Suspense - Rod Serling’s Nightmare at Ground Zero (1953)

Rod Serling’s interest in science fiction and horror pre-dated his work on The Twilight Zone. It can be seen in a very definite form in an episode he wrote for the anthology series Suspense in 1953. The episode in question is Nightmare at Ground Zero, and it’s included as an extra with the season one Blu-Ray release of The Twilight Zone.

The episode is especially interesting in that it features a number of elements that would figure prominently in The Twilight Zone, notable an end-of-the-world scenario and store-window mannequins.

Technically the episode might not include any overt science fictional elements but the entire concept of the story is essentially science fictional. And the horror elements are undeniable.

A mild-mannered man named George Vance makes his living manufacturing life-like mannequins that will be used in atomic bomb tests. The mannequins will be placed inside houses in the test area.

George seems to be more genuinely fond of his mannequins than he is of his wife. That isn’t hard to understand since all his wife does is criticise him, belittle him and generally make his life a misery. As he is placing his mannequins in position for the latest atomic bomb test he suddenly sees a way of escape. A rather drastic way, but he is a desperate man.

The question is, will he actually go through with it?

George Vance is a rather typical Rod Serling protagonist, a meek but sensitive soul oppressed by an uncaring world. And the technique of using a doomsday scenario to bring his characters’ inner conflicts to a crisis is one he would use again.

Nightmare at Ground Zero is in fact very much like a Rod Serling episode of The Twilight Zone.

The picture quality on this episode is very poor. That is not surprising given that the Suspense series went to air live and the only recordings made were kinescope recordings, made by filming the picture from a television monitor. Since the episode is offered to us as an extra it would be unreasonable to complain about the image quality. We’re lucky to have such recordings at all and this one offers us the opportunity to see an early Rod Serling attempt at the kind of television he would later become famous for.

Nightmare at Ground Zero is a very effective piece of television and is most certainly worth watching.

Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer (1958-60)

Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer was originally broadcast by the CBS network from 1958 to 1960. Bringing Mike Hammer to the small screen must have presented quite a challenge, Mickey Spillane’s novels being considered at the time to be remarkably violent.

I was initially sceptical about the idea of Darren McGavin as Mike Hammer. He was always an entertaining actor but Hammer is a very tough guy and exceptionally ruthless and I feared McGavin would make him too much of a lovable character. In fact he does a surprisingly good job. This is a much tougher Darren McGavin than I’ve ever seen.

Of course the character had to be watered down a little for 1950s network TV but he still comes across as a guy who leads with his fists and is sublimely unconcerned about kicking heads when it seems necessary. In one scene in an early episode, literally putting the boot in! When the guy is already down on the ground. His favoured method of soliciting information involves slapping people around. He also chases anything in a skirt. This is really pretty close to the authentic Mike Hammer.

The Hammer of the books is a tough hombre and has few scruples about bending the rules a little when he feels it’s necessary, but it’s an essential part of the character that he has a very clear personal morality and an obsessive sense of justice. And he has a definite sentimental streak - he’s a tough guy but he’s a sucker for a sob story.

McGavin captures this other side of Hammer pretty well.

The series shows a marked film noir influence on the visuals, something that is a feature of so many of the best 50s American TV crime shows. It also nicely captures the seedy glamour of film noir, of night clubs and mean streets. The noir influence is apparent in the story lines as well.

As you'd expect there's no shortage of delightfully hard-boiled dialogue.

By the mid-1950s television crime series had largely driven the classic crime B-movie to extinction, but the best of these television series have the same rough-edged vitality and at times a surprising degree of toughness as well.

Half-hour crime dramas in the late 50s were made on very tight shooting schedules (episodes of M Squad for example were shot in two days). Despite the tight schedules Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer is a well-made series.

Hammer's buddy in the Homicide Squad, Captain Pat Chambers, appears in quite a few episodes. Fans of the books will be disappointed that Hammer's glamorous but tough secretary Velda isn't featured.

This was just one of the many private eye series on American TV in the late 50s and early 60s, but of those I've seen Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer is by far the best, with the optimum combination of action, hardboiled dialogue, sardonic humour and grittiness. It goes without saying that there is a total absence of political correctness here, another major bonus.

The series ran for two seasons, a total of 79 episodes (39 episodes was considered fairly standard for a season in those days).

I’m quite impressed by the episodes I’ve seen so far. I’m a big fan of Mickey Spillane and while the series isn’t quite the real deal it comes a good deal closer than I would have expected. And it’s thoroughly enjoyable.

The complete series has been released on DVD by A&E and it looks pretty good. Definitely a worthwhile purchase.

The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. (1966-67)

The idea of taking a successful series and spinning off another series from it has always had a seductive appeal to television networks. It seems like a sure-fire recipe for success and a neat way to avoid the risks always inherent in trying to sell a brand new series to the public. In practice it’s never been quite such a wildly successful idea but networks just keep on trying it. 

The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. is a case in point. The Man from U.N.C.L.E. had been launched on NBC in 1964 and had been immensely popular. Surely adding a glamorous female spy (glamorous female spies and crime-fighters were rapidly becoming the flavour of the month at the time) to the formula would be a certain winner. Alas, The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. folded after a single season.

There are two ways to do a spin-off. You can take a popular character or characters from the original successful series and give them their own series, utilising a similar but not identical format and relying on the popularity of the character to assure success. The Lone Gunmen spin-off from the hugely successful The X-Files is a classic example of this method, and the spectacular failure of The Lone Gunmen is a classic illustration of the dangers involved. Characters who added spice to a series when served out in small quantities as side-dishes can be overwhelming when served up as the main course week after week.

The other method is to repeat the formula of the original exactly, but with different main characters. That was the approach adopted for The Girl from U.N.C.L.E.. Glamorous girl secret agent April Dancer (Stefanie Powers) and her partner Mark Slate (Noel Harrison) took the place of Napoleon Solo and Ilya Kuryakin.

There are two major dangers to this method. The first is that if the original series has already been running for several seasons (and the The Man from U.N.C.L.E. was entering its third season by the time The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. debuted in 1966) viewers may be getting just a little tired of the formula. The second potential problem is that the success of the original series may have been due in large measure to the casting, so the same formula might not work twice. It’s like changing the ingredients of a successful recipe - the new flavours might not combine quite so pleasingly.

The failure of The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. was probably partly due to a combination of both these factors. It's also likely that yet another factor working against it was that the tone of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. changed somewhat after its triumphant first season, becoming more self-consciously camp and more like a spy spoof than an actual spy series. The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. tended to copy the tone of the less successful later seasons of its parent series. 

The problem of course was that the enormous success of the Bond movies convinced the producers  of other spy movies and spy TV series that a tongue-in-cheek approach was the way to go for every spy movie or TV series. What was overlooked was that such a tongue-in-cheek approach is immensely difficult to pull off successfully. The balance has to be just right. It has to be done with some subtlety, as it was in the Sean Connery Bond movies. If you overdo it you end up with a pure spoof, a quite different genre with its own dangers. If you go down that road you might as well do the whole thing as pure comedy, as Get Smart did (and did very well).

Having said all that, The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. is not without its charms. Stefanie Powers is fine, although I can’t help suspecting she might have been better had the series adopted a more serious tone. She doesn’t quite have the assured comic touch of a Diana Rigg. At times also April Dancer seems to get herself into trouble and in need of rescuing a bit too easily. Mind you her partner Mark Slate seems just as accident-prone. Noel Harrison might also have been a little more confident had the series taken itself a little more seriously.

The series does have some very good moments though. The Mother Muffin Affair with Boris Karloff in drag and Robert Vaughn putting in a guest appearance as Napoleon Solo is a great episode, although again the problem is that Napoleon Solo takes the lead and April Dancer is left seeming to be not quite capable enough to handle a mission on her own. Powers herself is somewhat overshadowed in the acting department in this episode, although of course almost anyone is going to have trouble keeping up with Karloff in full flight.

The Horns-of-the-Dilemma Affair tends to suggest that the producers were not quite sure which way to jump. It’s a slightly more serious episode and it works very well. The use of the horns of the bull (you’ll have to watch it to find out what I’m talking about) is a very nice touch.

Unfortunately from there we go straight to The Danish Blue Affair, a truly dire exercise in over-the-top self-parody.

One very odd feature of several episodes is Mr Waverly doing the action hero bit, rather unexpected given that Leo G. Carroll was 80 at the time!

The Girl from U.N.C.L.E.’s biggest problem is that inevitably it’s going to be compared to The Avengers, and the comparison is not going to be in its favour. The Avengers trod the fine line between ironic high camp and mere silliness very sure-footedly indeed. Diana Rigg and Honor Blackman both did the glamorous female spy bit with a good deal more assurance than Stefanie Powers. In fact Linda Thorson has the edge on Powers as well. It’s not that Powers isn’t reasonably good, it’s just that in that genre she’s up against some very stiff competition.

If you can put such comparisons aside The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. can be fun although it can hardly be described as a must-watch series.

Warner Home Video have released The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. on DVD in two half-season boxed sets. 

Department S (1969-70)

Department S, which ran for 28 episodes in 1969 and 1970, was another in the successful cycle of action/adventure series made by ITC in Britain in the 60s and 70s. It was the brainchild of Monty Berman and Dennis Spooner who already had an impressive track record in this area. The obvious problem they faced was to stick to a basic formula that had proved successful but to vary the formula enough to make the new series distinctive. In that object they succeeded brilliantly.

As James Chapman points out in his excellent book on the various ITC adventure series, Saints and Avengers, what they did was to invert the formula of their earlier series The Champions. The Champions started off with a bizarre and fantastic premise, three secret agents who have acquired superhuman and paranormal powers, but balanced the fantastic premise with straightforward and realistic storylines. So Department S would start with a thoroughly realistic and conventional premise, a department of Interpol tasked with solving sensitive and difficult cases, but balance the realistic premise with outlandish and fantastic storylines.

Like The Champions the new series would have three main characters, two men and a woman. But in contrast to The Champions the three characters would be wildly contrasting personalities. This idea, coupled with a particularly inspired piece of casting, would prove to be one of the series’ main strengths.

The inspired casting decision was to have the flamboyant Peter Wyngarde as the odd man out. The other two characters, Stewart Sullivan (Joel Fabiani) and Annabelle Hirst (Rosemary Nicols), are the kinds of professionals you would expect to find working for Interpol. Sullivan is an experienced cop who believes in solving cases by using the conventional techniques of the professional detective. He is methodical and dogged. Annabelle Hirst is a computer expert who handles the research side of things. 

But Jason King (Wyngarde) is a different kettle of fish entirely. He is a successful writer of thrillers who dabbles in crime-solving as a hobby. He is a complete amateur with a sublime disdain for following conventional rules. He has however had considerable success as an amateur sleuth, relying on his fertile imagination and his ability to think outside the square. As a result he has been recruited as an unofficial member of Department S. King’s unconventional methods provide the perfect balance to the straightforward approach of the other two members of the team, just as Wyngarde’s extravagant and outrageous characterisation provides the series with the perfect foil to the low-key approaches of the other two stars.

Dennis Spooner claims that the Jason King character was inspired by Winston Churchill’s characteristically eccentric World War 2 scheme to ask Dennis Wheatley, the immensely successful author of both occult and spy thrillers, to recruit a team of thriller writers to form a kind of literary brains trust to come up with ideas to win the war. Wyngarde on the other hand claims to have essentially created the character himself, inspired by the fact that the fabulously successful author of the James Bond spy thrillers, Ian Fleming, had been a key player in British Naval Intelligence during the war. Fleming had in fact been one of Naval Intelligence’s main ideas men and had come up with a number of incredibly wild intelligence schemes that actually worked. Whether Jason King was actually primarily the creation of Spooner or Wyngarde the fact is that a number of very successful writers of spy fiction had been real-life spies and it’s actually rather surprising that no-one had used such an obviously clever idea before.

There’s little doubt though that Wyngarde was responsible for the extreme flamboyance of the character and for Jason King’s remarkably outré fashion style, even taking a hand in designing the clothes for the character.

Wyngarde’s performance is so over-the-top and so entertaining that he inevitably overshadows his co-stars, so much so that Jason King ended up with his own spin-off series. As a result the performances of Fabiani and Nicols have sometimes been unfairly disparaged. In fact they had to be low-key. To have approached their roles in any other way would have made the series merely ridiculous. The tension between straight arrow action hero Sullivan and eccentric dilettante Jason King was one of the keys to the show’s success, and that tension was nicely balanced by a grudging mutual respect. Annabelle’s slightly straitlaced personality also balances well with King’s disdain for the conventions. 

The balance between the three characters was perfect, a fact that becomes rather obvious  when you compare Department S to the Jason King spin-off series. Jason King is fun and I’m quite fond of it but he really needed the other two rather conventional characters to play off.

The scripts were mostly provided by writers with plenty of experience in the genre and the best episodes, such as The Man in the Elegant Room and The Pied Piper of Hambledown, achieve a pleasing sense of the surreal. The stories scrupulously avoid any hint of the supernatural or the paranormal. They do occasionally flirt with marginally science fictional elements, although less so than The Avengers. No matter how bizarre the events described they must have a rational explanation so the strangeness has to come from the twisted nature, or the diabolical cunning, of the people responsible. And of course from the imaginativeness of the writing.

Like other British series of its era Department S relies on stock footage to establish the exotic locales in which the stories take place. There’s a lot of studio shooting but the reasonably generous budgets allow for quite a bit of location shooting so it doesn’t feel overly studio-bound. The budgets were sufficient to allow for reasonably impressive sets and at least a modicum of high-tech gadgetry. The series seems slightly more slick and more polished than The Champions, made just a couple of years earlier.

The series is also a treat for fans of excessive 1960s fashion with Jason's extraordinary suits and Annabelle's often delightfully odd outfits.

Department S achieved considerable international success, especially in Australia where Peter Wyngarde on a promotional visit received the kind of adulation normally reserved for pop stars. It remains one of the best of the ITC action/adventure series and in fact one of the high points of the golden age of British television. I personally rate it as one of the five best series of its type of that era.

The Region 4 boxed set from Umbrella includes a couple of delightful audio commentary tracks by Peter Wyngarde.

Checkmate (1960-62)

Checkmate was a US series that ran on the CBS network from 1960 to 1962. It was created by Eric Ambler, one of my favourite writers of thrillers and crime/espionage fiction and that in itself is sufficient reason for me to want to give this one a look.

There are a couple of episodes of Checkmate included in one of the Mill Creek boxed sets that I have. Sound and picture quality is, as you’d expect from Mill Creek, deplorable. On the other hand the set includes 150 assorted episodes of crime shows and works out at around 12 cents an episode so it’s unreasonable to complain too much.

And one of the two episodes, The Human Touch, guest stars Peter Lorre so that was another major point in its favour straight away.

I enjoyed these two episodes enough to pick up the Best of Checkmate boxed set.

The series centres on the cases undertaken by a very slick up-market firm of private investigators known as Checkmate Inc. The firm basically consists of two private eyes played by Anthony George and an absurdly young Doug McClure along with a psychologist/general-purpose scientific advisor played by Sebastian Cabot (who was quite a fixture on American TV at that time).

The firm is very selective in the cases it takes on. They don’t deal with routine investigations like divorce work. The case has to be challenging enough to get them interested and their reputation is such that they can afford to pick and choose their cases. They also tend to specialise in cases where there is a threat of a crime being committed, rather than cases where the crime has already taken place.

While 1950s crime series were pretty much stuck with the very restrictive half-hour format that was standard at that time Checkmate benefits considerably from the more generous one-hour format which is probably one of the series the scripts are a little bit more adventurous.

The scripts are definitely of above average quality and the stories are well thought-out and managing to avoid the more obvious clichés of the genre. Some episodes, such as Laugh Till I Die, take hackneyed themes but give them a new twist. Others, like The Paper Killer which deals with a comic book writer whose most famous fictional hero is apparently trying to kill him, are genuinely original and inventive. Hot Wind in a Cold Town is even better, with an atmosphere of brooding menace and more than a touch of the bizarre.

The series obviously had a certain amount of prestige judging by the galaxy of very big name guest stars who appear.

Don Corey (Anthony George) is the boss while Jed Sills (Doug McClure) provides the muscle and Dr Carl Hyatt (Sebastian Cabot) provides the brains and the scientific knowledge. Corey has the polish needed when dealing with the sorts of clients the company attracts, clients who are usually wealthy and prominent citizens.  

While other private eye series at the time focused on the seedy side of city life or on the glamorous world of night-clubs and jazz bars the operatives of Checkmate Inc move in the world of high society and celebrities, a world that of course has its own darker side. 

All three leads are very good although Sebastian Cabot does tend to steal most of the scenes in which he appears. The three main characters with their differing areas of expertise provide the balance such a series requires, and all three actors (and McClure and Cabot in particular) have a certain charisma, another essential ingredient for a successful series.

The series ran for two seasons but in the early 60s a season was a lot longer than it is today and a total of no less than seventy episodes were made. Checkmate impressed critics at the time with its intelligence and class and it still impresses today.

The Best of Checkmate boxed set was issued by Timeless Media Group and includes twelve episodes. Picture quality isn’t stellar but it’s quite acceptable and for the fairly modest price the set offers good value. The entire series is also available on DVD although with a significantly stiffer price tag. Still it’s an interesting and original enough program that it’s probably worth investing in the complete series sets.

Checkmate is stylish crime television. Highly recommended.

The Four Just Men (1959)

The Four Just Men was an ITC series made by Sapphire Films for British TV in 1959. It was inspired by Edgar Wallace’s mega-bestselling books featuring the Four Just Men.

Four men who had served together during the war in commando-style operations meet up again a decade and a half later to create an informal international organisation to fight for justice in areas where the police and the law have failed. Ben Manfred (Jack Hawkins) is a British MP, Jeff Ryder (Richard Conte) is a professor of law at Columbia, Tim Collier (Dan Dailey) is a Paris-based American journalist and Rico Poccari (Vittorio de Sica) is the owner of an exclusive hotel in Rome.

Each episode focuses on the activities of one of the four stars. In common with so many British TV series of its era the cast has a transatlantic feel with two Americans and one Briton, although the addition of an Italian is unusual.

It’s an idea with potential, but it doesn’t quite come off. This is partly because of the half-hour format, which sometimes makes the cases seem a bit trivial, certainly too trivial for such an organisation to take an interest in.

Another problem is that Edgar Wallace’s Four Just Men were not private detectives or mere amateur crime-fighters - they were more like vigilantes. Their TV counterparts do at times seem like little more than glorified private detectives. The TV version also lacks some of the edginess of Wallace’s. It might be unkind but it would not be entirely inaccurate to call the Four Just Men of the TV series the Four Bleeding Hearts. They seem afraid to get their hands dirty and the stories are somewhat sentimental and predictable. There’s no sense of moral ambiguity. These are men who seem to view the world in terms of conventional moral platitudes. 

The writing is a little weak also - there’s a reluctance to take risks. The tone of the series is unbearably earnest and self-satisfied, reminiscent of the worst excesses of the Hollywood “social problem” movies of that era. The audience cannot be trusted to form their own conclusions - they have to be bludgeoned into accepting the writers’ conclusions. The writing is manipulative. It’s like being lectured to.

The writing has other blemishes. In The Judge, one of the episodes featuring Richard Conte, we discover that all small-town people are dumb, vicious, small-minded hypocrites and every official in every small town is corrupt. Big city people on the other hand are all honest and fearless crusaders for social justice. In Village of Shame we discover that every single person in France was in the Resistance during the war. Both are irritating examples of lazy writing.

Episodes like Dead Man’s Switch are examples of this series at its absolute worst - nauseatingly self-righteous and manipulative to a degree that becomes positively offensive. This is an episode that illustrates the contempt that politically motivated writers so often have for their audience. It treats the viewer like a small child being lectured by Nanny.

On the plus side the series does feature two of my favourite actors, Jack Hawkins and Richard Conte. They both do their best despite the scripts but unfortunately it shows Conte at his worst, smug and irritatingly self-righteous.. Dan Dailey is OK, but Vittorio de Sica is a bit cringe-inducingly earnest.

By the standards of 1959 this was a rather expensive series, which may have been the factor that sealed its fate after a single season. It ruined Sapphire Films, although on the evidence of this series that might not have been a bad thing.

The money spent on the series doesn’t really show - it still has the very studio-bound feel we associate with TV of the 50s and 60s.

On the whole this series is a major disappointment. This is not just bad television; it is truly awful television. It proves that even in television’s golden age there were still some prize turkeys. Network DVD have done quite a nice job with the DVD release though.

It Takes a Thief (1968-70), season 1

It Takes a Thief was a spy series that ran from 1968 to 1970 on the American ABC network. It follows what was by then a well-established formula for such series that had been lain down by series such as The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and Mission: Impossible.

All three seasons have been released on DVD but at this stage it’s the first season I’m concerned with, for the very good reason that it’s the only one I’ve bought so far.

Alexander Mundy (Robert Wagner) is a very successful cat burglar. At least he was very successful until he got caught and found himself facing a very long spell in prison. Not a very pleasant prospect, especially for a thief who had developed a very definite taste for the finer things in life. Then Mundy receives an offer he can’t refuse. He can get out of prison, but only on the condition that in future he does his thieving for the US government. One of the major intelligence agencies has decided that such a skillful thief would make a very useful spy. 

Being a spy doesn’t especially appeal to Mundy but it sure beats sitting in a prison cell. 

Noah Bain (Malachi Throne) is the intelligence chief who recruited Mundy and now acts as his controller. Mundy is not the easiest of agents to control, but then Noah Bain is not the easiest of bosses to work for.

The premise of the series means that it is even more rigidly bound to a formula than most spy series. Since Mundy’s only secret agent skill is his ability to steal things every episode has to be built around that one skill. In every episode Mundy has to break into, or talk his way into, some very well-protected building of some sort and steal something, or occasionally plant something.

By this time television producers in the US (and to a large extent Britain as well) had arrived at the conclusion that the best way to disguise the fact that all the plots were very similar was to send the hero to exotic locations which would with any luck make the same basic plots seem reasonably fresh. Obviously no television series boasted budgets big enough to fly the cast and crew to actual exotic locations, so the exotic atmosphere was achieved by the judicious use of stock footage, the right kind of set dressing, and supporting players who could assume foreign accents (not always very convincing but convincing enough). Since most of the adventures would take place in mythical countries there was no need to worry too much about making costumes and accents accurate as long as they looked suitably foreign.

It Takes a Thief follows this formula to the letter. While it’s certainly not a ground-breaking show it’s executed with considerable style and was successful enough to last for three seasons.

In common with so many television series of its era the formula received a minor makeover for the third season, with the departure of Malachi Throne and the introduction of a new hero. The new hero was Alexander Mundy’s father Alistair, played by no less a personage than Fred Astaire. The idea was that Alistair would take over the lead role in occasional episodes. Astaire eventually appeared in five episodes. But as I’ve only seen the first season I’ll leave discussion of the later series to another time.

The absolutely crucial ingredient for a series of this type is the right hero played by the right actor and Robert Wagner fills the bill admirably. In some ways Alexander Mundy is an American version of The Saint - a sophisticated playboy type who hasn’t always been on the right side of the law but is now one of the good guys. And Wagner’s acting style is not wildly dissimilar to Roger Moore’s - it’s slightly tongue-in-cheek and very smooth and with plenty of charisma. Wagner can’t quite match Moore in the charisma department but he’s more than adequate.

The most interesting aspect of the series is the relationship between Mundy and his boss Noah Bain. They don’t particularly like one another but there’s a grudging respect. Wagner and Malachi Throne handle this relationship extremely well, playing off one another very neatly.

Alexander Mundy being something of a playboy it goes without saying that he will have a succession of glamorous female guest stars on whom to exercise his charms. Wagner does this quite adroitly and without becoming irritating.

It Takes a Thief is a triumph of style over substance, but the style is impressive enough and the first season is highly entertaining action adventure television.

It Takes a Thief has been released on DVD in Regions 1, 2 and 4. In Region 1 you can buy the first season on its own (and it can be found at a fairly reasonable price), otherwise you have to buy the complete series package which is a little on the expensive side. In Region 4 you can buy the three seasons individually but all they’re all very pricey.