by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Over the last two nights my partner Charles and I watched all four episodes of the early 1950’s TV series Mr. and Mrs. North on “volume three” of Critics’ Choice’s reissue of these shows. (In my last order from them I bought volumes three through seven, since I’ve always liked mystery shows.) Mr. and Mrs. North were a married couple who got involved in criminal investigations — sort of The Thin Man lite, very lite (as Charles pointed out after the first two shows on this disc, they make The Thin Man seem like Tolstoy by comparison!) — and they were created by Richard and Frances Lockridge and first filmed in a 1941 movie from MGM with William Post, Jr. as Mr. North and Gracie Allen as Mrs. North (to my knowledge, the only time Gracie was ever cast as the wife of someone other than her real husband, George Burns).
The TV cast was Richard Denning (tall, blond and a hunk to die for! I hadn’t realized he was this good-looking, and the TV producers gave him ample changes to appear in swimsuits to show off his hot bod) as Mr. North and Barbara Britton (Edmond O’Brien’s girlfriend/secretary back home in the 1949 D.O.A.) as Mrs. North, and the writers of this series (who included some semi-major names: the “Nosed Out” episode was co-written by Mary Orr, whose story “The Wisdom of Eve” was the basis for the film All About Eve, and “Target” was written by M. Coates Webster, who wrote Strange Confession for the Universal “Inner Sanctum” film series in 1945) generally had Mrs. North either figure out the case or actually bop the villain and subdue him (or her — the writers also had a penchant for female baddies), giving her a more active role than most women in 1950’s TV shows.
The first episode on this disc was “Nosed Out,” an interesting choice to be the next item we watched together after the 1937 film "Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry" since it also dealt with horse racing, and specifically with a jockey who got a syndicate of gamblers mad at him because he refused to throw a big race. Only in this version, instead of getting him thrown off the track, they just kill him and stuff the body in Mr. and Mrs. North’s car because it happens to be parked next to the jockey’s own car and be the same make, model and color. They also stick gasoline-soaked rags in it and set it on fire, hoping to burn up the body, but a security person at the track notices the car smoldering and the Norths are alerted and able to get to their car in time to save it. (Mr. North is depicted as regularly parking his car and leaving its windows wide open — a real sign of how much the times have changed!) The immediate suspect is the jockey’s wife, an ex-circus acrobat played by the marvelous Veda Ann Borg (I like her as an actress and I love the sound of her name) who was planning to divorce him to marry a much older man, a Texas oil millionaire who owned some of the horses her husband rode, but the Norths trace the crime to a syndicate and prove that the owner of their garage is part of it. “Nosed Out” was the best of the episodes we watched over the last two nights.
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The second show on the disc was “The Third Eye” — the title refers to a miniature camera with which an unscrupulous model is taking pictures of the garments she’s modeling for Suzi’s haute couture salon so she can sell them to someone else for knock-off purposes. This wasn’t as much fun because, typically for Hollywood when they’re dealing with the fashion world, they ramped up the camp factor: the owner of the salon whose designs are getting ripped off (and whose clothes actually look both pleasing and functional, a far cry from the ridiculously impractical garments that get shown at high-fashion shows today!) is a woman with a very bad fake French accent, and the victim is the go-between between the model who was shooting the knock-off photos and the people paying her for them — and the photographer, whom the Norths put up because she formerly lived with the victim and made a big show about not wanting to go back to that apartment, turns out to be the real killer.
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Last night’s episodes were “The Frightened Night” — another campfest, a haunted-house story with all the trimmings, including a Seven Keys to Baldpate-style author who came to the deserted house to write a book (the Norths enter the story because the owner is the aunt of one-half of a honeymooning couple and she offered the house to them, and the Norths accompanied them there to see they got there safely in a storm as nasty as the producers’ limited effects budget could make it) and a crazy rustic who’s out to shoot as many people as possible out of some twisted sort of revenge of which the writers don’t bother to give us much of an explanation.
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“Target” was from a later season of the series, and their print had the original commercials (for Revlon, whose products were actually integrated into the series’ action and shown on screen with the stars — Barbara Britton had to do a pitch for one) whereas the others had had the commercials spliced out (I suspect that in the interim the show acquired a sponsor and a network berth instead of just being syndicated); it was fun not only for the choice glimpses it gave us of Richard Denning in swimwear (I said it before and I’ll say it again: the man was hot!) but also because it had a good story: the Norths are sunbathing at a local beach when from out of nowhere a sniper tries to pick them off. Mr. North sees the man escapes but catches only a glimpse of him and his car, and the rest of the show features a cat-and-mouse game between the Norths and their police homicide inspector friend (a continuing character) to find out just who is trying to kill them and why.
The killer crashes their apartment in the guise of a grocery delivery man (another sign of how much the times have changed!) and the finale is suspenseful, though otherwise the direction by Paul Landres (who eventually became house director fot the Sam Katzman-Alan Freed rock ’n’ roll movies at Columbia) is pretty flat, as the Norths and the hidden killer confront each other and the Norths hope they can stay alive long enough for the cops to arrive and arrest the guy. Mr. and Mrs. North isn’t one of the great series of 1950’s television, and given his druthers Richard Denning would probably have preferred to do the TV version of his hit radio sitcom My Favorite Husband with Lucille Ball (instead, as everyone knows, she insisted on changing the title to I Love Lucy and the actor playing her husband to her real one, Desi Arnaz) but he’s quite good in the role even though most of the stories make him the butt of the humor and require her to save him — a surprisingly proto-feminist conception for 1950’s television! — 2/6/08
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I showed two more episodes in the Mr. and Mrs. North series. One was called “Million Dollar Coffin” and was a quite inventive tale about a rather seedy old man who claims to be the direct descendant of a Revolutionary War hero who was buried with a packet of letters from the Founding Fathers that would be worth a bundle to an enterprising publisher like Jerry North — only the cemetery where he’s buried also happens to be the locus where a gang of bank robbers, whose plot included burying the money in an out-of-the-way place and not divvying it up until three years later, once the statute of limitations had run out, buried the money inside a coffin along with the body of a person they murdered on the beach simply to supply a corpse. (Since this episode was made in 1953, pre-dating the original Ocean’s Eleven by seven years, they didn’t realize the obvious danger of hiding the “take” from a big robbery in a coffin.)
One member of the gang gets his girlfriend to pose as the murdered man’s daughter and get the authorities to exhume the body (she’s played by Veda Ann Borg, and she deliberately adopts a wooden, porn-like line delivery when she’s playing her character attempting to act and failing miserably), and another gang member sneaks into the action and switches the tombstones (which are properly heavy and ponderous-looking when he tries to lift them — this isn’t an Ed Wood movie where the “tombstones” are clearly made of light wood), so the bad guys dig up the coffin of the Revolutionary War hero (what happens to the letters is never made clear, though since Jerry North warned us earlier that they’d evaporate if exposed to light too suddenly we’re evidently supposed to think these historical treasures are lost forever) and the good guys dig up the coffin with the more recent corpse and the bank robbery proceeds — which they conveniently open in the vault of the very bank from which the money was stolen in the first place, making it easy to return. This improbable tale was told with a delightfully insouciant air that suited the Thin Man-lite premise of the show, and Richard Denning and Barbara Britton are personable in the leads even though this one didn’t show him topless or in swim trunks (I hadn’t realized until I saw the episodes in volume three what a hot hunk Denning was!).
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The other episode we watched, “Dead Man’s Tale,” was mopier, dealing with a Mafioso who calls in a death threat to the Norths — only it turns out he’s dialed wrong and really means to kill somebody entirely unrelated. Needless to say, the Norths immediately get dressed (the phone call had disturbed them while they were just about to go to sleep) and go to the cigar store where the murder is supposed to take place — and the murder duly happens, after a false alarm in which the victim fakes his own shooting because he thinks the Norths are the gangster’s hit people.
Eventually the gangster is proven innocent — of the murder, anyway — and the writers alter him from a figure of menace to a charming Runyon-esque lowbrow, while establishing that the owner of the cigar store actually committed the killing, which had something to do with his wife’s bookie debts to the victim (the writers of these 25-minute crime shows were often more concerned with simply explaining whodunit than delving into whydunit; obviously if you’re strapped for running time, the easiest thing to leave on the cutting-room floor is the discussion of motive). It was an O.K. episode but the character of the threatening gangster got pretty oppressive and it didn’t have the charm of the “Million Dollar Coffin” episode or some of the other shows we’ve watched (I bought five DVD’s of this show — 20 episodes in all — mainly because on the Critics’ Choice list they were $4 apiece). — 2/10/08
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Afterwards Charles and I settled in and ran the remaining two episodes of Mr. and Mrs. North from volume four of the Critics’ Choice collection (I got volumes three through seven). One was called “Dying to Live” and was quite intriguing even though at times it seemed like the screenwriter was trying to see how many noir clichés he could crowd into a 25-minute show: it’s all about George Tuttle, an accountant who’s just been diagnosed with a fatal disease and told he has only a few more weeks to live. He decides to use this knowledge to blackmail his boss (Alan Mowbray), who embezzled $76,000 from the company to support the expensive tastes of his wife (Lee Patrick). For $10,000, Tuttle offers his boss, he will sign a confession naming himself as the embezzler and it will be found on his body.
To get back his money, the boss and his wife hire an adventuress (Ann Savage, the marvelous femme fatale from Edgar G. Ulmer’s Detour) to meet up with him in a fancy bar, seduce him, get him drunk and steal back the money — which she does, only when the boss confronts the drunken Tuttle he kills Tuttle and then helps himself to a bottle of Napoleon brandy Tuttle had bought as his final thrill in life. Mr. and Mrs. North enter the action because in addition to his regular job, he also works on their taxes (the original air date of this episode was March 13, 1953 and back then the IRS deadline was March 15, not April 15 — at least according to this script), and he happens to drop his phony confession on their floor. They discover it and confront the principals, and in the end it turns out that Tuttle had spiked that bottle of Napoleon brandy with poison and therefore the Mowbray character unintentionally killed himself: a neat, chilling ending to a quite well-written, well-done episode whose only flaw is that the Norths, nominally the show’s leads, seem almost totally irrelevant to it.
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After that, the last show on the disc, “The Man Who Came to Murder,” seemed anticlimactic; set at a honeymoon lodge where Mr. and Mrs. North take a vacation every year, it involves a county sheriff who gets murdered; a former racketeer who says he’s quit the criminal life; his fiancée, who backs out of their planned marriage at the last minute because she’s not so sure that he’s really quit (especially when she learns he’s deposited a good chunk of his ill-gotten gains in their joint safe deposit box, fueling her paranoia that his activities will get her arrested as an accessory); and a French cook with a really bad accent who’s married four women without bothering to divorce any of them in between. The gangster killed the sheriff, it turns out totally unsurprisingly in a dull episode with too many suspects and too few motives, and once again too little of Mr. and Mrs. North — though at least in “Dying to Live” (a show that in addition to its macabre plot twists also brought to Tuttle some of the pathos of the Lionel Barrymore plot line in Grand Hotel) that didn’t matter so much because the rest of the episode was so good. — 2/12/08
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I ran the next episode in sequence from the Mr. and Mrs. North DVD’s: “Breakout,” an unusually good one in which the Norths (Richard Denning and Barbara Britton) visit a prison where a famous gangster who was busted for income-tax evasion is ready to discuss writing his memoirs. Two other convicts use the Norths’ presence as the excuse to break out and use them as hostages, and the show (directed by Ralph Francis Murphy, whose name consistently appears on their best episodes) turns into a quite exciting suspense drama in which the Norths vanquish the bad guys by feeding them coffee spiked with a sleeping pill Mrs. North had previously bought for her husband. Interestingly, the gangster whose memoirs the Norths were going to publish (and who is killed by the other cons before the final denouement) was played by a padded and virtually unrecognizable Lyle Talbot (the one degree of separation between Bette Davis and Ed Wood!), — 3/8/08
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It was even more ironic, after watching such a thought-provoking but mostly anti-war movie, to come home and (after I nebulized John P. and Charles and I had ice cream for dessert), that the film we showed as a nightcap was a Mr. and Mrs. North TV episode, “Salt in the Blood,” featuring a story about a young man who joins the Navy because he’s so anxious to serve his country in the Korean war (which was just lurching to a close when this episode aired on May 29, 1953), only to be mustered out when his mother reports him for being underage. Thinking that if he can get hold of $150 he can go to the West Coast and re-enlist under another name, he goes to a sailor’s bar where the bartender is a man who calls himself “Boats” and gets into an argument with a drunken sailor, Sloan, who is flashing around a big bankroll and loudly and drunkenly proclaiming his intention of spending it.
Sloane is ultimately found mortally wounded in an alley near the bar (as Mr. and Mrs. North walked down the representation of the alley I couldn’t help but joke, “Down these cheap sets a man must go … ”) and Our Hero, Chuck Walker, is naturally wanted and ultimately arrested for the crime, but the Norths find a ferrule (the metal band at the base of a walking stick) and with that Mrs. North finds out that the real assailant (who ultimately killed Sloane) was the tattoo artist who hangs out at the bar and who clubbed him with his cane. It’s a nice show that was well written and, for the budget, reasonably well directed by Ralph Francis Murphy, and with a good performance by Dick Jones as the sailor (even though he looked well over 18 and therefore more than old enough to serve!), and some interesting members in the rest of the cast: Sara Haden, all-purpose mother type, as Chuck’s mom; Claudia Barrett from Robot Monster as his girlfriend Dorothy (who looks even older than he does!), old silent-era star Monte Blue as Boats, Phil Tully as Sloan, John Gallaudet as Eddie Pink (Sloan’s business partner — in a mysteriously unstated “business” — and briefly a suspect in his own right), and Percy Helton as Needles, the tattoo artist who turns out to be the real killer (did writer Herbert Purdum have to give all his characters such obvious names?). — 3/11/08
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It was the next in sequence on volume 5 of the Mr. and Mrs. North series on Critics’ Choice, and this episode, called “Reunion” and first aired February 9, 1954, in which Jerry North (Richard Denning) returns to his alma mater and meets up with his old roommate “Stuffy” Barton (Douglas Kennedy in a very tough performance reminiscent of Fred MacMurray’s in Double Indemnity), who’s now an atomic scientist. The university, under the leadership of professor Nielsen (Leonard Mudie) — who puffs away so enthusiastically on his pipe he looks radioactive — has developed an atomic bomb so small it can fit into a suitcase, and Barton — horrified at what this could mean to world peace — has made a duplicate version and planted it in the college gym, set to go off when the big basketball game is scheduled to start as a way of dramatizing his cause.
He’s also given himself radiation sickness from trying to build a bomb on his stony lonesome and having to handle the fissile material without help, and when he’s captured he claims to have made three other bombs and planted them in New York City and Washington, D.C. (the fact that this fictional character picked the same target cities as the real 9/11 plotters was probably pretty obvious but still struck me), though he finally agrees to disarm the bomb (with two seconds to spare!) and admits that the additional bombs didn’t really exist and were just a bluff. This was a very tough, well-done melodrama, expertly directed by Gordon Blair and with a script by Donn Mullally and Lee Erwin that was particularly noteworthy for avoiding the obvious Cold War tropes: the villain was crazy but sympathetic (much like the socially conscious mad scientists Boris Karloff played in the Columbia films we’d been watching recently) and the writers did not take the easy route (for the time) of making him a closet Communist deliberately trying to destroy America. — 3/14/08
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Charles and I crashed and I ran him the final Mr. and Mrs. North episode on Critics’ Choice DVD volume 5: “Loon Lake” (inescapably associated for me with E. L. Doctorow’s rather grim novel of that title), aired the week after “Reunion” (February 16, 1954) and a chilling suspense tale of the Norths being held hostage in a mountain cabin by outlaws Matt Weber (Jack Elam), who’s just escaped from jail (the escape is shown in an appealingly noir-ish wordless opening in which he’s smuggled out in a coffin-like box, which made me joke, “Dr. Frankenstein, call your office”), Doc Randall (Ross Elliott) and Clay (John Doucette), the usual mentally retarded triggerman associated with stories like this. (The “Breakout” episode, also on this DVD, in which the Norths were held hostage by escaping convicts in prison, also featured a retarded triggerman who constantly had to be coddled and psychologically stroked by the ringleader.)
The gimmick is that Randall has been brought in to do plastic surgery on Weber, who accordingly goes through most of the episode wearing bandages on his face — only Randall is also attempting to seduce Weber’s girlfriend Bonnie (Pamela Dumcan, doing a good hard-bitten portrayal), and judging from the surprisingly (for 1950’s television) passionate open-mouthed kissing Mrs. North catches Randall and Bonnie doing in the kitchen, he’s got considerably farther than first base with her. Apparently Randall (or at least the show’s writer, Lee Erwin) had seen the 1935 RKO gangster film Let ’Em Have It, in which gangster Bruce Cabot similarly (stupidly) inveigled a plastic surgeon with a grudge against him to change his appearance, for Randall has carved scars with the letter “M” into both of Weber’s cheeks the way the surgeon in Let ’Em Have It did with Cabot — so he’d be easier, not harder, for the cops to identify.
Erwin also borrowed a plot gommick from an earlier Mr. and Mrs. North episode, “Dying to Live,” in having the principal villain essentially murdered by someone who was already dead — this time Weber kills Randall and Bonnie and then drinks a cup of coffee Bonnie had made before he shot her, spiked with rat poison in hopes of killing him so she could run off with Randall. Despite an odd and inappropriate comic tag scene, this Mr. and Mrs. North episode — directed with unusual élan by “B”-movie veteran Lew Landers — was one of their best, and proved that even the rather superficial premise of this show could be used as an excuse for good suspense drama. — 4/15/08
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I screened another episode of Mr. and Mrs. North, “The Silent Butler,” in which Gerald North (Richard Denning), tired of being mistakenly awakened on Sunday mornings by the Norths’ maid Millie, decides to hire a male servant instead and end up with Oliver (Edgar Barrier, coming across very much as a graduate of the Arthur Treacher School of How to Play a British Butler), not realizing that Oliver is taking the job only to get away from a decidedly unrequited crush on him from Mrs. Bentley, owner of the employment agency that referred him. Oliver is also having an affair with the maid working for the Wentworths next door, even though the Wentworths have a maid and a butler as well, the two are married to each other and the Wentworths hired them as a couple. By pretending to be Gerald’s private secretary, Mrs. Bentley lures Oliver down to the basement of the Norths’ (and the Wentworths’) apartment building and stabs him — only it turns out Oliver is very much alive and she’s really killed Edgar by mistake. It takes about half the show’s running time before the crime actually materializes, and until then it’s a nice, sprightly domestic comedy, and the whole thing is a lot of fun — Mr. and Mrs. North was obviously derivative of The Thin Man (as was the 1980’s TV show Hart to Hart) but at least it was well derived, and it was a treat to see the writing credit at the end and find George Oppenheimer’s name at the top for a change! — 4/18/08
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I also managed to squeeze in the final episode on volume six of the Mr. and Mrs. North DVD’s. It was called “Stranger than Fiction” — which couldn’t help but remind us (me, anyway) of that marvelous recent film with Will Ferrell and Emma Thompson, written by Zach Helm and touchingly directed by Marc Forster — though about all this had in common was that it was also about a writer. Since the print Critics’ Choice mastered from was missing the show’s closing credits, I wasn’t able to do a cast list, though I’ll say the acting was quite good all around. The plot deals with an excessively macho writer who’s made his mark with a grittily realistic novel about World War II (the show originally aired on February 20, 1953) — I was wondering just who the screenwriters were modeling the character after (Hemingway and Mailer were my two main guesses) — who’s spending an alcohol- and bitterness-fueled weekend with his trophy wife, an old Army buddy from his own war service and his soft-spoken “secretary,” whom he continually browbeats and has made into a house servant, who it turns out actually wrote the best-selling war novel Gerald North (Richard Denning) published.
He’s the only likable character in the bunch, which no doubt is why he’s dispatched after the first act — the other people in that house are all so hateful he’s sorely missed in the rest of the program — and the Norths not surprisingly find that the writer killed him, especially since he lusted after the writer’s trophy wife (who was actually, natch, having an affair with the war buddy). I didn’t realize while we were watching it how clichéd this plot was, but the story was genuinely fun and enjoyable and the actor playing the writer made him properly loathsome. — 4/23/08
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I trotted out the last of the five Critics’ Choice DVD’s I ordered of the Mr. and Mrs. North show and we watched the first episode, “Trained for Murder,” a far less exalted mystery than the Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode I’d screened for myself earlier but a good one even though this was one 1950’s TV episode that suffered from the brevity of the half-hour drama format. This was a story about a mean-spirited boxer, Vince McKay (a good slimeball performance by Hal Baylor) — a sort of white version of Mike Tyson — whose avocations are womanizing and pissing off everybody in his circle, from his manager Whitey Malone (Ray Roberts) to his sparring partner to his manservant Joe (Christopher Dark), whose girlfriend Ruth (Gloria Henry) has got the hots for Vince. Joe is poisoned and drops dead in the ring during a practice session for his upcoming fight that would put him one bout away from the championship in his weight class, and for a moment we’re led to believe that one of the women in the cast — either Ruth or Art’s blonde-bimbo wife Edna (Nancy Valentine), who’s also succumbed to Vince’s dubious charms — by spiking a pie they were baking him with rat poison, but the killer turns out to be Joe, who in addition to his own jealousies over Ruth hates Vince because one of the women Vince seduced and abandoned previously was Joe’s sister Sharon.
The Norths get there through a plot gimmick this series used several times — the Norths are given a proposal for a book about Vince to be written by sportswriter Art Davis (Robert Carson) and they come to spend the weekend at a remote house in the country where Vince and his entourage are holing up in preparation for his big fight — indeed, I think this was the same remote-house-in-the-country set they’d used previously for stories like this (all they did to make it look like a prizefighter’s training camp was to put a ring up on the backlot and hang a heavy bag in the living room) — and writer Erna Lazarus went out of her way to give the various dramatis personae motives for knocking Vince off, though the show’s 25-minute running time (not counting the original commercials, left off of this edition) was way too short to build much suspense about the revelation, especially since Vince didn’t even get killed until 16 minutes in.
This was the first Mr. and Mrs. North we’d seen that contained an actual sponsor’s announcement (for Colgate toothpaste, lather shaving cream and a spray-on deodorant called Veto — and what was the Colgate marketing department thinking when they came up with that name?) as well as plugs for next week’s episode (“Murder on the Midway”) and other shows Colgate was sponsoring then — and it can be fun to watch these old TV shows with the original commercials (if only to remember how tacky they were compared to the production values of TV ads today!) even though the gimmick of Martin Kane, Private Eye — where the sponsors, U.S. Tobacco (now just a chewing and pipe tobacco manufacturer but then a cigarette company as well) actually worked their spots into the plots of the shows — was more than a bit excessive. — 5/23/08
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I ran him a nice Mr and Mrs. North episode called “The Placid Affair.” This was considerably better than the usual run of these programs in that it featured a genuinely terrifying villain, Mills (John Hoyt), a tubercular clerk at the Brewster company who cracks the company safe and steals $150,000 in payroll money, then tells his live-in nurse/lover/slave Betty (Hillary Brooke) the he embezzled a considerably smaller amount but didn’t get away with the money. She finds out differently when she sees a newspaper headline about the theft while the two are on their way to Lake Placid (so the title turned out to be geographical, not emotional), where they end up in a cabin next door to the Norths, who recognize Betty because she once nursed Jerry North (Richard Denning) through an illness.
Directed by Lew Landers from a script by Mortimer Braus, this one turned out to be one of the tightest and most convincingly noir-ish episodes of this series, which was generally interesting but sometimes turned too campy for its own good. This time, though, the only trace of camp was the bizarre conceit that because Mrs. North (Barbara Britton) breaks the heel of her high-heeled shoe running down the stairs while Betty was presumably fleeing in the elevator (but actually set it to go down while she herself remained on the fourth floor where the apartment she shared with Mills was located), she discovers her and they have a quite graphically staged fight on a table and a bed before the men in the cast — series regulars Denning as her husband and Francis de Sales as a cop — figure out what happened, take the stairs up (why they didn’t take the elevator up only Mortimer Braus would know!) and come in the nick of time to take Betty into custody. The years had been hard on Hillary Brooke — she was now pretty hatchet-faced instead of the alluring femme fatale she’d played in the Rathbone-Bruce Sherlock Holmes film The Woman in Green — but her marvelous ability to play thinly controlled menace remained vividly intact, and Landers actually directed this with more care than he showed in a lot of his features! — 6/5/08
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I showed him our next-to-last Mr. and Mrs. North episode, “Mark of Hate,” directed by Lew Landers (again!) from a script by Lee Erwin and featuring actor Willis Bouchey in an absolutely chilling performance as Gordon Lane, an old friend of the Norths who two years earlier was involved in an automobile accident that left him crippled and bedridden. The Norths still think he’s the kind man who became their friend years before, and are impressed at how well he seems to have adapted to life without mobility — but in fact he’s become bitter and filled with hatred, directed partly at himself but mainly at his wife Marion (Eve Miller), who was drifting away from him even before the accident and since then has started an affair with Barry Weston (Harry Lauter), the art director at the magazine Gordon owns and Marion worked for when they met. Bouchey’s depiction of this role — particularly the vicious crabbiness with which he orders around the people supposedly taking care of him and the bitterness perched on the thin edge between wanting to take his own life and lashing out at the people near him — was absolutely accurate.
The gimmick is that, unbeknownst to everybody else, Gordon has actually regained enough of his ability to walk that he’s able to take down a gun from the gun rack on his bedroom wall, load it with a bullet and use it to shoot and kill Barry and frame Marion for the crime — and when Mrs. North, all smiles and innocence, comes in to look after him, she catches on when a newspaper she was reading to him has mysteriously moved from the end table where she rested it to his bed. It was ironic that this disc (volume 7 of the Critics’ Choice series of Mr. and Mrs. North DVD’s) should contain two consecutive episodes about deathly ill individuals who lash themselves and summon up their last reserves of energy to commit crimes and screw over the women in their lives (though in fact the two shows originally aired four weeks apart, “The Placid Affair” on April 27, 1954 and “Mark of Hate” on May 18), and once again this was a solid thriller with the comedy aspects of the formula well under control this time. — 6/6/08
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We ended up playing the last of our 20 episodes of the early-1950’s Mr. and Mrs. North series, “Climax” — which, even though the script by Herbert Purdum (a name otherwise unknown to me) doesn’t bother to explain the title, turned out to be perhaps the best of all 20 episodes on these five Critics’ Choice DVD’s, a neat, taut half-hour mini-drama about a serial killer who particularly targets sailors — not for sexual reasons but because he’s a Navy vet himself, he spent 10 years in the brig for a carefully unspecified crime, and he’s decided that the deaths of six naval officers will be appropriate payback for the decade of his life they cost him. The actual central character, though, is “Clipper” Hale (Steve Brodie), yet another old friend of the Norths the writers on this show introduced willy-nilly as needed, whose lifelong friend and fellow sailor Doug Parrish (Russ Conway) is lured into a trap and becomes victim number five of the killer, Carl Denver (Paul Richards).
The main dramatic issue becomes whether “Clipper” will yield to his killer instincts and murder his friend’s murderer or whether he’ll step aside and let the law take care of him — and at one point the series regular who usually represented the police, homicide inspector Wigan (Francis De Sales), gets so worried that “Clipper” will turn vigilante he arrests him and holds him as a material witness until the Norths agree to be responsible for him if he’s released — whereupon he gives Jerry North the slip and traces the killer to the dirty-spoon restaurant where he’s a dishwasher. The episode is effectively staged by director Lew Landers, who along with cinematographer Kenneth D. Peach (who did a peach of a job photographing this — bad joke) sets the scene with a strikingly noir-ish shot, though the next scene — inside the restaurant, introducing Denver (though we’re not yet aware he’s the killer) and his co-worker and friend (girlfriend, maybe?) Katie (Monica Keating) — is photographed all too flatly in what would become the standard “look” of black-and-white television.
Still, this is an excellent show and one which ably caught the balance between drama and comedy that often eluded producer John W. Loveton and his directors and writers on this show (usually the trap was they overdid the comedy and produced shows that only worked as camp, but not this time), and an excellent finish to our travel through 20 episodes of this very interesting and often entertaining program. — 6/15/08
