussing women’s concerns." As you can see from the ad at the left, there's no topic off limits; it sounds much like the kinds of day-long seminars conducted nowadays, with main speakers, breakout sessions, vendors, demonstrations, and various activities from which attendees can pick and choose. A live variety show hosted by entertainment critic Pat Mitchell, featuring only female entertainers (including Helen Reddy and The Labelles) precedes the special at 10:00 p.m. on Thursday. 

It wasn't that long ago that we were marveling at ABC's Africa documentary that took up an entire prime-time in September, 1967, but that was only four hours, not an entire day. The only thing I can think of that compares to this is a telethon, but when you think of it, that's what this amounts to: a telethon raising not funds, but awareness. 

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Finally, to answer the question posed on the cover: why TV is having a crime wave. The answer, according to Paul Klein, is a simple one: it normally takes two years for a show to go from idea to treatment to script to sale. Two years ago, two of the big hits on television were Columbo and Cannon. Producers and networks took notice. And here we are today, with crime shows all over the place. There's more to it than that, of course, but why make things more complicated than they already are? 

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MST3K alert: The Human Duplicators (1964) Outer-space aliens pose as humans in their plan for conquest. George Nader, Barbara Nichols, George Macready, Richard Arlen, Huge Beaumont, Richard Kiel, Dolores Faith, Tommy Leonetti, Lonnie Satin. Good cast in a so-so sci-fi movie. (Saturday, 11:30 p.m., Channel 5) The description isn't exactly accurate; Richard Kiel plays an alien plotting to create android duplicates to use in the takeover of Earth. But the movie doesn't really matter; what you want to see is the second appearance of "Hugh Beaumont" (Michael J. Nelson), this time griping about how it's always "How's Beaver?" but never "How's Hugh." Worth the price of admission. TV  

This week in TV Guide: August 22, 1959

There's a little something for everyone this week, and there's no better place to begin than at the beginning, so let's go through the week a day at a time!

Saturday night football! The NFL preseason continues with a game between the Pittsburgh Steelers and Chicago Cardinals from Austin, Texas (9:00 p.m. CT, ABC). The appeal of this game would have been obvious: Bobby Layne, the star quarterback of the Steelers, was a native of Texas and an all-time great at the University of Texas (which, of course, is in Austin), while John David Crow, star halfback of the Cardinals, had won the Heisman Trophy at Texas A&M. In these days before widespread coverage of pro football, when Texas didn’t have any professional football of its own, I imagine the chance to see two of Texas’ greatest football stars live and in person made for quite an event in Austin.

The Chicago Cardinals were nearing the end of their run as the second team in the Second City. Their history in Chicago dated back to 1920, but those years were spent mostly in futility and by 1959 the team had had only one winning season in the decade. There was no way the Cards could compete any longer with the Bears, and as the Bidwell family (which had owned the team since 1932) looked for options, a number of businessmen sought to buy the team and relocate it. Those attempts failed due to the family’s insistence on maintaining majority ownership of the team, and eventually the NFL allowed them to move the team to St. Louis.

Among those businessmen seeking (separately) to buy the Cardinals were Lamar Hunt and Bud Adams. When those efforts failed, they joined forces with others to form the American Football League, Hunt owning the Dallas Texans (which eventually moved to Kansas City) and Adams the Houston Oilers. I can’t help but wonder if the scheduling of this game was perhaps a trial run to test out the Texas market. In any event, by the next year the Lone Star State would have three professional teams: the Texans, the Oilers and the Dallas Cowboys. Of the three, only the Cowboys remain where they started.

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On Sunday afternoon at 4:30, Arkansas Senator J. William Fullbright* (listed in TV Guide as “James W.”, which is technically correct but not the way he was usually referred to) is the guest on CBS’s Face the Nation. I’ve frequently mentioned how sports was not always wall-to-wall on the weekends, and stations generally filled the time with public affairs and documentary programming. At various times this Sunday we have Open Hearings (hosted by ABC’s John Secondari), College News Conference, Victory at Sea, Conquest (a science program on CBS narrated by Eric Sevareid), NBC’s Meet the Press (with this week’s guest, Erwin D. Canham, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and editor of the Christian Science Monitor), The Twentieth Century (CBS), and Chet Huntley Reporting (NBC). Religious programming, such as This Is the Life, This Is the Answer and The Gospel in Art fill out the schedule, along with Quiz a Catholic, which I guess would be both religion and public affairs.

*Fun fact: Fulbright’s sister Roberta is the maternal grandmother of Fox pundit Tucker Carlson.

There is some sports on Sunday; both NBC and CBS have afternoon baseball (Red Sox vs. Indians on CBS, Orioles vs. Tigers on NBC), but the games are blacked out in the Twin Cities, as the Triple-A Minneapolis Millers are hosting the Kentucky Colonels. WCCO fills the time with more auto racing from Shakopee’s Raceway Park, a place that I visited several times during my youth (with the souvenier checkered flag to prove it.

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The American Legion is having its national convention in Minneapolis, and on Monday at 9:30 a.m., both Channels 4 and 9 offer coverage of the Legion’s parade, which is expected to last eight-to-ten hours, with 7500 marchers, floats and bands, and delegations from nine foreign countries. Channel 4, the CBS affiliate, breaks away from the coverage from time to time for local news, soaps, and game shows; Channel 9, the independent station, actually begins its broadcast day 2½ hours earlier than usual, and only breaks for an afternoon movie. Can you imagine a local station doing this now? A few years ago, when we were living in Minneapolis, the Legion returned to the city for its convention, and I can testify that the parade is very long and very colorful, though I don’t think it attracted the crowd it did in 1959.

One thing I really like about the listing for this is the reference to representatives from “the 49 states.” That’s right, we’re in that one-year period when Alaska’s achieved statehood, but not yet Hawaii. That we’re able to capture a reference like this in writing, from such a relatively short timeframe, is just a very cool cultural reference.

At 9:00 p.m., CBS’ Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse presents the story of famed gangster Al Capone in part one of the two-part “The Untouchables,” with Neville Brand as Capone and Robert Stack as Eliot Ness, the G-Man who helped bring Capone down. The show was a hit when it was originally broadcast in January, and in October it premieres as a weekly series on ABC, where it remains for four successful (and extremely violent) seasons.*

*Fun fact: Desi Arnez, whose Desilu studio produced The Untouchables, went to high school with Al Capone’s son.

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Tuesday features a David Brinkley report entitled “Back to School” (7:00 p.m., NBC), which takes advantage of the upcoming start of the school year to examine the problems faced by America’s public schools. Not surprisingly, they’re some of the same problems that exist today, particularly financial ones: crowded classrooms in New York, no money for school construction in New Orleans, no funds for facility maintenance in Los Angeles, and desegregation problems throughout the South. But if you look closely, you’ll notice something strange. Many of those challenges facing American school systems in 1959 are the result of overcrowding. New Orleans, Los Angeles, Oklahoma City, New York—all face a need for more school buildings to house additional students. The school I attended for grades K-6, built early in the 20th century, had temporary classrooms built to accommodate the growing student population. And that’s not happening today. The baby boom is over, and in many places the increase in student enrollment comes from immigration, from people moving to a community from another state or country. Some school systems may be looking at expansion, but in how many situations is this anything other than a zero-sum game, with enrollment increases in one area coming at the expense of another?

So many things have changed since 1959, but the decrease in population growth is one of the most significant, and I think one of the saddest, of all. Maybe Bishop Sheen’s program (7:30 p.m., KMSP) has some insight into what plagues us today. The topic: "Cure for Selfishness. To do great deeds we must supplant self with the Divine Will." But Bishop Sheen won't have much of a chance to say anything about it, not if the world of tonight's David Niven Show episode "The Last Room" comes to pass. (9:00 p.m., NBC) "In a totalitarian country where religious worship is a crime, a brutal inquisitor attempts to force prisoners to name the leaders of a group of citizens who are secretly attending church services." But that can't really happen here, not today. Can it?

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Wednesday: One of the more unique programs on television is Court of Last Resort (7:00 p.m., ABC), based on Erle Stanley Gardner’s organization, devoted to investigating cases in which reasonable doubt about the original verdict exists. Gardner, the creator of Perry Mason, started the actual Court of Last Resort in 1948 as a column in the popular magazine Argosy, and the program’s 26 episodes are based on actual cases investigated by the Court. The show ran for a single season in 1957-58 on NBC, and the broadcast in this week’s TV Guide is part of the series’ rebroadcast on ABC in 1958-59. Actors played the principles, but the real members of the Court appeared at the end of each episode.

Gardner believed that, because of "the exceptional nature of American liberty," no actual court could ever truly be a court of last resort; instead, that verdict could come only from "the people themselves." As opposed to today's organizations, which often work to free the unjustly convicted through DNA and other scientific findings, Gardner's cases were driven by polygraph tests, and augmented by findings from the Court's staff of investigators; the results would then be published in Argosy in hopes of creating a groundswell of public opinion. "Public opinion must be molded," he was once quoted as saying, "but it must be an enlightened public opinion based on facts, otherwise we would be charged, and justly charged, with the tactics of the rabble rousers."

One of the cases investigated by the real-life Court was that of the accused murderer Dr. Sam Sheppard in the late 1950s, with Gardner believing in Sheppard’s innocence even though nothing came of the Court’s investigation. Had The Fugitive existed in the same universe with Court of Last Resort, I suspect they would have investigated Dr. Kimble’s case as well. And isn’t that a meta conversation: a TV show about a fictional character from another TV show being aided by a fictional version of a real organization started by the creator of a different fictional character in an unrelated TV show. Makes your head spin, doesn’t it?

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Thursday: Now here’s the type of local programming you don’t see anymore: at 7:30 on WCCO, Operation Southdale presents a fashion show in the Garden Court of the famed Southdale Center in Edina, Minnesota – the nation's first enclosed shopping center, and a mall in which I've spent many, many hours over the decades. “For the men’s benefit,” an auto show is being held in the parking lot. And a musical group called the Jimarlen Trio provides background color for the show. For this, WCCO pre-empts a rerun of Yancy Derringer.

Later, Playhouse 90 (8:30 p.m., CBS) presents a curious drama, based on the true story of the first hydrogen bomb test. In “Nightmare at Ground Zero,” starring Barry Sullivan, the scientists behind the development of the bomb discover that they’ve made a few miscalculations, and that the bomb is really many times more destructive than they’d anticipated. Whoops!

On the face of it, this sounds like all the makings of one of those 50s sci-fi movies that wound up on MST3K. You know how it goes – the bomb goes off, much more powerful than they’d thought, with the result that people or insects or vegetation (or all three) are turned into mutants 50 feet tall. And it was written by Rod Serling. But it’s also directed by Franklin Schaffner, who would eventually win an Oscar for Patton, and the true story of the blast, which went off at 15 megatons rather than the expected five and vaporized three coral islands, in the process raining the fallout over a 7,000 square foot area , is remarkable.

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A big matchup for NBC’s Friday night fight on Gillette Cavalcade of Sports (9:00 p.m.), as Gene Fullmer faces Carmen Basillo for the world middleweight championship from the Cow Palace in San Francisco. I’ve written before about how boxing used to be a major sport on television, and Friday’s bout is one of two broadcast in prime-time this week (the other being ABC’s Wednesday Night Fights). But there’s one thing that never changes in boxing, and that’s politics. The reason Fullmer and Basillo are meeting for the title is because the National Boxing Association (which would have been the bigger “NBA” at the time), had stripped Sugar Ray Robinson of the title, leaving the top two contenders, each of whom had both won and lost title fights to Robinson in the past, to settle the score.


Fullmer wins on a 14th round TKO.

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On the cover this week is the cast of I've Got a Secret, the long-running panel show on CBS. Inside, we read about some of the wackier secrets that have involved members of the panel through the years. There was, for instance, the time that Paul Newman appeared on the show. His secret was that, a few weeks before, he had appeared at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, disguised as a hot dog vendor, and sold an unsuspecting Henry Morgan a hot dog. It was hilarious stuff; Morgan might not have recognized Newman, but some in the crowd did, and by the time Newman reached Morgan's row he had already sold $25 worth of hot dogs. Well, acting is an uncertain occupation.

Among the more mundane and intriguing secrets which people both ordinary and famous bring to I've Got a Secret, it has become increasingly popular to involve the panel in the stunts. Host Garry Moore once wrestled an alligator (and did pretty well at that), while Ernest Borgnine, taking lessons from Newman, dressed up as a taxi driver and drove panelist Jayne Meadows to the show. By consensus, the butt of most of these "secrets" is Morgan, the acclaimed satirist and humorist who manages the almost impossible feat of simultaneously being witty, urbane, and charming, all the while remaining vaguely unlikable. In addition to his encounter with Newman, he's also wrestled a female judo expert and spent an entire day entertaining three women, ages 10, 20 and 30, whose identical secrets were, "I want a date with Henry Morgan." Ah, but then, the name of the show is I've Got a Secret, not I've Got a Neurosis.

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She's not exactly a starlet, but this week's profile is Diana Lynn, who's personal trademark is that of a "shrinking tigress." You know, the "brave but frightened girl, torn by conflicting emotions." Says a director of her characters, "Diana either can't scream above a whisper or is murmuring 'I love you' at the top of her lungs." She's a hard worker who's spent 20 years in the business; "I had no training. All I had was a kind of desperate, honest quality" that's taken her from a Hollywood career in movies to New York where she's done live TV on the major dramatic series, hit Broadway with Maurice Evans, and recorded an album of piano music—her dad's a piano teacher in Los Angeles, and she was considered a prodigy.

The last couple of years she's concentrated on her family and community work, with most of her appearances coming on Playhouse 90 (she's starred in it five times). She enjoys her work, wants to keep working, but appreciates the good life she has as a wife and mother. Remarkably, when this article comes out she has only a dozen years to live; while getting ready to do the movie Play It as It Lays, she suffers a stroke and dies in December, 1971.

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Finally, on Monday night there’s this ad from Channel 4 for a “Girl Reporter.” A few weeks ago I referenced Barbara Walters’ role as the Today show’s “Today Girl,” so the term wasn’t terribly unusual; still, it’s another of those things that reminds the reader that they’re in a different place and time. Naturally, the Girl Reporter’s job is to cover the unveiling of CBS’ daytime television schedule.

I wonder who the winner was, and if she ever went into the media business? TV