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

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved (no copyright claimed for the quoted song lyric)

Last night (Monday, November 11) I watched a couple of reruns of the surprisingly interesting police procedural drama M Squad on YouTube. Both of these luckily contained the show’s closing themes (which had been deleted from the previous episode, “Decoy in White,” due to copyright claims), and the first, “The Third Shadow,” had a quite good musical number in the middle (more on that later). “The Third Shadow” opens with a shoot-out at a factory whose payroll is being robbed. One of the criminals dies on the scene and another, Al Stemple (Richard Benedict), is mortally wounded but lives long enough for police lieutenant Frank Ballinger (Lee Marvin, who’s about the only reason people are still interested in this show even though a lot of major stars got key career breaks on it as guests) and his partner to question him. The uniformed police officer who led the enforcement effort, Dave Price (Tony Travis), recovers $10,000 in stolen loot and is acclaimed as a hero – until the next day, when Maxwell (Guy Prescott), head of payroll for the company that got robbed, insists that there was really $30,000 stolen and accuses Officer Price of taking the rest for his own use. Lt. Ballinger is convinced Price is innocent, but the only explanation he can come up with is there must have been a third person involved in the robbery besides the two who were caught and killed. He traces this person and learns that Stemple had actually been an “inside man,” who’d got a job at the company due to a phony reference four weeks before the robbery occurred. Through a friend, Ruth Scanlan (Amy Fields), who works in the club scene in Chicago, where the show took place, Ballinger meets Grace Richards (Monica Lewis), who supplied the phony reference for Stemple at the behest of her boyfriend, Greg Cook (Alfred Shelly). Lt. Ballinger already had a file on Cook from the New Orleans Police Department, who wanted him for two separate armed robberies there.

Ballinger goes to see both Grace Richards and Greg Cook at a local TV studio, where Grace is performing on a local show. We get to hear at least one complete chorus of her song, a quite good blues lament in the then-modern urban style, before Ballinger questions both of them and ultimately tracks Cook to Grace’s apartment. At some point Grace says she gave him a key, though later in the show it turns out he didn’t have one until he stole it from her (a glitch in the continuity from writer Jack Jacobs). Since he doesn’t have probable cause to search Grace’s apartment for Greg’s share of the loot, Ballinger somehow has to trick Greg into grabbing it so he can be caught red-handed with it, and among other things Officer Price can be exonerated. Ultimately there’s a quite good chase sequence down the fire escape of Grace’s building, and in the end Greg is arrested, the loot is recovered and Officer Price can get on with his career. Though this show, like “Decoy in White,” was also scored by Benny Carter with an opening and closing theme from Count Basie, the really remarkable item in its musical content was the featured song Monica Lewis sang. Monica Lewis is one of those musicians, like composers Marius Constant (The Twilight Zone), Alexander Courage (Star Trek) and Henry Vars (Flipper), whom you’ve heard even if you don’t recognize the name. She was the voice of “Chiquita Banana” in the long-running series of commercials that began in 1944, at first as an animated banana and, after 1987, as a woman very much designed to look like Carmen Miranda.

Lewis was born in 1922 to a musical family in Chicago and got what should have been her big break in 1943, when Peggy Lee, Benny Goodman’s female singer, left the band to marry the group’s guitarist, Dave Barbour, and settle in Hollywood. At the time her plan was to retire and just be Mrs. Barbour full-time, but in 1945 Barbour was working on an historical jazz album and they needed a female singer for two songs. “My wife used to sing with Goodman,” Barbour said – so they called in Peggy Lee and ultimately she became a solo singing star. Meanwhile, Monica Lewis got caught in the American Federation of Musicians’ (AFM) strike against the record companies in 1942, which meant she couldn’t record with the Goodman band. After the strike was settled in 1944 she went on a long recording career for Signature (owned by her first husband, record producer Bob Thiele), MGM, Capitol, Decca and Verve. After her brief first marriage to Thiele, in 1956 she married Hollywood agent and producer Jennings Lang (best known in movie trivia history as the man producer Walter Wanger shot at because Wanger thought his wife, Joan Bennett, was having an affair with Lang, her agent at the time) and retired to take care of his children. She stayed with Lang until his death in 1996 and died herself in 2015 at age 93. I had imagined the producers of M Squad would hire a professional singer for this role, and I was right; she sang an odd mixture of blues and cabaret song called “Baby, That Ain’t Right” (not to be confused with “That Ain’t Right,” recorded by the Nat “King” Cole Trio and also performed by “Fats” Waller and singer Ada Brown in the 1943 film Stormy Weather) whose lyrics strike the right note of despair. After the show wraps up, a closing narration delivered by Lee Marvin in character tells us that Lewis’s character, Grace Richards, was so broken up by the fact that the man she’d thought was Mr. Right turned out to be a despicable crook that she literally lost her voice and never sang again. Here are the words of the marvelous song Monica Lewis sings here:

My baby left, and that ain’t right
The days are bad, it’s worse at night
With no warm arms to hold me
The nights are cold, and that ain’t right.

I’m all shook up, can’t eat a bite
I’m like a string without a kite
I thought I had love controlled, it didn’t hold,
Now you know that ain’t right.

Who was right? Who was wrong?
Who told lies all along?
Who was weak, who was strong?
To which one does the blame belong?

There’s nothing left, there’s nothing right,
It’s like someone turned out my light,
I got a feeling you are happy, gay and bright
And that ain’t right.
Baby, that ain’t right.
Baby, that ain’t right.