I decided to watch the first of the 27 episodes of the 1958-1960 TV series Man with a Camera that I’d recently downloaded from archive.org. The opening show was called “Second Avenue Assassin” and was essentially the Ur-cliché of boxing stories: a young prizefighter, Joey Savoyan (Tom Laughlin — so this episode featured two people who became popular in action movies in the 1970’s; Laughlin was most famous for Billy Jack and the sequels he produced and directed as well as starring in), has been carefully groomed for a chance at the world’s championship. What he doesn’t realize is that all his fights have been fixed — he’s been built up by being matched against a series of opponents who’ve been bribed to throw the fights against him — and now the gangsters who manage his career have let him in on the secret because he’s now become a favorite against champion Sal Benning (Don Kennedy) and the gangsters are going to bet against him and want to make sure he gets with the program and loses on schedule — or else they’ll retaliate against him, his girlfriend Dolly MacDermott (Ruta Lee) and his family. (We see Laughlin mostly in a skin-tight white outfit that nicely shows off his nipples and his basket; he looks quite sexy but also surprisingly short for anyone who saw him in the Billy Jack movies.) Mike Kovac (Charles Bronson) is an old friend of Joey’s from “the neighborhood” (later episodes of the series were set in San Francisco but this one clearly takes place in New York, city and upstate, since there’s reference to the principals partying in “the Village”) and is out to get photos of him, but Joey’s camp has a security guard that bodily ejects anyone who shows up with a camera, the better to build up Joey’s bad-ass image. Joey and Dolly want Mike to take a picture of the gangsters and the champ meeting with him to discuss how he’s to throw the fight (nobody, including writer William Fay, seems to have realized that an audio recording would have been better evidence than a simple photo — but then the sponsors of this show were Kodak and Sylvania, the latter pushing their flashbulbs, rather than 3M and Sony), but the gangsters turn out so many of the lights in the room that Mike is forced to use his camera’s flash, which of course gives him away, and there’s a chase scene around the picturesque grounds of the house where the meeting took place in which Mike is caught and forced to give up his camera, the gangsters take the film out of it and threaten to kill him — only Dolly, whom Mike and Joey left waiting in their car for hours, awfully vulnerable, shows up and evens the odds a bit, and of course it turns out that Mike palmed the film originally in the camera and substituted another roll, so he’s got the photos he wanted as evidence and Joey gets what he wanted, freedom from having to fight in fixed bouts or fear for his family. The show wasn’t especially creatively photographed or lit — the story cries out for noir treatment but gets it only sporadically — but it was a nice kickoff for the series and it looks promising for the rest of the show, even though Charles Bronson isn’t exactly the sexiest guy alive and his face already had the appearance that it had been sculpted with a hatchet (Tom Laughlin has it all over him in the hotness quotient!). — 5/17/12
••••••••••
I ran the second episode of the interesting 1958-1960 ABC-TV
series Man with a Camera (shot at, but
apparently not produced by, Desilu Studios), “The Warning,” and it was a
considerable improvement on the first. Most of it takes place at night, and
cinematographer Joe Novak lights it like a classic film noir, complete with shadows, half-lit chiaroscuro, an overall air of grunge and sleazy sax-driven
music to accompany the action. The plot is pretty preposterous — we’re supposed
to believe that freelance photographer Mike Kovac (series star Charles Bronson)
gets a call at 9:20 p.m. from an anonymous tipster he’s never met nor heard of
before to go to a particular streetcorner at 10 and photograph whatever happens
there. Of course the tipster is a bad guy: Winkler (Arthur Hanson), a
protection racketeer who, along with his confederate Carver (Robert Carricart),
is going out to shoot Sam Bartlett (Bill Erwin), a local merchant who refused
to pay “protection,” and they want Kovac to photograph Bartlett as he gets shot
and dies, then sell his photo to the newspapers, who will print it and thereby
warn other merchants of the dire consequences of saying no to the racketeers.
This is also the show that introduced the series’ other recurring character,
Anton Kovac (Ludwig Stössel — I’ve seen other credits that eliminated his
umlaut but imdb.com includes it), Mike’s father, who talks Mike out of his
initial reluctance to help police lieutenant Abrams (Robert Ellenstein) catch
Winkler. The bad guys overplay their hand by kidnapping Anton and holding him
in a movie theatre — where Mike is obliged to go and sit through the entire
show before the theatre closes for the night and the baddies will appear with
the terms for his dad’s release (as we saw Charles Bronson sitting in a
movie-theatre seat I joked that he was thinking, “Why are they showing this stupid movie? Why don’t they show a good one, like House of Wax?”) — and at the end Mike takes on the baddies and
all ends well. The story by Richard Bluel isn’t much — though at least the
brevity of the half-hour drama format is welcome — but director Gerald Mayer,
who shot most of the series and did the first episode pretty plainly, here
throws the full armamentarium of noir visual devices at the screen and manages to create a convincing
atmosphere, illustrating that this bag of visual tricks could make for
compelling television even though film noir as a genre was no longer fashionable on the big screen in 1958. — 5/22/12
••••••••••
I decided to divide our movie-watching last night into a
short and a feature. The “short” was actually the third episode of Man with
a Camera, “Profile of a Killer,” a truly
bizarre and preposterous tale (the story credit went to Richard M. Bluel and
the “teleplay” credit to James Edmiston, with Gerald Mayer directing) in which
the series’ central character, photographer Mike Kovac (Charles Bronson, a
decade younger than we’re used to seeing him — this show ran from 1958 to 1960
— but still with the familiar hatchet face and spiky hair), is in a small town
for a puff assignment to photograph the local banker (Nolan Leary) when the
bank is robbed by Killeen (Tom Pittman in one of the most bizarrely queeny
renditions of a psycho I’ve ever seen), dressed in a helmet that makes him look
like a space alien. Kovac sees the bank being robbed and the killer shoot the
banker he was there to photograph, and Killeen takes Kovac hostage and, much to
the chagrin of Killeen’s more level-headed henchman Danny Penro (James
Chandler), hires Kovac to photograph him in the act of committing his crimes,
hoping that that will get him favorable attention in the newspapers and win the
affections of Sara (Mayo Loizeaux), a college girl who works for her father at
the Lone Pine Resort. Kovac agrees to photograph Killeen and send his crime
photos to the newspapers — Danny, being at least a reality-based baddie,
worries that Killeen’s D.I.Y. promo shots are going to alert the police to
where they are and help them catch them — and Kovac actually inserts either
signs or locations as a way of alerting the police to where Killeen and Danny
will strike next, but of course none of the cops are smart enough to get that
until the virtual end of the program, when a shot of Killeen silhouetted
against a lone pine (get it?) alert the stupid back-country authorities to
Killeen’s next target. Killeen and company arrive at the Lone Pine Lodge the
day before it’s scheduled to open for the summer and Killeen kicks off the
festivities by shooting and killing Sara’s father — which for some reason only
Richard Bluel and James Edmiston could explain, he believes will endear him to
her. Instead she’s turned off big-time and can’t wait to get away from him —
and Killeen can’t decide whether he’d rather kill her or Kovac until the
police, having finally cracked
Kovac’s code, show up and save the day. “Profile of a Killer” (the title comes
from Killeen’s continually frustrated desire for Kovac to shoot him in profile,
which he thinks is his best angle) is a thoroughly silly story by any normal
standards, but Tom Pittman’s performance as Killeen is riveting and thoroughly
watchable. — 5/29/12
••••••••••
The short was the next episode in sequence of Man with a
Camera, “Closeup on Violence,” which began
rather confusingly in medias res
— whoever uploaded this one to archive.org cut off the opening credits and so
it opened with a shot of four young thugs, I. Q. Rickles (James Kevin), Rooster
McConnell (John Herman Shaner), Shivvy Brewster (Charles Brill) and Ding Dong
Fabrizi (Kip King), terrorizing — or at least attempting to terrorize —
Mike Kovac (Charles Bronson) in his apartment. Then the story flashes back to
explain why these kids are so mad at Kovac in the first place: it seems that
Kovac went to shoot pictures of a tenement fire and on the way out he snapped a
picture of a young woman, Norma Delgado (Angie Dickinson, in one of her
earliest credits a year before Howard Hawks introduced her to the big screen in
Rio Bravo), who was part of the
crowd outside the building watching it burn. It turns out that she’s protecting
her father, gangster Marty Delgado (Robert Armstrong in one of his last credits — one degree of separation between King Kong
and Charles Bronson: who knew?), who’s just released from prison and plans to
hook up with his old gang boss — he doesn’t know that just before his release
the old gang boss died — and fetch a large stash of money he hid before he went
in. The thugs steal Kovac’s camera on the scene, then find that he’s already
taken out the film of the picture of Norma Delgado, so they come to his
apartment, ostensibly to return the camera but actually to steal the negative
and print of Norma’s photo. Kovac, who has a photographic memory in more ways
than one, is able to reconstruct Norma’s appearance and do a cut-and-paste
composite from various pictures in the library of his father, Anton Kovac
(Ludwig Stossel), and with that he returns to the neighborhood where the story
started and asks a young man named Teabag (Marc Cavell) for information — only
Teabag gets beaten up by the four thugs who were in Kovac’s apartment for his
pains. Eventually it all ends the way it’s supposed to, with Kovac convincing
the Delgados that the young thugs don’t give a damn about them and are just waiting for Marty to lead them to the
money. It was a well-done episode, with an interesting directorial credit —
William Castle (according to imdb.com, this was his last credit before the 1958
movie Macabre, which established
his reputation for making cheap but effective horror films and promoting them
with gimmicks) — and a script by Jack Laird and Wilton Schiller that not only
made sense (not all of the Man with a Camera episodes did) but actually offered a certain amount
of pathos in the portrayal of Marty Delgado, who’s convinced himself that the
young thugs he’s hired give a damn about him and not just his money. — 5/30/12
••••••••••
The last two nights Charles and I had also watched further
episodes in the very interesting ABC-TV series Man with a Camera, filmed and aired between 1958 and 1960 and starring
Charles Bronson as a former Korean War combat photographer turned free-lancer.
One was called “Turntable” and was perhaps the best episode of this show we’ve
seen so far: the story opened with Mike Kovac (Charles Bronson) explaining in a
voice-over narration that he was out at an illegal gambling casino to get the
goods on its owner, Bradman (Dennis Patrick). Bradman and his henchmen catch
Kovac using his secret miniature camera disguised as a cigarette lighter, but
Bradman tells his thugs to let Kovac leave unmolested and take his pictures
with him. “It’s not the pictures he’s taken that matter, it’s the pictures he’s
going to take,” Bradman explains,
leaving us to wonder just what that means. Next we see Kovac shooting a photo
layout for John Payson (Logan Field), a reform candidate who’s running for
district attorney on a pledge to put Bradman’s casino out of business. Kovac
gets the photos but, thanks to a gang member he’s planted in Payson’s household
(we’re kept in the dark as to who), Bradman steals Kovac’s undeveloped plates
from the Payson shoot and uses them to create composite photographs showing
Payson visiting Bradman’s casino and accepting a bribe from him. Payson
understandably blames Kovac and accuses him of having been in on Bradman’s
plot, but Kovac traces it to Miss Hollis (Phyllis Avery), a servant girl at
Payson’s house, who’s Bradman’s double agent on Payson’s domestic staff. He
also asks his father, Anton Kovac (Ludwig Stossel), who was also a
photographer, who could have done composites as convincing as the ones Bradman
has sent Payson for blackmail purposes. Anton names three people, two of whom
are dead and the third is in prison — only the third man, Clyde Bosser (Addison
Richards), was in fact just released and was on the train with Kovac and Miss
Hollis, and got the undeveloped negatives after Miss Hollis stole them from
Kovac and used his skills to create the composites. Bradman kills Bosser to
shut him up and then Kovac traces him and the police arrest him. I’m not sure
why this episode was called “Turntable,” but it’s a chilling story and the
photography by Robert B. Hauser is the most convincingly noir work on this show so far, full of classic chiaroscuro shadows and half-lit rooms in which dirty
deeds are going on. Charles Bronson’s performances as Kovac tend towards the
overly aggressive (but then given his later reputation what else would you expect?), but the show is still quite effective dramatically
and the writers (Lowell Barrington did this script) are surprisingly good in
finding ways to integrate photographic technology into the storylines without
it seeming forced.
The next show on our disc was supposed to be episode six,
“Double Negative,” but instead it was episode seven, “Another Barrier,” an interestingly
topical show set at Edwards Air Force Base in California, where the X-1 plane
flown by Chuck Yeager in 1947 became the first plane to break the sound barrier
— and where the X-series was still being flown in 1958 when this show was made.
Major Dickson (Grant Williams) is readying himself for a test flight of the X-2
with a new fuel mixture, and his girlfriend Liz Howell (Norma Crane) is about
to have a cow because her brother and father both died in freak accidents and
she’s worried that her fiancé will die similarly. As (bad) luck would have it,
Major Dickson’s plane disappears in mid-air and instantly Liz assumes the
worst, climbs on the ledge of the room where she’s staying and threatens to
kill herself — and Kovac, who was there to photograph Dickson’s flight, finds
himself trying to talk her out of jumping and at the same time keeping anyone
(like the hotel manager, who wants to call the police to protect the image of
the hotel — despite Kovac’s warning that the cops will freak her out and lead
her to jump) from doing anything that might freak her out further. It’s an
oddly schizo show — the first half is mostly aviation porn and the second half
is a gripping, if not exactly original, drama about a would-be suicide and the
people trying to talk them out of it (an old situation vividly satirized on the
old TV cop comedy Barney Miller, in
which the person hanging out on the ledge turns out to be a worker from a
suicide prevention hotline, and when he’s asked why he’s out there threatening
suicide himself he says, “Because I was on the phone to a client … he told me
he didn’t think life was worth living … and I suddenly realized he was
right!”). The payoff is neatly done: Kovac tells the next-door neighbor, Mrs.
Burns (Ann Morrison), to call Liz and distract her, and Liz’s phone duly rings
— only it’s not Mrs. Burns (she shows up later and apologizes because the line
was busy and she couldn’t get through), it’s Dickson, who survived after all
(he was able to put down his plane on a dry lake bed and was ultimately rescued
by helicopters from the base), hopefully ending Liz’s fears of his (and every
other man important to her) untimely demise. — 6/6/12
••••••••••
Charles and I watched the next episode in sequence of the TV
series Man with a Camera from 1958 to
1960, starring Charles Bronson as Mike Kovac, freelance photographer in New
York (occasionally in San Francisco — the series shifted locale from coast to
coast and often didn’t bother to explain why, but this show was definitely set
in the Big Apple). Like the “Mother Hubbard Case” episode of Sherlock
Holmes Charles and I had watched just
before it, this episode, “Double Negative” (actually the sixth in the series
but listed on archive.org after
episode seven, “Another Barrier”), was probably the best in the show we’ve seen
so far. In both subject matter and visual “look” — set almost entirely at night
and filled with the high-contrast chiaroscuro black-and-white photography, vertiginous camera
angles and sleazy, sax-driven music to match that we’re used to in the classic noir movies from the 1940’s — it’s essentially a
25-minute vest-pocket film noir
with a bizarre character borrowed surprisingly blatantly from Raymond
Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely. The
story opens when Mike Kovac is called by freelance reporter Jim Costigan (Frank
Faylen, older and seedier as he was as the queeny Bellevue nurse “Bim” in The
Lost Weekend but still a superb screen
presence, radiating slimy but low-level evil). Costigan has received a tip that
Helen Sprague, a woman who’s believed to be murdered, is still alive, and he
wants Kovac along to take her picture in order to get the assistant district
attorney to drop the case against nightclub singer Howard Dorn (played by Don
Durant, who seems to have modeled his performance on the slimier aspects of
Dean Martin), who’s been indicted for murdering her and is about to go to
trial. Costigan’s story and Kovac’s photo are published, and the D.A.’s office
is suitably embarrassed — but then Pete Montee (Karl Lukas), an old friend of
Mike Kovac’s who’s a former professional wrestler (his career just ended when,
on orders from the syndicate that controls the game, he took a dive in a bout)
and stands head-and-neck taller than Charles Bronson and even decks him one in
Kovac’s own apartment (and it’s a pretty amazing sight for anyone who remembers
Bronson’s big action movies from the 1970’s to see him on the receiving end for a change, even though he turns the tables
well before the episode is over), enters the story. Montee saw Kovac’s photo of
“Helen Sprague” in the paper and thinks it’s actually his girlfriend, Connie
Sawyer (Tracey Roberts) — he’s convinced because the girl in Kovac’s photo was
wearing fancy $50 earrings Montee bought for her (the possibility that there
might be another identical pair of earrings somewhere in New York City never
occurs to him) — and the plot thickens when Kovac traces Connie to a
restaurant, finds she looks exactly like “Sprague” except she’s bleached her
hair, and she’s been strangled and left to die in a private booth. Eventually
it turns out that Costigan and Howard Dorn were in on the fix together: they
recruited Connie to pose as Sprague, whom Dorn had in fact killed, and make a
“live” appearance that would persuade the district attorney’s office to drop
the case — only now that Kovac has cottoned to the scheme they have to
eliminate him, too. The show is effectively staged by its usual director,
Gerald Mayer (who did some quite good low-budget features in the early 1950’s
before settling in as a TV director), beautifully photographed by Robert B.
Hauser and effectively written (story by Steven Thornley, teleplay by James
Edmiston) and acted, especially by Karl Lukas as Montee, who manages some of
the same pathos Mike Mazurki brought to the similar role in the 1944 film of Farewell,
My Lovely (renamed Murder, My
Sweet because Dick Powell played Philip
Marlowe as his breakthrough out of musicals and into serious dramatic parts,
only when audiences saw “Dick Powell in Farewell, My Lovely” on the marquees they thought the new film was a
musical instead of a gritty film noir). — 6/13/12
••••••••••
I ran the next episode in
sequence of Man with a Camera, “Blind
Spot,” which took the show out of the United States and into the world of
international intrigue. It begins with Mike Kovac (Charles Bronson) receiving a
long-distance phone call from an old friend, fellow ex-combat photographer
Terry Ross (Norman Alden), who reports that he’s in Lisbon, Portugal and has
just shot some “dynamite” negatives he’ll be sending Mike to have developed and
printed. Just then a man breaks into his apartment, shoots him and ransacks the
place looking for Ross’s camera, which he finds. We see who the man is but we don’t know his identity
yet. Then Mike decides to fly to Lisbon (which in the pre-jet age of 1958 when
this show is set takes him a full day from New York) and investigate,
determined to find out what Ross was working on, take similar pictures and
break whatever dastardly scheme Ross was about to expose when its practitioners
had him killed. At the Lisbon airport (the set decorators were at least aware
that the Portuguese spell the name of their capital “Lisboa”) Kovac encounters
a hanger-on named Al Alviella (Mario Alcalde), whom we instantly recognize as
the man who killed Terry Ross in the opening scene, but after some initial
reluctance Kovac decides to trust Alviella and hire him as a guide. Kovac also
contacts two Portuguese police officials, Captain Castilho (Rodolfo Hoyos) and
Lieutenant Da Gama (Rico Alaniz), who tell him they were investigating Terry
Ross because they believed him to be part of an industrial spy ring. Kovac
naturally defends his old friend and says that if Ross was involved with spies,
it was only because he was trying to infiltrate their gang and entrap them.
There’s a peculiar scene in which Kovac ends up in the sanctum
sanctorum of the mystery man who heads all
Lisbon’s crime rackets, who sits at a table in heavy disguise like Moriarty or
Mabuse and issues orders to his men in that guise so they won’t know who he is.
Kovac grabs a photo but the mystery man’s henchmen, who vastly outnumber him,
take the camera away from him and ruin the film. Then Kovac returns to Ross’s
old apartment — in the meantime he’s encountered Ross’s wife Renée (Chana
Eden), who was married to him for only a week but nonetheless shares Kovac’s
estimate of his morals — and he figures out where Ross stashed the secret
camera, not the one his killer found earlier, with which he managed to take an
automatic photo of his own murder … by Al Alviella, who turns out to be the
secret racket boss and who comes to Ross’s apartment in time to see Kovac
develop the picture exposing him as Ross’s murderer, and there’s a fight to the
finish which, of course, Kovac — not only being the star of the show but being
played by Charles Bronson — wins. “Blind Spot” was a nice little episode, a bit
of a disappointment after the marvelously noir-ish “Double Negative” in that, except for Alviella’s
Moriarty-like appearance in front of his men, the photography and choices of
camera angles are pretty straightforward and unatmospheric — but the story is a
good one (even though Alviella’s come-on is so insincere one wonders why Kovac
doesn’t realize he’s at least a
villain from the get-go) and the episode is a good half-hour of intrigue-style
fun. — 6/29/12
••••••••••
Charles and I watched the next
two episodes in sequence of Man with a Camera — both of which proved to be quite compelling dramas and unusual in
that they didn’t really fit the formula of this show. Indeed, there were so many formulas being used in this show that it’s no wonder
it did only middling business and lasted just two seasons — aside from the
young Charles Bronson getting to hone the butch credentials that would
eventually make him a major action star in the 1970’s, once you turned on this
show you wouldn’t be sure of what you were going to get: a gritty noir drama, an action tale, a romance, a soap opera or as
in episode ten, “Six Faces of Satan,” a tough social drama by screenwriter
David P. Harmon reminiscent of the 1920’s play and 1931 film Street
Scene (most of it even takes place on the
stoop of a brownstone building in a seedy New York City neighborhood). The
setting is New York in the middle of one of its famously oppressively hot
summers (there are some nice shots of actors playing young toughs going
shirtless, and director Boris Sagal — later famous for doing some of the most
important TV-movies of the 1970’s and 1980’s; he also had some regular gigs on
TV series before that but this was the only episode of Man with a
Camera he helmed — gives us some nice,
well-defined shots of their bare chests with the nipples clearly visible) and
the emotions are running as high as the thermometers. There to see if he can
get some stirring (and publishable) pictures of the locals, Mike Kovac (Charles
Bronson) shows up with two cameras — a large press camera that uses flash and a
smaller one with a keyhole-shaped viewfinder whose film is fast enough he can
shoot with available light — and catches a woman named Carmen (Linda Lawson)
running out of an alley and screaming that a man attacked her — only Kovac saw
more of the attack than anyone else, enough to realize that the culprit was a
woman, and later we learn the two were fighting because Carmen was having an
affair with the other woman’s husband. Carmen sticks to the story that a man
attacked her because her fiercely protective father won’t believe her otherwise
— though he’s at the other end of the socioeconomic scale from the mean daddies
in The Heiress and Madeleine he’s just as tyrannical, just as domineering and
just as fearsome — and eventually dad and his friends and hangers-on decide
that the culprit must be Phil Pike (Arthur Batanides), a ne’er-do-well (he sits
in his apartment watching Westerns on TV and apparently has no above-board
source of income; Kovac identifies him as a low-level thug for the Mob but
never shares either with the other characters or with us how he came by that
conclusion) who isn’t liked by the neighbors, so they can readily believe he’s
guilty of a crime. Kovac tries to call the police to stop the lynching and gets
denounced as a “fink” — a late-1950’s/early-1960’s word I haven’t heard
seriously in context for decades! — and in the end he shows up the various
people involved by taking photos of them, blowing them up to the size of small
posters, and showing each of the other dramatis personae a photo of themselves and giving a commentary on
just what foul sort of human behavior they’re indulging in and his camera has
captured. The moral lesson comes off a bit didactically but the show works
overall not only because Charles Bronson was already an icon of machismo (when he faces down a bunch of young toughs who are
threatening and outnumbering him, our knowledge of Bronson from his later
movies assures us that he’s not in any real danger because he can handle anything these twerps
can throw at him) but because it’s nice to see him as the voice of reason for a
change instead of playing the revenge-maddened crazy himself the way he did
later.
After that I screened the next
episode of Man with a Camera, “Lady on
the Loose,” with a script by Oliver Crawford that’s a bizarre combination of Roman
Holiday and Love Story. Fredericka Rojas (Judith Braun) is the daughter of
one of the richest men in the world, Milo Rojas (Gregory Gaye), who’s arranged
for her to marry a baron so the family can have a title to go with its money.
She comes to New York City to shop for her wedding trousseau and is greeted by
the usual photographers, but she takes a liking to Mike Kovac and asks him to
take her around the city for 24 hours, showing her all the sights and treating
her like a normal person instead of a china-doll princess. Once she goes,
Rojas’s staff treats it like she’s disappeared and possibly even been
kidnapped, while she and Kovac are enjoying a nice, touristy day in New York.
Then Rojas comes down with a debilitating illness — though it wasn’t quite
clear whether it was supposed to be terminal —and the film fades out with her
in a hospital bed, a bandage around her head, saying a tearful goodbye to Mike
Kovac while her dad tells her he’s broken off the engagement to the man she
didn’t want to marry and, as Kovac puts it, is finally treating his daughter as
a human being and not as a possession. It’s not quite as stunning a piece of
filmmaking as “Six Faces of Satan” — perhaps significantly, instead of Boris
Sagal the usual Man with a Camera
director, Gerald Mayer, returned to the helm for this one — but it’s still a
quite sensitive piece of work, though its derivations are all too obvious, and it’s an indication of just how far this
show (featuring a not-quite-star and on the then-chronically third-place
network, ABC) was willing to run roughshod over the formulae and achieve a
surprisingly diverse tone for a series TV show with recurring characters! —
7/13/12
••••••••••
I put on the 12th
first-season episode of Man with a Camera,
completing the second of the five discs I burned containing the archive.org
downloads of that interesting program (all but the last two of its 29 total
episodes). This was called “The Last Portrait” and took this show back to
international intrigue — as I’ve noted before, Man with a Camera was one of the most variable shows I’ve ever seen:
sometimes it was gritty, noir-ish
crime drama, sometimes it was a family story, sometimes romance, and sometimes
intrigue, and this one hit the “intrigue” stop even though it took place
entirely within New York City. It begins with an establishing shot of the United
Nations and then a newspaper headline announcing that Arab leader Ibn Lateef,
in town to address the UN, is the key to maintaining peace in the Middle East.
(Charles joked that one way you can establish credentials as a psychic is to
predict “unrest in the Middle East” — indeed, I remember once telling a similar
joke to Bob Riggs and he said, in his inimitable Riggsian way, “You mean
there’s a high probability of random occurrence?”) We’re never told what Arab country Ibn Lateef is from or why he’s so important
and so key to the peace of the region, but we are told there are sinister forces in the Arab world who
want to assassinate him. He’s already survived an assassination attempt in his
homeland just before he came to the U.S., and two fellow Arabs, Hasaan (Eddie
Saenz) and Jasmin (Virginia Core, a.k.a. Genie Corée), are plotting to kill him
in New York. Jasmin is a member of Ibn Lateef’s household and will let Hasaan
in, and Hasaan will pose as a news photographer and shoot Ibn Lateef with a gun
concealed in a camera (had the plotters seen the Marx Brothers film The
Big Store?). At the same time, series lead
Mike Kovac (Charles Bronson) is at the same hotel where Ibn Lateef is staying,
and he is admitted to the sixth floor to do a photo layout on faded movie star
Sara Castle (Virginia Field) — though the script slyly hints his real reason for contacting her is so he can be on the
same floor as Ibn Lateef and get a photo of him. Mike does a dangerous
ledge-walk, camera in hand, to get from Sara’s balcony to Lateef’s, then sneaks
in the room to get his picture — only he’s knocked out by Hasaan, who aims his
camera at Lateef, does the dirty deed, then switches cameras with Kovac to
frame him as the assassin (a word
the loyal member of Lateef’s household, a man, who discovers the body actually
uses: the term comes from the late 11th/early 12th
century Arab-Persian leader Hassan i Sabbah, who organized a band of soldiers
called the Hashshashin to protect
his religious community in what is now northern Iran from attacks by outsiders:
the words “assassin” and “hashish,” the latter referring to the Hashshashins’ drug of choice, both stem from his name). Kovac
finds himself wanted by both the police and the Arab bad guys, whose attention
now turns to murdering Ibn Lateef’s son Idrees (Booth Colman) when he shows up in New York to claim both his father’s body
and his position of power. Kovac’s only ally is Sara Castle, who hides him out,
lends him her car, drives him through the police cordon around the hotel and ultimately
helps him trace the bad guys and apprehend them. The reason no actor is listed
as playing Ibn Lateef is that he’s only shown sitting on a couch and then
slumping over when shot — indeed he was so inanimate I was wondering, based on
the Sherlock Holmes story “The Empty House” and the 1924 film Waxworks, whether the “Ibn Lateef” that was shot was simply a
dummy and the real one would emerge, alive and well, later on — but this is
still one of the better episodes of this often compelling program, and Charles
Bronson at this stage was obviously athletic and a credible action hero but
hadn’t acquired the cigar-store Indian’s cragginess he had during his star
years in the 1970’s — though when he hides out in an all-night movie theatre
until Sara can meet him there, and his voiceover narration on the soundtrack
recalled how bored he was sitting through the same movies over and over again,
I joked, “I’ve got to be here —
they’re showing all the Death Wish
movies!” — 7/19/12
••••••••••
Charles and I eventually ran a half-hour TV show before we
crashed: the next in sequence episode of the interesting 1958-1960 series Man
with a Camera, starring Charles Bronson
(when he was relatively young and convincingly butch without the chiseled
cigar-store Indian look he acquired later) as Mike Kovac, a former combat
photographer who’s making his living as a free-lancer in New York City. This
episode was called “Face of Murder,” and in a show that changed personalities
and genres at the drop of the
proverbial hat, this time out they did a quite tough, engaging prison drama.
Mike Kovac has applied for permission to photograph serial killer Edwin Bray
(Phillip Pine, who turns in an electrifying performance similar to the ones
James Cagney and John Garfield had given in similar parts at Warner Bros. in
the 1930’s and 1940’s; he should have had a big-screen career but instead got
stuck in TV and shorts), who murdered five people on the streets he ran into
totally at random for reasons he’s too busy expressing smoldering anger to
bother to explain. Kovac is given the ground rules: he isn’t allowed to take
pictures of the actual execution and he’s only allowed to take two shots of
Bray beforehand (why, Charles asked). He takes his pictures and then remains in
Bray’s cell while the prison priest (James Bell) visits him — only Bray pulls a
gun on the priest (it’s actually one he’s carved himself out of soap and
painted black with shoe polish, reflecting John Dillinger’s famous escape from
Crown Point, Indiana and anticipating the scene in Woody Allen’s Take
the Money and Run in which Allen’s
character makes a similar escape attempt but is foiled by a rainstorm which
turns his “gun” into suds) and is able to grab a real gun from one of the guards, which he intends to use
to hold both Kovac and the priest hostage and demand that the warden (Jay
Barney) send him a car so he can make his getaway when it turns dark. Bray
holes up in the prison infirmary, where he’s joined by another con named Al
Henchely (Dick Wessel, who isn’t quite as electrifying a sight as he was in Dick
Tracy vs. Cueball, mainly because this time
he has hair, but he’s still a quite good actor for this sort of role) and
another prisoner who’s laid up in bed and at the time Bray started his break
was being visited by his sister (the tragically ill-fated Yvette Vickers — she
was found in her home by a neighbor, Susan Savage, in April 2011, but the
condition of her body made it appear that she’d been dead for almost a year
before her remains were discovered). The show is tautly written (by Berne
Giler) and suspensefully directed (by series regular Gerald Mayer) and was one
of the best episodes we’ve seen, excellent and exciting drama with an ending
that was legitimately powerful and not a cop-out, highlighted by the moment in
which Bray is about to kill the priest and Kovac gives him the line from the
1945 Dillinger movie that one
should never commit murder except for a reason — ultimately Bray lets the
priest go unharmed and is himself picked off by a sniper the warden has called
in. — 9/29/12
••••••••••
Charles and I wound up the evening with another episode of Man
with a Camera, the quite interesting
1958-1960 TV series starring Charles Bronson (butch but not as annoyingly
hatchet-faced as he became later) as Mike Kovac, a combat photographer in Korea
who upon his discharge became a free-lance photographer in New York City. This
episode was called “Mute Evidence” and it’s about Dr. Ray Danton, a
white-haired researcher who lives in a farm outside the city and who’s been working
on a journal article about attempting to teach deaf-mute people to communicate
via photography. Only the opening sequence is a horrific one in which Earl
Grant (Simon Scott), a homely but not altogether unattractive figure who’s a
local farmer, a neighbor of Dr. Danton, is shown as a virtually supernatural
figure of menace who, armed with a pitchfork, has just killed Dr. Danton. Susan
Barnes (Sue George), Dr. Danton’s deaf-mute research subject, who can
communicate only with the crudest gestures because she never went to school and
therefore learned neither to speak by lip-reading nor to sign, witnessed the
killing and photographed it with the camera Dr. Danton gave her, which Kovac
describes as “one of those instant cameras that develops its own picture in one
minute” (given that the sponsors of this show were Kodak and Sylvania, which
used it to push their flashbulbs, the name “Polaroid” could obviously not be
spoken in the script!), but Earl spotted her, chased her and, though she got
away, he managed to grab her camera and smash it. (Given that it was a
Polaroid, I half-expected that he’d be exposed as the killer when her photo,
self-developed, was found in the woods, but that didn’t happen.) Mike gives
Susan one of his cameras (non-self-developing, though he has one of his
portable darkrooms with him that allows him to process his photos in a hotel
room) and Susan takes a picture of Earl in a room with Lila (Judith Ames), the
local woman for whom Earl killed Dr. Danton — he wanted to be able to give her
enough money to get her out of having to work as a waitress at the local café,
and so he killed Dr. Danton and stole his cash stash, only when Lila realizes
how Earl got the money she’s naturally horrified — from which Mike deduces that
Earl killed Danton. The show may not sound like much in synopsis, but with a
well-constructed script by Dallas Gaultois and James Edmiston and surprisingly
exciting suspense direction by Paul Landres (a filmmaker I’ve made fun of
because of the sloppy work he did on the Alan Freed rock ’n’ roll quickie Go,
Johnny, Go, his best-known feature credit,
but who’s a lot better here at doing action than I’d have expected from that
film), it’s excellent melodrama even though it represents yet another change in
tone from this chameleon-like show. I can understand why Man with a
Camera, despite its quality, didn’t last
long as a series (just 29 episodes over two seasons on the lowest-rated major
network at the time, ABC — in the late 1960’s so many ABC series bombed after
short runs that there was a joke that said, “You know how to end the Viet Nam
war? Just put it on ABC and it will be canceled in 13 weeks!”): even if you
watched it regularly you never knew what to expect — family drama, film
noir, suspense, action, international intrigue,
whatever … — 10/10/12
••••••••••
I screened the 15th and last episode of the first
season of Man with a Camera, the
fascinating if somewhat uneven 29-episode series aired on ABC in 1958-1960 and
starring Charles Bronson as freelance photographer Mike Kovac. This one
featured the character of Mike’s father Anton (Ludwig Stossel) —though he only
appears in the opening scene (the gimmick is that Anton runs a camera store
that does film developing and Mike uses it as a sort-of headquarters for his freelance
business). The show was called “The Big Squeeze” and was obviously based on the real-life meeting of La Cosa
Nostra at Apalachin in upstate New York in
1957, which was accidentally broken up when officers with the New York state
police stumbled on it and staged a raid. It kicks off when gangster Johnny Rico
(Steven Ritch) shows up at Kovac Vater’s camera store and asks if Anton Kovac still has photos of his parents
which were taken decades earlier. Anton agrees to search his files for the
negatives and print them but says that will take a couple of days. Rico leaves
the shop — and is suddenly gunned down in a drive-by shooting by a mobster
riding in the back seat of a Chrysler Imperial after Rico, knowing what’s up,
knocks Kovac to the ground and draws his own gun, but he only has a pistol and
it wouldn’t be a match against a submachine gun even if he’d drawn first, which
he didn’t. Mike Kovac goes to see Rico’s girlfriend, Lorraine Nelson (May Wynn,
in a chilling noir performance as
an amoral woman), who tells him that Rico had heard about a major gangsters’
meeting in the posh suburb of Riverdale. Mike determines to infiltrate the
meeting and photograph it, and he does so (using a camera with a gun-like grip
and a telephoto lens that makes it look like a weapon) but is caught and beaten by the gangsters, though not
before he’s given the camera and film to Lorraine and instructed her to take
the unexposed film to the police so they can bust the mobsters’ meeting.
Instead Lorraine hides the film with an unknown friend, intending to use it to
blackmail the gangsters into turning over the man who shot Rico — and the
gangsters threaten Kovac and say that unless he turns over the film to them they’ll kill him within a day and a half. The
deadline (literally!) arrives for both Lorraine and Kovac, who turns over the
film but only after he snipped off two shots and developed them, and eventually
the police get the prints of the two pictures, Kovac’s would-be killers are
palmed off with the rest of the roll, and Kovac confesses to Lt. Fields of the
homicide squad that he’s bothered by having double-crossed the people he had an
agreement with, even though they’re crooks. This was definitely one of the
better Man with a Camera episodes
— and in Charles Bronson’s ability to tough it out with two hardened gangsters
beating the shit out of him and coming out not only alive but relatively
unscathed, it comes closer than most of the shows in this series to the
super-tough guy he played in his star-making films in the 1970’s — even though
it shows this series’ remarkable Romneyesque ability to shape-shift, going from
soap opera to film noir to
international intrigue and here a gangster story. — 10/21/12
••••••••••
Charles and I watched the second-season premiere of the very
interesting ABC-TV series Man with a Camera,
which ran from 1958 to 1960, a half-hour crime show with Charles Bronson
starring as Mike Kovac, free-lance photographer who gets mixed up in various
cases. This one had him landing in a small airport in Arco, Nevada on his way
to Los Angeles to do some consulting for a man named Hanley, who sent him a
cashier’s check for a job supervising a new color printing process Hanley had
allegedly installed at his factory. Only when he lands in Arco for the
20-minute layoff on his way to L.A. he’s approached by a middle-aged man with
glasses (James Parnell) who just eludes sinisterness — and the man asks if he’s
Mike Kovac, and when Mike says he is, without further ado or explanation he
pulls a gun out from under his jacket and shoots Mike. Just about anybody
attacked this suddenly would get killed, but since he’s the series star and
he’s being played by the indestructible Charles Bronson he survives, though
he’s wounded enough to be hospitalized Arco is such a small town its hospital
doesn’t even have a kitchen — when Mike wants a meal his nurse (Bek Nelson),
whom of course he’s flirting with, has to get it from the diner across the
street — though as Charles pointed out, for such a tiny town it has an awfully
big airport and a lot of people getting off the plane when it lands there.
Anyway, Mike is interrogated by the town’s chief of police, James “Angie”
Angelo (Lawrence Dobkin, who for the first few minutes was coming off so much
like Sheldon Leonard I wondered if it were he), and his partner John Butler
(Harlan Warde), who relates to him much the way Ward Bond did to Barton MacLane
in The Maltese Falcon, and it
seems like they’re suspecting him
of something from the hostility they aim at him. They’re so determined to pin
something on him they remain in his room longer than the five minutes his
doctor said he should be questioned, and eventually they leave him alone and he
spots the killer hanging out outside the hospital, apparently ready for a
second try. Mike has a tiny Minox spy camera with him and manages to arrange
the pillows in his hospital bed so it looks like he’s sleeping in it, when he’s
really hanging out in the room closet waiting to get a clandestine photo of the
murderer riddling the bed (and presumably Mike himself) with bullets. Then the
police take Mike into custody and trundle his hospital bed into the police
station so they can hold him there — for some odd reason they still suspect him
of something even though they also explain to him (and us) that Angie was
actually the honest chief who
took over from the crooked former chief McClure, who fled to Los Angeles. Mike
deduces that “Hanley,” who hired him in the first place and put him on a plane
from New York to L.A. that stopped in Arco instead of one that flew direct, is
McClure, and the three realize that McClure just wanted somebody murdered in Arco, he didn’t really care who, in
order to embarrass the current chief and set himself up for a comeback. McClure
is arrested back in L.A. — the bank teller he bought the cashier’s check from
recognized him in a lineup — but his hired killer doesn’t know that and tries
to shoot Mike again as he gets on
the plane back to New York Angie and John have arranged for him — only Mike,
being played by Charles Bronson, still has one good shooting arm even though
the other is in a sling, and he’s able to drop the killer with his own gun (one
he took from a police officer the killer shot at the airport) and execute the
sort of vigilante justice Bronson would become really famous for in his 1970’s
movies. Called simply “The Killer” (and that’s the total billing for James
Purnell’s role in the credits!), this was a good episode, not as interesting as
some of the shows in this series were, and a bit far-fetched but still exciting
and well suited for Bronson: not many actors who started on TV got to play this close to the kind of character that later made them
movie stars, but Bronson did on this show. —11/26/12
••••••••••
I ran the next episode in sequence of Man with a Camera, though this one might actually have been called Woman
with a Camera since the opening sequence
features a man, who we later learn is an out-of-work actor named Ed Minnit
(Douglas Dick, a decade older and considerably seedier than the almost
ethereally beautiful young man he was in The Accused, a 1948 film noir in which he was a law student with a crush on his
professor, Loretta Young; the main intrigue of the film is that she
accidentally kills him while fending off his pass, then tries to cover it up),
disguising himself as a much older man, Tim Bergdoll (Joseph Hamilton), to rob
a Gypsy restaurant where he and Bergdoll are both “regulars” and Bergdoll’s
girlfriend Maria (Helen Mitzie Chapman) is a waitress. A woman photographer,
Clara (Marian Collier), showing the same sort of fearless moxie series lead
Mike Kovac (Charles Bronson) regularly displays, takes a photo of Bergdoll
(really Minnit) sticking up the restaurant and shooting Maria when he’s got a
gun and is likely going to aim it at her and take her film after he makes her
his next victim. Based on the photo — which she sells to the local paper, which
publishes it on the front page — the real Bergdoll is arrested, but Kovac
demands to see the photo, gets the negative from Clara, studies it and discerns
that the “Bergdoll” in the photo is a younger man who made himself up to look
older. Kovac successfully fights off three thugs who try to take the negative
from him (once again, this series anticipates Bronson’s hit movies of the
1970’s in which he won fights in which he was considerably outnumbered —
ironically I had just read a similar scene, a man holding his own against five
thugs sent to mug him, in Lee Child’s Jack Reacher novel One Shot) and does some of his own prints, and in the
meantime he hires a photo retoucher to make a shot of a man who also isn’t
Bergdoll look like him to show the police that if someone can retouch a photo
to make it look like Bergdoll, someone else can retouch his face to make himself look like Bergdoll “live.” Later,
though, Minnit sneaks into Kovac’s home (Charles joked that he ought to get a
better lock, since so many of the episodes featured bad guys sneaking into his
home!) and steals the negative out of the enlarger with which Kovac was
printing it. Kovac decides that the killer must be someone who regularly went
to that restaurant and knew all the customers and their routines, and he
settles on Minnit as his suspect because as an actor he’d know how to use
makeup, and he could also justify his deviations from routine and his long
absences from Clara, his girlfriend, by saying he was out auditioning for
parts. It’s a nice little thriller, not a great show (and some of the other
episodes have been darker and more entertaining) but a fun one, and well worth
seeing — indeed, this whole series has been surprisingly good and it’s a wonder
it isn’t better known the way other series of the time that “broke” the careers
of their lead actors into major film stardom (like Clint Eastwood’s Rawhide and Steve McQueen’s Wanted: Dead or Alive) are. — 12/8/12
••••••••••
I ran Charles the third episode from season two of Man
with a Camera, the surprisingly interesting
half-hour action drama ABC put on between 1958 and 1960 as a vehicle for
Charles Bronson, whose role as Mike Kovac, former combat photographer who
solves crimes via his picture-taking skills, anticipates the action movies that
made him a major star in the 1970’s. This episode, “The Man Below,” was one of
the very best, starting with a beautifully atmospheric noir sequence in which Helen Baines (Patricia Donahue,
making a quite good femme fatale)
is alone at home at night when she suddenly receives a visitor sneaking into
her apartment: her husband, mine owner Carl Baines (David Lewis). She doesn’t
want them seen together, and for good reason: they’ve concocted a scheme by
which Carl will fake his own death and Helen will collect $250,000 on his life
insurance — only Helen has concocted a scheme of her own with mine foreman
George Werner (Baynes Barron); Werner will kill Carl for real and he and Helen will split the money. Accordingly, Werner
tries to kill Carl by shoving him into a mineshaft (hence the episode title),
only a local boy (Jim Houghton) witnesses the incident, and what’s more, Carl
doesn’t die: Mike Kovac (Charles Bronson), in town to investigate on behalf of
the insurance company, lowers a camera into the mineshaft and takes two
pictures of Carl’s body, and since one arm changes position between the two
photos he knows Carl is still alive. Werner has to mount a rescue effort and
make it look like he really wants to save Carl’s life, but of course he
actually wants Carl to die but to look like his death was a regrettable tragedy
caused by their inability to save him in time. Eventually Kovac himself rescues
Carl and the baddies — all three of them — are arrested, but not before Helen
attempts to seduce Kovac and, when he turns her down, two thugs break into his
room and beat him up. (It’s certainly unusual to see Charles Bronson on the receiving end of a brutal beating.) This program probably
didn’t make it at least in part because of its radical changes in tone — if you
had watched it from week to week “in the day” you wouldn’t have known whether
you were getting a straightforward action story, a whodunit, a tale of international
intrigue or (as here) a miniature film noir — but at its best (and “The Man Below” is its best, or close to it) Man with a
Camera is an intriguing program, albeit
based on a clever novelty gimmick, that still holds up surprisingly well. — 12/15/12
••••••••••
I got home it was about 10:15 — I had remarkably good bus
luck with the #10 — and Charles and I ended up watching the next episode in
sequence of Charles Bronson’s interesting 1958-1960 TV series Man with a
Camera. We hadn’t seen an episode of this
in two months even though months ago I’d downloaded the complete series (29
episodes) from archive.org; it cast Bronson as former combat photographer Mike
Kovac, who moved to the San Francisco Bay Area when he was mustered out of the
service after the Korean War (sort of) ended, though about midway through its
first season the show shifted its locale to New York City without any
explanation. The episode we watched was called “Black Light,” a reference to
the fact that in it Mike Kovac is commissioned by his friend in the police
department, Inspector Randolph (Carlyle Mitchell), to get photos documenting
police corruption. It begins with a marvelous bit of neo-noir as we see Pierson (Keith Richards — no, not the same
one!) meeting a contact in a pool hall, getting a cold shoulder because the
pool hall “regulars” don’t like “stoolies,” then being beaten to death outside.
It turns out Pierson was a private investigator Randolph hired to see if he
could find dirty cops in a particular precinct, but not only was he killed but
all his notes were stolen. This is what’s given Randolph the idea to have a
photographer do his undercover work because a photo’s authenticity can’t be
questioned (though even then some retouching was certainly possible) and, unlike
an eyewitness, it can’t be bribed or intimidated into silence. Kovac decides to
shoot on infrared film so he can get nighttime pictures without having to give
away his presence by using flash — though he’s still using the big old press
camera he generally did (one would think someone trying to take photos of
illegal activity without being noticed by the perpetrators would use a
miniature camera, and those
certainly existed in 1960!) — and he catches an image of a man in a police
uniform being paid off by a man in ordinary clothes, though the angle of the
picture and the position of the two men renders both of their faces invisible.
Kovac’s nemesis on the police force, Lt. Donovan (James Flavin), is convinced
that the man in the photo in a cop’s uniform is an ordinary person disguised as
a policeman — though a canvass of costume rental companies to see if anyone
recently rented out a police uniform turns up empty — and during his travels in
the area Kovac also runs into a vampy blonde who’s wearing a college pin that
identifies her as Jenny Hansen; only Jenny Hansen is dead and the woman Kovac
saw turns out to be her younger sister Bunny (Ann Baker). Kovac takes Bunny
Hansen to a neighborhood bar, only the bartender throws them out and it turns
out Bunny and her boyfriend were working a scam by which they’d walk into bars,
order drinks, then Bunny would claim to be underage and her friend would say he
was a cop but would take a bribe not to arrest the bar owner or bartender (and
these were mostly such small bars those were usually the same person). We’re
led to believe that Bunny’s boyfriend was the other man in Kovac’s picture, but
in a nice surprise twist (one that genuinely is a surprise, which can’t often be said of similar
twists in modern shows!) it turns out the other man in Kovac’s photo really is a cop and he’s the one taking the bribes. “Black Light” is something of a misnomer —
my understanding was that “black light” was a slang term for the invisible
light at the other end of the
spectrum, ultraviolet — and the direction by Paul Landres and cinematography by
feature-film veteran Paul Ivano are awfully variable, mixing marvelous neo-noir bits of chiaroscuro with flatly photographed
exposition scenes. Still, it’s a good episode, with a well-constructed script
by Wilton Schiller that ably takes advantage of the concision necessary to the
half-hour TV drama …and I don’t know about you but I miss half-hour TV dramas; an awful lot of shows in
general and crime shows in particular seem really padded out because nobody
makes a non-comedy series with episodes shorter than an hour these days! —
2/10/13
••••••••••
I ran Charles the next episode in sequence of the quite
interesting 1958-1960 ABC-TV series Man with a Camera, starring Charles Bronson as freelance photographer
Mike Kovac, who got involved in various crimes. The next episode in sequence
was supposed to be “The Positive Negative” but instead it was one called
“Missing,” directed by Gene Fowler, Jr. from a story by Hal Evarts and a script
by Robert E. Thompson and Lee Loeb, and it took place in San Diego — though the
only scenes actually shot here were, as Charles pointed out, taken by a second
unit that didn’t involve the stars (just exterior glimpses of the San Diego
International Airport — I guess it wasn’t yet called Lindbergh Field) — and
featured Mike Kovac’s old friend, San Diego police detective Ed Kern (played by
the fine character actor Steve Brodie — I didn’t place the name before I saw it
in the credits but he certainly looked familiar), summoning him to look for Ed’s missing wife Jill (Ce Ce
Whitney). Ed doesn’t want to search for her through the police department
because the other cops looked down on him for marrying her in the first place;
he met her when he arrested her for being an “escort” (that was a euphemism for
high-end prostitute even then!) and later got her to turn state’s evidence on
the head of the escort service, and he doesn’t want his fellow cops to know
she’s gone missing because he doesn’t want to have to deal with the I-told-you-so’s.
The show begins with a noir scene
in which Jill, driving the family car, parks in her driveway — and then we see
a couple of obvious crooks following her in a much fancier car. They get out
and follow her home, look under the back end of her car for some mystery item
we’re not supposed to know about what it is yet, then enter before she has the
chance to close the door behind her and overpower her. That’s the pre-credits
sequence; later we get the needed exposition from Ed telling Kovac why he asked
him to fly cross-country to investigate the case. Kovac traces the case to
Tijuana when he finds a receipt for a pair of cufflinks she bought at a Tijuana
gift shop as a present — only the cufflinks bear the initials “R” and that
convinces Ed his wife is having an affair with a man with that name as either
his first or last initials. The shop is owned by a man named Carl Ganza
(Wendell Holmes) and his assistant, Jack Hawley (Henry Randolph), the same two
baddies we saw stalking Jill in the opening scene. Kovac photographs both of
them surreptitiously — Ganza in the field with a miniature camera disguised as
a cigarette lighter (a piece of equipment he could have used in the “Black
Light” episode that preceded this one by two weeks!) and Hawley from a room
with a standard 35 mm camera equipped with a telephoto lens, has the two
pictures wired to Ed Kern back in San Diego and asks him to check for criminal
records. (As Charles noted, the fact that there was a time lapse during which
Kovac had to have the films developed and then he had to use a wire transfer
scanner to send the photos electronically to the San Diego Police Department
was the most blatantly dated part of this story; in this digital age, he could
simply have uploaded his photos to a computer and e-mailed them!) Kovac learns
that Ganza and Hawley had developed a racket in which they stuck contraband under the cars of Americans innocently returning home
after doing business in Mexico, and tricks the crooks into thinking he has the
diamonds they were smuggling (it could have been just about anything and in a modern-day version of this plotline it
would almost certainly have been drugs) — which suggested that he, or the
writing committee, had read or seen The Maltese Falcon — and the show builds to a shoot-out in a car wash
in which Kovac has to hold off the two armed crooks with nothing but a steam
hose until Kern and the cops come to his rescue and arrest the baddies. This is
one of those episodes that was considerably more exciting to watch than it
sounds in synopsis; Fowler’s direction and the cinematography by feature-film
veteran Paul Ivano (like John F. Seitz, he began in the silent era shooting
Valentino’s vehicles, had a career drop in the 1930’s and made a comeback doing
noirs) is drenched in film
noir atmospherics, and the character of
Jill comes off as a classic noir
woman even though we don’t see much of her and she does (in an inevitable but rather saccharine ending) to
be a good girl after all. Still, this was one of the better shows in the series
and featured a nicely anguished performance by Steve Brodie and a good one from
Bronson that, more than a lot of the Man with a Camera episodes, anticipates the avenging angel he’d play
in his action-movie star vehicles in the 1970’s. — 2/27/13
••••••••••
Charles and I had watched an episode of Charles Bronson’s
quite interesting 1958-1960 TV show Man with a Camera that was one of the better ones: “Live Target,”
about Mike Kovac’s (Bronson) attempts to protect the life of a witness to a
gangster’s murder against the efforts of the gangster and his hired hit people,
Johnny Patch (Gavin McLeod, a far cry from his much better known roles on TV
sitcoms The Mary Tyler Moore Show
and The Love Boat) and his
triggerman Santos (George Keymas) to eliminate the witness, Eddie Wilson (James
Lydon, he of the Paramount Aldrich family films in the 1930’s — their attempt
to duplicate the success of the Hardy family movies at MGM — and star of PRC’s
interesting rescension of Hamlet
as a film noir variously called Out
of the Night and Strange Illusion in 1945) so district attorney Martin Denny (Robert
Carson) can keep him alive and on purpose to testify — against the wishes of
his wife Bess (Toni Gerry), who thinks that if he just keeps his mouth shut the
gangsters will leave them and their daughter (Tracy Stratford) alone. It’s not
exactly the freshest plot in existence (it wasn’t then, either!), but it’s done marvelous here, with great
neo‑noir direction by Paul
Landres, atmospheric cinematography by Paul Ivano (give the show’s producer,
Jason S. Bernie, credit for realizing that a show that centered around
photography needed a great director of photography) and a well-constructed
script by Barry Trivers that really brings Eddie Wilson’s dilemma — testify
against the gangster even at the risk of not only his own life but his family’s
— home and makes it powerful, moving drama. I still have to wonder, though, why Trivers gave the A.D.A.
character the same name as the “exotica” bandleader Martin Denny, whose vaguely
Polynesian-sounding M.O.R. record albums were best sellers when this film was
made! — 3/12/13
••••••••••
I picked the next episode in sequence from Man with a
Camera, “Girl in the Dark” — I suspect I
simply inadvertently skipped “The Positive Negative,” which I expected to see on this disc but it falls earlier (though on
the discs I burned from the first season two shows were presented out of order) — which began with a nice
neo-noir scene in which a tall
man with a long nose (pretty obviously a fake one) robs the offices of the
Hathaway Children’s Center, an adoption agency, and steals $28 in petty cash.
Far more importantly, he takes out a miniature camera (on this show, a vehicle
for Charles Bronson as photographer Mike Kovac, it’s odd to see someone else using a piece of high-tech photo equipment) and
takes pictures of some of the files. Then the opening credits come up, and
after they’re donie we meet Barney O’Neal (Hugh Sanders), a
ditchdigger-turned-multimillionaire capitalist whom Sanders plays very much in
the mold of Broderick Crawford in Born Yesterday and Paul Douglas in The Solid Gold
Cadillac, who since his wife died his only
companion and love object has been his adoptive daughter Terry (Susan Crane),
who came — you guessed it — from the Hathaway Children’s Center. He’s just
received a letter from private investigator Robert J. Willings (Gregory Morton,
whose manner in the role is an intriguing hybrid of Michael Rennie and a less
overwrought Hans Conried), who meets O’Neal and tells him (within earshot of
Kovac, whom O’Neal is passing off as a European masseur who doesn’t speak any
English) that there’s a woman who is Terry’s birth mother and who’s desperate
to see her child one last time and for only $20,000 will then disappear from
Terry’s life forever. Of course, this is a scam — Willings, the woman (Darlene
Fields) and the guy we saw break into the Hathaway offices in the opening scene
are all in it together and are going after multiple victims to wrest as much
blackmail money as possible out of them in a short space of time, then they
plan to flee town and repeat the process somewhere else. (I had briefly thought
“The Woman” — that’s her only identification in the cast list on imdb.com —
might actually be Terry’s mother and have been tricked or seduced into the
scheme, mainly because Darlene Fields and Susan Crane look enough alike to be believable as mother and
daughter; indeed, more believable
than many people cast in movies as parent and child who don’t look like each
other at all!) Eventually, of course, the baddies are caught, though Willings
almost gets away in a final chase sequence in which Mike Kovac finally behaves like the action hero Charles Bronson played
in his most successful films. What’s most interesting about this (especially with
the interview I did with Patrick McMahon in the later days of Zenger’s still very much on my mind) is how much the
attitudes towards adoption have shifted: this show (written by Barry Trivers)
presents it as an unmitigated disaster if the birth mother actually turns up in
the life of an adopted child, and you’d never guess from this show that there’d
be movements towards “open adoptions” and that adoptees would start demanding
as a matter of right that they not only know who their birth parents were but
would insist on being allowed to see them. — 3/14/13
••••••••••
I screened Charles the “Positive Negative” episode of the
interesting TV series Man with a Camera,
a 1958-1960 vehicle for Charles Bronson that lasted for 29 shows over two
seasons. It was one I’d accidentally skipped in our traversal of this show — my
intent was to run all the shows in chronological order but I’d left this one
out by mistake — and though it wasn’t as interesting as the next two in the
sequence, “Live Target” and “Girl in the Dark,” it was a nicely done if rather
overfamiliar gangster tale. It begins with a scene in a nightclub in which
Ellen (Anne Neyland), the house photographer — some clubs offered a service in
which their photographer would take your picture at the club and sell it to you
on the spot — has a dust-up with a party of four (one woman and three men) that
definitely do not want to be
photographed. But she takes their picture anyway by accident because they’re in
the background when she shoots a couple who do want her to take their pictures, and the guys in the
picture — including outwardly respectable but Mob-connected attorney Jeffrey
Blaine (Richard Gaines), a man identified only as “The Texan” (Norman Leavitt)
— who’s in the middle of a hotly contested divorce case and therefore can’t
afford to be seen out with a woman other than his wife — and a heavily
disguised man who turns out to be wanted gangster Ace Lupo (Anthony Caruso).
The guys, along with their companion, supermodel Monique Thaxter (Susan Cummings),
offer the photographer $50 for the photo, and when she refuses they grab her.
She gets away and goes to her friend Mike Kovac (Charles Bronson), who develops
the picture for her, realizes what’s on it, and gets an offer of $500 for the
negative from the gangsters. Instead he prints the picture and turns the print
over to police lieutenant Donovan (series regular James Flavin — in the early
episodes the second-billed star had been Ludwig Stossel as Kovac’s father, also
a photographer but one with a considerably more sedate business, but by this
time they’d written Stossel out of the show — which was probably just as well
because he was basically a comic-relief character and they didn’t really need
him), who in turn sends it (presumably by wire transmission, since he keeps the
original, though that isn’t made clear in the show itself) to the FBI, which is
leading a manhunt for Lupo. The gangsters, working through Blaine, approach
Kovac for the picture but he refuses to sell it for $500, and when he says the
price is $5,000 they beat him up and kidnap him instead. There’s an interesting
surprise element in Oliver Crawford’s script in that the emissary who comes to
make him the offer is Monique — and there’s some nice byplay between her and
Kovac before he makes his last, best offer and she calls in Lupo’s thugs,
including Joe (Michael Harris), to beat him up. Then he’s taken to Lupo’s
hideout, a cheaply constructed warehouse (this is one of those shows in which
the entire set visibly shakes whenever anyone uses a door) where Kovac is
tortured (for a show featuring someone who later became an action-movie icon
there are quite a few scenes in Man with a Camera with Bronson on the receiving end of mayhem — and unlike the roles Bronson played
in the 1970’s, he’s not so superhuman that he can take on three armed thugs
with his bare hands and win!) until he reveals where he hid the negative: under
the passenger-side floorboard of his car (a cool Ford station wagon whose back
is outfitted so he can use it as a darkroom and develop pictures on the road).
But of course there’s still the outstanding print — as well as Lt. Donovan, who
figures out where Kovac has been taken by trailing one of the gangsters, and
there’s a spectacular final shootout in which the good guys win and the bad
guys get theirs, and Charles Bronson almost gets locked in a refrigerator
before turning the tables on the thug who tried to do that to him. A well-aimed
shot by Donovan takes out Lupo permanently and the rest of the baddies are
arrested. The show has some nicely offbeat camera angles by director Paul
Landres (who’s quite a bit better here than he was on the Alan Freed feature Go,
Johnny, Go, a typically banal all-star rock
movie with great music videos stuck in the interstices of a preposterous plot)
and cinematographer Charles Burke (Paul Ivano must have had the week off but
the visual sense is not that different), and a wonderful performance by Susan
Cummings as a woman who isn’t a sexually destructive femme fatale but simply a girl who’s managed to parlay her good
looks and willingness to date Ace Lupo into a nice living for herself
(symbolized by a fur coat she actually forgets to take with her the first time
she leaves Kovac’s apartment — as if there’s always another one where that one
came from!). — 3/16/13
••••••••••
I screened Charles the next episode in sequence of Man
with a Camera: “The Picture War,” a quite
good gangster tale about a man named Larry Gaines (played by an actor with the
bizarre and quite obviously phony pseudonym “Johnny Seven” — his real name was
John Anthony Fetto and he was born in New York in 1926; he was in Edward J.
Cahn’s interesting gangster movie The Music Box Kid and played a small role, Karl Matuschka, in The
Apartment), who seems to have a nearly
supernatural talent for killing people and escaping any legal accountability.
By the time the story starts his reputation for murdering anyone who sees him
murdering anyone else has grown so big that he casually shoots down accountant
Phil Mason (Don Dillaway) in his club after Mason said he wanted out of Gaines’
organization and if he wasn’t allowed to go peacefully he would blab all
Gaines’ secrets to the police. (Once again we have the idiotic movie convention
of the whistle-blower telling the
bad guy to his face that he’s going to expose him — thereby giving the bad guy
the chance to bump him off — instead of quietly going home and calling the
police on the baddie without the
baddie getting the heads-up.) Two people watched the murder happen, the
clean-up person at Gaines’ nightclub and Gaines’ girlfriend, singer Carla
Norris (Dolores Donlon in a nice bad-girl performance), who seduced Mason and
got him to work for Gaines in the first place. But Gaines arranges for his
clean-up person to have an “accident,” Carla refuses to testify against her
lover (especially after he buys her a nice engagement ring and says they’ll get
married soon), and the district attorney drops the charges. Mike Kovac (Charles
Bronson) enters the case when Mason’s widow (Jeanne Bates, who started in
interesting Columbia horror “B”’s like The Return of the Vampire and The Soul of a Monster and ended up in things like Eraserhead,
Mulholland Drive and Die Hard 2) hires him to get the goods on Gaines and make sure
he pays for knocking off her husband. Accordingly Kovac trails him,
photographing him and retouching the pictures so it will look like both Gaines
and Carla are cheating on each other (and there’s some historically interesting
footage showing how hard it was to alter a photograph in the days before
Photoshop) in hopes that this will drive a wedge between them and get Carla to
break off with Gaines and testify against him. What actually happens is that
Gaines gets so pissed off with Carla he’s about to pitch her out the window of
a building 20-plus stories up — only Kovac has alerted the police just in time
and they arrive, hear Gaines threaten Carla and arrest him for Mason’s murder.
“The Picture War” doesn’t really reflect its title that much, but on its own
it’s a quite thrilling and challenging little tale, benefiting from the
concision forced on the makers of half-hour crime dramas and one it’s easy to
imagine being remade today, with
the Larry Gaines character now being a Crips or Bloods leader or perhaps the
U.S. branch commander of a Mexican drug cartel. — 3/24/13
••••••••••
I screened Charles the next episode in sequence of Man
with a Camera: “Torch Off,” in which Mike
Kovac (Charles Bronson) goes undercover to catch a gang of arsonists. It opens
with Billy Whyeth (Stacy Harris) setting a fire but then getting arrested, and
appearing in a lineup with none other than Kovac, who’s affecting a slouch and
a more gravelly voice than usual to keep up his pose as an arsonist from
Detroit. Whyeth recruits him to torch a warehouse for an arson gang headed by
Amos Hartwell, played by the character actor Sebastian Cabot — whose best-known
role was as a male nanny in the sitcom Family Affair and whose appearance as a villain was almost as
surprising as Gavin McLeod’s in an earlier Man with a Camera episode. It turns out the warehouse belongs to
heiress Ruth Craymoor (Sylvia Lewis), yet another of the dark-haired femmes
fatales who abounded on this show; she was
willed it by her grandfather but she isn’t allowed to tear it down or do
anything with the valuable, developable property it sits on because his
grandfather wrote in the will that she has to let it alone because it had
“sentimental value” for him. (“‘Sentimental value’ for a warehouse?” both Charles and I thought at this quirky, to say
the least, element in Oliver Crawford’s script.) So she’s decided to have it
burned down by professionals who can make it look like an accident, whereupon
she can either redevelop the property herself or sell it to a developer and
make big bucks she can squander. The crooks “make” Kovac when Ruth recognizes
him as the photographer at a charity event she attended, and they decide to
eliminate him by knocking him out and locking him inside the warehouse as it
burns — though, in a legitimate surprise in Crawford’s script (ably directed by
Paul Landres, whom I’m thinking a lot more of on the basis of these shows than
I did from his generally lousy and hacky feature films), it turns out that not
only does Kovac escape the inferno but the building doesn’t burn at all, thanks
to Kovac finding and disarming the incendiary device that was supposed to set
it off in the nick of time. Another interesting plot element is the hand-held
radio Kovac carries at all times in his crook disguise (at a time when
transistor radios were still very much a novelty item), which he obnoxiously
plays at inopportune moments; of course, given that Kovac is a professional
photographer, the radio (while it works as such) also conceals a camera with
which Kovac is able to get candid shots of the gang so the police can identify
them. “Touch Off” is a neat episode and makes one wonder why this often
interesting and occasionally quite compelling series lasted such a short time
(just 29 episodes in two seasons) and why Charles Bronson, as convincing an action
hero here as he was later on, had to wait another decade for movie stardom
(unlike Steve McQueen, who leaped almost immediately from the similarly
short-lived series Wanted: Dead or Alive to big-screen stardom in The Magnificent Seven and its follow-ups from action director John
Sturges). — 3/27/13
••••••••••
Charles and I got home shortly after 9:30 even though the
service had broken at 8:45 — the vicissitudes of bus travel again! — and about
all we had the energy for was a TV show episode and in Charles’ case a late
snack while in my case some more ice cream for dessert. Charles and I watched
the next episode in sequence of Man with a Camera — we only have two more shows to go before we complete the run — which
was called “Hot Ice Cream” and begins with a wordless sequence in which an
unidentified man shoots another unidentified man at an amusement park. Then the
credits come up and, for the first time in this show’s history, there isn’t an announcer’s voice on the soundtrack reading the
title and the star’s name — “Man with a Camera, starring Charles Bronson” — in synch with that
information appearing on the written opening credits. The show turns out to be
a good one: Stokes (Paul Bryar), the man who owns the amusement park, tells
Mike Kovac (Charles Bronson) he wants to hire him to find out who committed the
murder — about which he would have had no idea (the park is built over a pier
and the killer disposed of the body by pushing it off the pier, into the sea)
except that one of his children, an aspiring photographer, shot a picture of
the overall park that happened to capture the killing in progress. Kovac tells
Stokes to send over Stokes fils —
only it turns out to be Stokes fille,
Jo Stokes (played by future Batgirl Yvonne Craig, in a nicely spunky
anything-a-guy-can-do-I-can-do-better performance), who brings over her
negative so Kovac can print a better copy of it on his superior equipment. (She
goes into orgasmic ecstatics over his darkroom and is pleased when Kovac tells
her he uses the same chemical she does to process prints.) Kovac ends up at the
amusement park and is slipped a note telling him to meet his mystery informant
behind the pier — only it’s a setup and the killer, whom Kovac doesn’t see (at
least facially) but recognizes from the two-toned shoes he was wearing in Jo’s
photo, knocks him out and pushes him off the pier. The image of Charles Bronson
rising from the sea like the Loch Ness Monster is trippy and premonitory of the
virtual superhero he played in the 1970’s action vehicles that made him a major
star. Eventually he realizes that the whole thing is a criminal plot worked out
between Fenton (Roscoe Ates), who owns the ice-cream concession for the
amusement park and hires his salespersons as what today would be called “independent
contractors” — he gives them a jacket, a hat and a refrigerated cart, sells
them ice creams and then when they sell out they come back for more — and
Barney (a heavier-set but still appealingly sinister Lawrence Tierney). The
idea was they would smuggle drugs into the amusement park and sell them
concealed in ice creams — and needless to say there’s a climactic fistfight
between Charles Bronson and Lawrence Tierney that ends up with the crooks
getting what they deserve, as well as an intriguing gimmick by which Kovac gets
the goods on the villains: he rigs up an automatic movie camera to shoot
surveillance footage of them and has Jo operated it by remote control. (Charles
questioned whether a still photographer like Kovac would have a darkroom
equipped to develop film — though movie film is chemically identical to 35 mm
still film, it’s likely he had the movie film sent out for developing at a lab
accustomed to handling it and giving it the special bathing, washing and drying
needed to process such a long strip of film.) While there were more effectively
noir episodes of Man
with a Camera, this was still an appealing
one and begs the question of why this show lasted such a short time — just 29
episodes, 15 in season one and 14 in season two (though my Man with a
Camera downloads from archive.org included
a 30th episode, unidentified but probably a duplicate of one we’ve
already watched) — and why it took another decade for Charles Bronson finally
to achieve stardom in the action-hero persona he was already projecting here. — 3/30/13
•••••
Charles and I watched the next-to-last episode of Man
with a Camera, the very interesting crime
show that lasted 29 episodes over two seasons on ABC: “Fragment of a Murder,”
in which a longtime burglar named Klemer (Larry Blake) is shot and killed in
the opening scene by two men — we don’t know who these people are at first but
we eventually learn the murderers are Paxton (Gordon Wynn), who got a law
degree but never practiced, and Randolph (Don Rhodes), his partner in a private
investigative company. The cops, headed by series regular Lt. Donovan (James
Flavin), write it off — they figure Paxton and Randolph surprised Klemer in the
act of burglarizing them and shot him in self-defense — but Kovac is hired by
an ex-con named Frankie Billings (Jesse White) to prove that Klemer wasn’t killed in a burglary, since his life insurance
policy would be uncollectible if he met his demise while committing a crime.
Later we find that Frankie is in cahoots with Klemer’s estranged widow Cara
(Doris Singleton) to split the $20,000 in insurance money — only Cara backs out
of the deal and then Frankie comes by Kovac’s apartment with a gun and insists
that Kovac give up the case and give back the one piece of evidence he has, a
fragment of a photo found in Klemer’s dead hand. The rest of the photo was
burned, and Kovac has had the extant portion blown up so he can determine from
the shape of the New York skyline and the position of the Brooklyn Bridge
exactly where it was taken.
Frankie saps Kovac but apparently doesn’t get the picture back, and Kovac is
able to trace it to a room where Paxton and Cara, with whom he was having an
affair, knifed a would-be john they’d lured to the room with her as bait,
planning to rob him. The photo originally showed Cara wielding the scissors and
shoving them into the guy’s back. Eventually there’s a shoot-out and both
Paxton and Cara are killed, and the $20,000 from the insurance company goes
into a trust fund for Klemer’s daughter Marcy (Shari Lee Bernath) so she can
get a start in life when she turns 18 and can get out of the group home where
Frankie parked her after Klemer’s death. It’s one of the most noir-ish episodes in the show — though not enough is made
of the potentially interesting femme fatale character of Cara — and its writer (Wilton Schiller)
and director (Gilbert Kay) are new names to the Man with a Camera credits. This has proved to be an especially
interesting series, not only because of Bronson’s presence (in a role that
quite strongly anticipates the action-movie vehicles of the early 1970’s that
would make him a major star after years in character-actor hell) but because
the plots are consistently inventive and exciting, and the show’s gimmick — not
only did every episode have to have something to do with photography (since
Mike Kovac’s profession was photography) but the sponsors, Kodak and Sylvania,
both made photographic supplies (Sylvania is known today mostly for lightbulbs
but they also made flashbulbs — ya remember flashbulbs?) — was actually used quite intelligently. The
writers were good at throwing in photographic elements into their plotlines
without making them seem forced, and as I’ve commented on other crime shows
(including the original Dragnet)
it’s nice that the half-hour format for a crime show meant that the stories had
to be dispatched quickly and efficiently, and without the subplots and gimmicks
that lard all too many of today’s comparatively bloated hour-long crime shows
(though given the proliferation of commercials an “hour” show today is not twice as long as a half-hour show then — the Man
with a Camera episodes time out at 25
minutes while today’s “hour” shows are only 42 minutes). — 4/16/13
••••••••••
I screened the last episode of Man with a Camera, “Kangaroo Court,” which was a somewhat disappointing
end to the series (it first aired February 8, 1960) after the quite good
“Fragment of a Murder.” It’s an odd mix of elements that takes place mostly on
the French Riviera, dealing with a group of low-level U.S. military officers
that have formed a criminal ring and run it largely like a military operation.
In the opening sequence they form a kangaroo court and “execute” one of their
own members for having been seen talking to a police officer (their suspicions
are actually right; the man was informing on them). They’re mostly involved in
black-market smuggling but they’ve hatched a plot to kidnap scapegrace movie
star Harry Fletcher (played by an actor named George Wallace who’s considerably
taller and rangier-looking than the little guy who became the notoriously
racist Alabama governor and presidential candidate) at the Cannes Film Festival
and hold him for ransom, which they’re confident the studio will pay. Fletcher
is drawn along the lines of Lawrence Tierney (or maybe Robert Mitchum), a
scapegrace off screen as well as on it and also the man who can’t resist a
sexual invitation — at the moment he’s being targeted for kidnapping he’s
making time with a starlet named Annette (Danielle Aubry) and there’s an almost
farcical air about his attempts to find time to be alone with her. Mike Kovac
(Charles Bronson) is called up from his Army reserve status to go to Cannes,
pose as a paparazzo and protect
Fletcher from being kidnapped — which he eventually does in a nicely staged
Charles Bronson action scene in which he successfully takes down two bigger,
stronger men — one of whom has a gun — with nothing more than his fists and his
legs. This episode was done by the same writer (Wilton Schiller) and director
(Gilbert Kay) as “Fragment of a Murder,” and while it’s hardly as good as
“Fragment” (this show was consistently at its best when it tapped both the
visual iconography and the cliché bank of film noir) it did
make a nice exit for a series that should have lasted a lot longer than 29
episodes over two years — and probably would have if it hadn’t been on such a
sleazepit network as ABC, whose reputation was so low that later in the decade
Hollywood wags joked, “You want to know how to end the Viet Nam war? Put it on
ABC and it will be canceled in 13 weeks!” — 4/17/13
