What I've been watching: June, 2021

Shows I’ve Watched:	Shows I’ve Found:
Johnny Staccato	Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
Richard Diamond, Private Detective The Search for Ulysses	Smiley's People

X suppose it would be many years ago now, on the late, lamented Trio cable channel, that I first saw the private detective series Johnny Staccato, starring John Cassavetes. It was part of a block of shows called "Brilliant But Cancelled," but the episode I saw must not have been very brilliant, because it gave me the impression that Staccato wasn't anything to write home about. But the end of N.Y.P.D. left a half-hour hole in our Thursday night schedule, so maybe it was time to give it another chance. And having that opportunity to view the series again has also given me the opportunity to reassess my opinion, for while Johnny Staccato may not be brilliant, it's mostly good and occasionally better than that, and it's always enjoyable to watch. (The ridiculous name of the show's hero also proved good fodder for SCTV's detective parody Vic Arpeggio, but that's a story for another day.)

Johnny Staccato (NBC, 1959-60) comes from the great era of jazz detective series, which also included Peter Gunn and Richard Diamond. (I wonder, though, was there another, not-so-great, era of jazz detective series, maybe a show starring Miles Davis as an irascible, iconoclastic, go-his-own way loner, doing battle with his evil nemesis, Felonious Monk. Or was that joke too easy? But I'm afraid I've digressed.) Staccato comes by his creditentials honestly, as a jazz pianist-turned-private detective who, when he's not hunting down the bad guys, spends his time jamming with real-life jazz greats like Red Mitchell, Barney Kessel, Johnny Williams and Red Mitchell. (The show's theme, by the great Elmer Bernstein, and the driving score, supervised by Stanley Wilson, add instant credibility for both jazz and mystery fans.) 

As is the case with many half-hour detective shows, the mysteries sometimes tend to get wrapped up a little too easily. That's an occupational hazard of the genre. It can seem as if Staccato barely has time for any detecting at all. But almost every episode introduces something that makes it worth watching. Cassavetes took an active part in making the show work, and it shows; in addition to directing several episodes himself (and you can tell; those episodes have a distinctive, movie-like feel to them), he also insisted on playing a part in casting, which results in some outstanding guest star lineups. In "Nature of the Night," a mysterious slasher is attacking young blondes in the neighborhood. As the attacks continue, Johnny suspects that the club's bartender, Dave, is involved. In the conversations that follow we learn the details, a bit at a time: Dave and Johnny are old friends; Dave is bothered by Johnny's success; Dave's life collapsed after his wife left him to pursue an acting career. Johnny thinks he's persuaded Dave to turn himself in, but Dave makes a break for it, and threatens to jump off a building. With help from the police and the parish priest, Johnny is able to talk Dave down.

On the surface, there's not much to the story. There's very little doubt that Dave is the slasher, we know Johnny won't fall in trying to rescue Dave. We're not sure that Dave's going to make it, though, thanks to an excellent, nuanced performance by Dean Stockwell, who gives Dave a backstory and depth often missing in half-hour dramas. Then there's J. Pat O'Malley as the police sergeant who recognizes the risks involved but doesn't resist Johnny's involvement. Finally, there's Vladimir Sokoloff as Pastor Keeley (unsaid, but likely a Catholic priest), who takes the time after Dave's rescue to make sure that Johnny is all right as well. As I say, there's a quality to this that raises the episode above the average detective thriller.

A halo, or the inquisitor's spotlight?

Another very good episode, this one directed by Cassavetes, is "Evil," which opens with a striking scene: Alexander Scourby, he of the diginfied speaking voice, looking straight into the camera and intoning,"Evil attacks you through your television sets." (Talk about bitting the hand that feeds you.) Scourby portrays Brother Max, a gospel mission preacher who may or may not be a con artist; Johnny's called into the case by a relative of an old woman who's pledged all her money—both in this life and in the next—to Brother Max. Johnny's preconceived notion of guilt is shaken after talking to her; he finds not a helpless old woman but one serene in her faith and the direction her life has taken, thanks to her involvement with Max. He decides to investigate further: if the preacher's a crook, the authorities need to know, but if he's legit, Johnny needs to know; he envies the quiet certitude that he's seen in the woman. 

Cassavetes brings a style and panache to his direction, putting himself in the backgroud to emphasize a trio of powerful performances from his co-stars: not just Scourby, who oozes charm and smarm in equal parts, but Elisha Cook, heartbreaking as a man constantly falling back into the sin of demon drink; and 

Lloyd Corrigan as Brother Thomas, founder of the mission, who finds an inner strength he never knew he had when he's forced to admit to the congregation that he, and they, have been duped by Max. His transformation from a weak man worried about what his congregation will think of him to a courageous man taking responsiblity for his failings and standing up against Max is both moving and inspiring; it's also a sign of an actor's director, which Cassavetes most certainly was, the certainty of the star allowing the guests to drive the episode.

Not every episode is this good, of course, or the series might have run for a few seasons rather than 27 episodes. And Cassavettes can be annoying in the best of times: I've always thought he had a Method tendency toward hammy, tic-filled, over-the-top performances at times, and perhaps that's part of what prejudiced me against the series for so long. I'm glad I got past that, though. Johnny Staccato is a worthwhile half-hour: entertaining, thought-provoking, exciting. If I was wrong to ignore it for so long, I'll gladly admit to it when the results are this satisfying.

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We've been speaking of noirish jazz detectives and Thursday nights, and they both segue nicely into Richard Diamond, Private Detective (aka Call Mr. D), the other half of Private Eye Thursdays in the Hadley household. Richard Diamond, which ran irregularly on CBS and NBC for four seasons between 1957 and 1960, is a spin-off of the radio series created by Blake Edwards, who also created Peter Gunn, which is either a remarkable coincidence or proves conclusively that these jazz detectives deserve to be grouped together.

On radio, Richard Diamond, a former cop who was too independent to stay on the force, was played by the incomparable Dick Powell; he was quick with his tongue, quick with his gun, and quick to spin a song in the apartment of his girlfriend, Helen. It was, overall, a light drama, filled with action and a healthy dose of violence, and the bad guy always got it in the end. Powell's production company, Four Star, brought the series to television in 1957, with David Janssen moving into the lead. 

A trendsetter with his car phone.

There are several differences between the radio and television versions of Diamond; although Janssen can wisecrack as well as Powell, the overall tenor of the show is darker, more serious, and now we can see the fights and shootouts that previously were left to the imagination. Helen no longer appears as Diamond's girlfriend, and his friend and former partner, Lieutenant Walt Levenson, has been replaced by Lieutenant "Mac" McGough, played by Regis Toomey. And the biggest difference of all came at the start of season three, when Diamond moved from New York to Los Angeles and acquired a Girl Friday of sorts, the sultry phone answering service operator Sam, who was never seen except in shadow, and was famously played by Mary Tyler Moore for most of the season (although neither she or her replacement, Roxanne Brooks, ever appeared in the show's credits).

So what do we make of all this? The stories, if not Holmsian in complexity, are good mysteries, and the dialogue is sharp, particularly when Diamond trades bon mots with the heavies. Unlike many detective heroes, Diamond's often playing from behind, due to a susceptibility for being bonked in the back of the head. (I wonder how many concussions he racked up over the course of the series?) One thing you can be pretty sure of, though, is that Diamond keeps score on little things like that, and he's more than likely to even the score before things finish. Janssen, of course, is everything you could ask for. His portrayal of Diamond is, as I said earlier, more serious than Powell's, and with his nervous tics and need to avoid calling attention to himself, you can see Dr. Richard Kimble foreshadowed in his performance. And although you don't worry about Diamond, he shows, I think, more vulnerability than the average TV detective. And the show is replete with guest stars, many of whom will go on to stardom: Dan Blocker, Charles Bronson, DeForest Kelly, Mort Sahl, Ross Martin, Claude Akins, and a very young Barbara Bain, who played Diamond's girlfriend in five episodes. And, speaking of jazz credentials, Diamond's come from the music of Pete Rugolo, who also wrote much of the music for The Fugitive. 

I use the word "fun" a lot when I'm writing about these shows, and I think that as TV goes, it's an underrated concept. Yes, TV can be educational, it can be profound, it can be mindless, it can be hilarious. We usually hope that it will at least be entertaining, even though we're resigned to our hopes being too often dashed. Sometimes, though, it doesn't need to be anything more than fun, and the team of Staccato and Diamond go a long way toward making Thursday nights a good warmup for the weekend.

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The third program on the lineup this month is The Search for Ulysses, a 1966 CBS documentary based on Ernle Bradford's quest for the real man behind the legend of Ulysses. It's one of a number of documentaries or classical programs from the 1960s that wouldn't see on broadcast TV today, but, somewhat surprisingly, can be seen on YouTube. Even though I saw it in June, I think I'll hold off on writing about it until I can pair it with another program from the era, NBC's Michaelangelo: The Last Giant. It gives us all something to look forward to, doesn't it? TV  

What I've been watching: Summer, 2020

I'm not here to tell you my problems, and I rather suspect you're not here to listen to them, so I'll only say that having gone through another period of unemployment, as well as moving to a new apartment, tends to put a damper on any new video purchases. Now, I'm back to work, at least temporarily for what it's worth, but what this all means is that our look back at the summer will focus on what I've watched, and we'll return to what I've bought whenever—well, whenever I buy something.

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N.Y.P.D. isn't a sequel to Naked City, at least not formally, but it functionally serves as one, and not because both shows were on ABC. Whereas Naked City, which aired from 1958 to 1963, portrayed a New York that might be thought of as in a state of tired, shabby chic, N.Y.P.D., (1967-69) finds the city in free fall, a place of crime and grit and decay, of vigilanties roaming the streets because they doubt the city's ability or desire to protect its citizens. While the characters propelling the stories in Naked City were often eccentric misfits, N.Y.P.D.'s streets are populated by grifters and thieves, gang members, racists, and common killers. And the city itself, still colorful and bold in the early part of the decade, is now comprised of mean streets that decent people avoid after dark. In other words, New York's descent from glory, hinted at earlier, is now undeniable—and it hasn't come close to hitting rock bottom yet.

New York's finest (L-r): Frank Converse, Jack Warden,
and Robert Hooks

One thing that hasn't changed, though, is the squadroom, a thankless place far removed from the technocenters portrayed in modern procedurals. Here, in this stark setting, are our heroes, Lt. Mike Haines (Jack Warden) and his two right-hand men, detectives Jeff Ward (Robert Hooks) and Johnny Corso (Frank Converse). They're good cops: hard working, honest, looking out for each other, frustrated at the challenges of being a policeman in New York City. (Just imagine how they'd feel now.) And while we're spared the soap opera elements that seem to saturate today's procedurals, thanks to a half-hour running time that mandates a lean, tight plot, that doesn't mean the characters are reduced to two-dimensional figures just there to keep the story moving. In one episode Ward is accused of taking kickbacks to buy a fur coat for his wife, while in another he confronts a subtle racism that never hits you over the head but exists nonetheless; Converse has to deal with second-guessing himself after killing a suspect, and in a later story faces an internal affairs investigation after being charged with assulting a woman. And Haines, who spends most of his time confronting rising crime, dealing with bureaucracy, and worrying about his men, is taken advantage of when a friend uses him to provide himself with an alibi. It's never over the top, but represents the kind of stress that cops have to deal with, a message that couldn't be more timely.

One interesting technique that, thankfully, isn't overused, is a brief voiceover allowing us to hear what's running through a character's mind at a point where it isn't feasible or practical for him to speak those thoughts out loud. It's a nice touch; sometimes it allows you to see the wheels turning in a detective's mind as he sorts out the pieces of a case, while on other occasions you get an insight into what makes him tick, what he thinks about, who he is.

The three leads are very good, which isn't surprising considering their acting credentials, and they're easy to root for—again, unlike so many of today's TV cops. The location shooting, echoing Naked City, works in tandem with the show's tense, tough soundtrack to lend the show a gritty realism that isn't surprising, considering that David Susskind (East Side/West Side) was executive producer. It's remarkable how much drama and action a show can pack into thirty minutes, actually. Today's showrunners might consider taking a page from that script.

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Speaking of half-hour crime dramas, Blake Edwards came to prominence as the creater of one such show that ran for four years on radio: Richard Diamond, Private Detective. It starred Dick Powell, who had made a brilliant transition from song-and-dance man to the star of hard-boiled detective stories, and while it was standard P.I. fare (aside from the song that Powell would invariably sing at the end of each episode as he played the piano for his girlfriend Helen), it was immensely entertaining, a natural for television. And indeed, Powell's production company, Four Star, brought Richard Diamond to the small screen in 1957, with David Janssen taking over the lead role. Unlike Powell, Janssen may not have had a song in his heart, but he often had a half-smirk on his face, part of the wisecracking persona that remained one of Diamond's trademarks, even as his Diamond resides in a tougher, less lighthearted universe than his radio counterpart. There are other differences between the two versions; the TV Diamond lacks both regular girlfriend Helen and police sidekick Walt, for example. Both radio and TV iterations have that same smoothness and charm, though; no Diamonds in the rough here.

"It's Sam, Mr. D. I have a message for you."

Diamond (his friends call him Rick, never, ever Dick) works hard for his fee; like every detective, he has his moments of brilliant insight, but just as often he comes to his conclusions (and the bad guys come to justice) through dogged determination and resourcefulness. (And occasionally dumb luck.) He also has a hard head, which comes in very handy for those times, and there are many, when he gets conked in the back of the head by some goon with a gun. Even in the first few episodes, the number of concussions that Diamond must have suffered is appalling; fortunately, thanks to that half-hour running time, the show moves at such a pace that you don't have time to consider what the long-term side effects probably were. Anyway, Diamond seldom ever lets one of these slights go unpunished; he may have a hard head, but he also has a long memory.

During the course of the series Diamond moves cross-country, from New York (the location of the radio series) to Hollywood (where the glamourous detectives hang out on the Sunset Strip), and picks up both a car phone and an answering service, manned—an inappropriate word if ever there was one—by the legs-only "Sam," played most memorably by young Mary Tyler Moore. The stories are pretty routine, with many of the early shows adapted directly from the radio version, but Janssen, in the role that made him famous and set him up for stardom in The Fugitive, is an eminently likeable hero, as quick with a smartass retort as he is with his fists, and his wry voiceover narration—which helps bridge the gaps that come with the half-hour format—immediately brings the viewer into the case. The two Richard Diamonds, Dick Powell and David Janssen, are two sides of the same coin, two different ways of portraying the same person, Either way you look at him, though, he comes up a winner.

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I've mentioned the documentaries of David L. Wolper several times, so it shouldn't be any surprise to you that we've moved on to another such series, Hollywood and the Stars, which ran on NBC for 31 episodes in the 1963-64 season. It was a good time for documentaries on television; ABC had taken season-long looks at both FDR and Winston Churchill, NBC adapted John F. Kennedy's Profiles in Courage, and CBS had taken an in-depth look at World War I, as well as its long-running 20th Century. Hollywood and the Stars has a decidedly lighter tone, though, and while it's not the in-depth look at the stuff of dreams that, say, Ken Burns might have produced, it's also a reminder of just what it is that we used to love about the movies.

That about says it all, doesn't it?

The celebrity narrator is a trademark of a Wolper doc, and Hollywood is no exception, with the distinguished actor Joseph Cotton doing the honors, and he combines an authoritative gravitas with an occasionally dry humor to serve as a able guide to the remarkable story of the film industry. (He only appears on-screen once in the entire series; it would have been nice to see him at the start of each episode, at least) Various episodes focus on the Hollywood musical, great comedians, famous swashbucklers, glamour girls, and the history of monster movies; others take us behind the scenes with "making of" looks at The Cardinal and The Night of the Iguana. Some of the best are the biographies of the screen's great heroes, from men known by one name (Bogart, Crosby, Jolson) to contemporary stars like Paul Newman, Kim Novak and Natalie Wood. It's occasionally jarring to see clips from familiar blockbuster color extravaganzas being shown in black-and-white, but then this is a black-and-white series. (If, say, TCM were to ever acquire this series, I wonder if they'd use clips from the versions in their own film library, as they did with their episodes from The Dick Cavett Show a few years ago.)

Like N.Y.P.D. and Richard Diamond, Hollywood and the Stars has never received a proper commercial DVD release, but a significant number of episodes are available thanks to YouTube, which makes up at least in part for its myriad faults. Perhaps Hollywood and the Stars isn't as hard-hitting and comprehensive as we'd expect to see today, but Hollywood itself is a fantasyland; I guess if any documentary series is entitled to give us the legend instead of the facts, it would be this one. TV