M Squad: "The Teacher" (Latimer Productions, Revue Productions, MCA-TV, 1959)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After “The Third Shadow,” I watched the M Squad episode immediately preceding it in the series’s original run, “The Teacher.” It dealt with a group of young punk kids at a wood-crafting school, in which the main bully is Nick “Sharpy” Sharples (Tom Laughlin, who 12 years later would emerge as the title character in the Billy Jack movies). Sharpy terrorizes the other kids into paying him protection money and generally following his orders. The school is run by a typically saintly teacher, Ralph Schnider (Stuart Randall), who like Father Flanagan of Boys’ Town insists that “there’s no such thing as a bad boy.” He vainly tries to get through to Sharpy to deal with his psychopathology and set him on a righteous path, but to no avail. One kid he has more or less successfully reformed is Pete Marashi (the young Burt Reynolds), who’s doing well in school and has a girlfriend, Irene Hanson (Sue George), who works at a music store. When another kid is beaten up by Sharpy and his gang, however, Pete refuses to “rat” and tells Lt. Frank Ballinger of the Chicago Police Department (Lee Marvin, the star of the show) that he knows nothing. Meanwhile, Sharpy confronts Schnider in his office and cruelly and coldly pushes him out of the office window to his death, giggling and calling out, “Write if you find work,” as Schnider dies. The police are stumped and originally write off the death as a suicide – which means Schnider’s widow (Maida Severn) can’t collect on his life insurance policy, so their daughter may not be able to go to college – until Sharpy and his gang, attempting to intimidate Pete into staying silent, beat up Pete’s girlfriend Irene.

Conscious that if he’d spoken out sooner, Schnider would still be alive and Irene wouldn’t be in a hospital recovering from her injuries, Pete finally tells Lt. Ballinger what he knows and Sharpy and the gang are busted. When I first saw the synopsis on imdb.com, “Young hoodlums use a trade school for criminal purposes,” I thought this was going to be a show about a corrupt teacher who had enlisted trade-school students to commit crimes for him, sort of like a 1970’s episode of the TV series Vega$ (that’s how it was initially spelled) in which the bad guy was a corrupt probation officer who got the young women assigned to him to commit crimes on his behalf by threatening to declare them in violation and return them to prison if they didn’t comply. But that wasn’t where writer Frank L. Moss chose to go. What makes this M Squad (which survived in much better visual shape than “The Third Shadow,” by the way) interesting is not only the presence of Reynolds and Laughlin in the cast but the name of the composer. Instead of jazz giant Benny Carter, for this one they got Johnny Williams – who would later abbreviate his first name to “John” and become the most popular film composer of all time thanks to his work on Jaws, Superman, Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T. and all their various spinoffs and sequelae. Williams had previously written for the Playhouse 90 anthology TV series and had made his feature-film debut writing the music for another juvenile delinquency drama (if I may use the term loosely), Daddy-O (1958), which Charles and I watched on a Mystery Science Theatre 3000 presentation and thought even the MST3K crew couldn’t make it entertaining. As I wrote of Williams’ contribution, “I had thought Elmer Bernstein’s debut in Cat Women on the Moon was the most embarrassing first credit for a composer that went on to major-budget productions and won Academy Awards, but this one certainly rivals it!”