Jessica Walter Makes Her Exit

This sad news comes from The Hollywood Reporter:

Jessica Walter, the sassy actress who excelled at portraying unhinged types, from the obsessed fan of a radio deejay in Clint Eastwood’s Play Misty for Me to nutty matriarchs on Arrested Development and Archer, has died. She was 80.

Walter died Wednesday night at home in New York, her daughter, Fox Entertainment executive Brooke Bowman, said.

“It is with a heavy heart that I confirm the passing of my beloved mom, Jessica,” she said. “A working actor for over six decades, her greatest pleasure was bringing joy to others through her storytelling both on screen and off. While her legacy will live on through her body of work, she will also be remembered by many for her wit, class and overall joie de vivre.”

Rolling Stone magazine adds that “Walter began her career as a stage actor in her hometown of New York City, working at the famed Playwright’s Horizons and landing roles in Broadway productions such as Advise and Consent, Neil Simon’s Rumors, A Severed Head, Nightlife, and Photo Finish, for which she earned the Clarence Derwent Award for Most Promising Newcomer. Outside of New York, she starred in Tartuffe opposite her husband, the late Emmy- and Tony-winning actor Ron Liebman, at the Los Angeles Theater Center. More recently, she was cast in the 2011 Broadway revival of Anything Goes, which won several Tony Awards.”

Walter racked up a lengthy collection of film and TV credits, dating back to the 1950s. She appeared in her youth on such dramas as Naked City, East Side/West Side, The Defenders, and The Fugitive. She went on to capture parts in movies such as The Group, Grand Prix, and the aforementioned Play Misty for Me, and in small-screen series ranging from It Takes a Thief, Banyon, and Banacek to Columbo, The Streets of San Francisco, and Murder, She Wrote. In 1975, Walter won an Emmy Award for Amy Prentiss, an Ironside spin-off and short-lived NBC Mystery Movie series, on which she played the San Francisco Police Department’s first woman chief of detectives. She was later nominated three times for her portrayal of manipulative and quotable Lucille Bluth on Arrested Development. Walter also provided the voice of spymaster Malory Archer on the FXX-TV animated show Archer.

She passed away just over two years after Liebman, her second husband—to whom she’d been married for 36 years—died at age 82.

(Hat tip to The Spy Command.)

READ MORE: “Jessica Walter and George Segal Personified a Time When Movies Grew Up,” by Ann Hornaday (The Washington Post).

“This Is Not a Women’s Lib Drama”

Following my mention last week of the 1974-1975 TV program Amy Prentiss, one of the less-well-remembered segments of the classic NBC Mystery Movie “wheel series,” several Rap Sheet readers wrote to me, inquiring whether I knew anything more about that show. I’m sorry to say I don’t, really. I clearly remember watching all three episodes of that Ironside spin-off, plus the pilot, but I do not have any of them on tape or DVD.

However, in digging through my files earlier this week, I came across a time-yellowed newspaper clipping from the Portland Oregonian in which star Jessica Walter talks with Francis Murphy, then the broadsheet’s TV columnist, about winning her small-screen role as the San Francisco Police Department’s first woman chief of detectives. I’m only guessing, based on the fact that this article mentions the Amy Prentiss pilot in the past tense (it was broadcast on May 23, 1974) and alludes to a Hawaii Five-O episode to “be shown this fall,” that it was published sometime during the summer of ’74. (Unfortunately, I was too young at the time I scissored this out of Oregon’s largest daily paper to realize that it might be useful someday to have written the date on it!)

For anyone who’s interested, the Murphy column is featured on the left. Simply click on the image to enlarge and read it.

Hills of Homicide: The Mysteries of San Francisco -- TV Series

There have been a number of American TV crime dramas over the years that used San Francisco as a setting, even if they weren’t always shot on location. Most have disappeared into history without significant lamentations. How many of you, for instance, remember Killer Instinct, a 2005 series that focused on a unit of the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) charged with “track[ing] down the perpetrators of unusual crimes within the city”? How about The Lineup (aka San Francisco Beat), or Racket Squad, or Shannon, which starred Kevin Dobson as a former New York cop who moves to the Bay Area? And did you ever tune in to Wolf, or The Evidence, or even San Francisco International Airport, which starred Lloyd Bridges and debuted in 1970 as part of a “wheel series” with Dennis Weaver’s McCloud?

On the other hand, this most mesmeric metropolis has served as the backdrop for some detective and cop programs that were popular during their first runs, and are worth watching again. At least those that are available in DVD format. Below are the 10 I recall most fondly, not necessarily in order of endurance or excellence.

1. The Streets of San Francisco (1972-1977). The granddaddy of San Francisco crime dramas, and actually shot in the city, this Quinn Martin production starred the prominently broken-nosed Karl Malden and Michael Douglas as SFPD detectives. Lieutenant Mike Stone (Malden) was a trenches-scarred veteran, newly partnered with Assistant Inspector Steve Keller (Douglas), a considerably younger and less-experienced cop who figured he could teach the old dog some new tricks, but wound up becoming Stone’s student instead. San Francisco was lovingly showcased in Streets, whether the camera was turned on the Ferry Building, Chinatown, the Bay Bridge, or Fisherman’s Wharf.

2. McMillan & Wife (1971-1977). Although it was often likened to the old movie series inspired by Dashiell Hammett’s 1934 novel, The Thin Man, McMillan & Wife had neither the torrent of witticisms nor the cute little fox terrier that drew viewers to Nick and Nora Charles’ adventures. What it did have, though, were longtime film star Rock Hudson, who played the city’s unusually in-the-midst-of-the-action police commissioner, Stewart “Mac” McMillan, and the lovely Susan Saint James (formerly the only regular on The Name of the Game) playing his trouble-prone spouse, Sally. This pair often found themselves helping society friends who had been ripped off, stumbling across corpses in their hillside home, or investigating figures from Mac’s past. Unfortunately, a contract disagreement led to Saint James’ departure from the series at the end of Season 5 (with viewers being told that Sally had perished in a plane crash) and its renaming as McMillan. Without its romantic undercurrents, the show’s popularity tumbled and it--like the NBC Mystery Movie of which it was a part--lasted only a year more.

3. Crazy Like a Fox (1984-1986). Straight-laced types always make good butts of humor, so this CBS series featured the always-watchable Jack Warden as Harry Fox,

a fly-by-the-seat-of-his pants private eye who frequently ropes his married, conservative attorney son, Harrison (John Rubinstein), into helping him solve cases. “Aw, come on son. All I need is a ride. What could possibly happen?” Harry asks in the show’s opener. The answer, of course, is everything. And that was the delight of watching the fast-paced Crazy Like a Fox, seeing how deep Harry could get himself and his worrywart son into trouble, and to what outrageous extent they’d have to go to dig themselves out of it again.

4. Ironside (1967-1975). Coming off his success as the star of Perry Mason (1957-1966), actor Raymond Burr played former SFPD Chief of Detectives Robert T. Ironside. An ever-impatient and frequently foul-mouthed cop whose shooting had left him in a wheelchair, Ironside was relegated to a different sort of investigative role, operating as a citizen volunteer with backup from a couple of police associates, Detective Sergeant Ed Brown (Don Galloway) and plainclothes officer Eve Whitfield (Barbara Anderson). Later, the lovely Elizabeth Baur, playing Policewoman Fran Belding, replaced Anderson. Throughout, Don Mitchell turned in excellent performances as Ironside’s reformed-delinquent assistant, Mark Sanger. Episodes found “the Chief” helping all classes of San Franciscans, the rich and the poor, the hip and the square. The stories tackled thorny issues (abortion and suicide), and much was made of the contrast between Ironside’s gruff exterior and the loyalty he engendered in his associates, who always seemed to be one step away from catching a bullet or being kidnapped.

5. Nash Bridges (1996-2001). One of the things I appreciated about this series was that star Don Johnson didn’t just try and re-create, on the opposite American coast, the success he had enjoyed as super-stylin’ Sonny Crockett in Miami Vice. Instead, he gave the character of Bridges, an inspector (later captain) with the SFPD’s Special Investigations Unit, a much deeper and more layered personality than we ever saw exhibited by the tightly wound Crockett. Bridges also had a much different partner in the form of Inspector Joe Dominguez (Cheech Marin), a life-loving guy who had the tendency to slip blithely into personal situations that demanded Bridges’ special brand of butt-saving. Like Crockett, Bridges boasted a flashy ride--an electric yellow 1971 Plymouth Barracuda convertible--and he could stimulate the libido of a woman at 40 paces. However, Miami Vice rarely exhibited humor, while Nash Bridges was rife with it. You got the sense that Johnson was showing more of his real self here than he had previously. Yet he and Marin weren’t the only two who lent strength, poignancy, and playful eccentricity to this show. Special kudos to Kelly Hu (who played Inspector Michelle Chan), Jodi Lyn O’Keefe (as Bridges’ fetching daughter, Cassidy), and James Gammon (who featured as Bridges’ dementia-suffering father).

6. Hooperman (1987-1989). This show, created by Steven Bochco and Terry Louise Fisher (who were also behind L.A. Law), was really more of a comedy-drama than an out-and-out crime series. Nonetheless, it had a great deal of charm and belongs on this

list. Former Three’s Company star John Ritter led the cast as an SFPD plainclothes detective, Harry Hooperman, who has recently inherited both a dilapidated apartment building and a dog, but can only blame himself for his personal problems. His fellow cops provide ample humorous distractions, especially the redneck inspector and a comely young female officer (Sydney Walsh) who launches repeated advances toward the persistently unmarried Hooperman, if only to prevent his turning gay. But after hiring a new manager for his apartment building (played by Debrah Farentino), Hooperman hardly needs look further for love. This is one of those shows that cries out for a DVD release.

7. Have Gun--Will Travel (1957-1963). We never heard more than his surname: Paladin. Or maybe that was his first name, or not his name at all. In any event, he resided at the elegant Hotel Carlton in San Francisco during the 1870s, was a West Point graduate, and had come to be known in town as something of a dandy, donning swank attire and attending opera performances. On top of that, Paladin (played by Richard Boone) was a gunfighter, though he preferred to settle disputes with a minimum of bloodshed. He handed around his calling cards--marked with a chess piece and the slogan, “Have Gun--Will Travel”--and for a $1,000 fee served as a sort of “a knight without armor,” extricating clients from whatever trouble had sought them out. The last thing robbers, card sharps, and blackmailers wanted to see coming toward them on a dusty western trail was Paladin in his all-black clothing, his Colt revolvers at his side. A decade after Have Gun was canceled, Boone returned to television as another gunfighter, Hec Ramsey, though this one had shed his quick-trigger ways to become a frontier detective. “You know,” he once said, “Hec Ramsey is a lot like Paladin, only fatter.”

8. Checkmate (1960-1962). Created by none other than thriller writer Eric Ambler (Journey into Fear, A Coffin for Dimitrios), this CBS series starred Anthony George and Doug McClure as private investigators Don Corey and Jed Sills, respectively, the owners and operators of Checkmate, Inc. Sebastian Cabot (later to feature in the sitcom Family Affair) appeared as tweedy British criminologist and college professor Dr. Carl Hyatt, an adviser to the agency. The gimmick--and the source of their firm’s name--was that Corey, Sills, and Hyatt prevented crimes before they actually happened, rather than solving them after the fact. The trio originally employed Corey’s Nob Hill apartment as their base of operations (enjoying the city views that were available from there), but during the second season moved to a much less interesting suite of offices. Blogger Ivan G. Shreve reviews some of Checkmate’s best episodes here.

9. Amy Prentiss (1974-1975). Like McMillan & Wife, Amy Prentiss was part of the NBC Mystery Movie rotation, but it enjoyed far less acclaim. Although star Jessica Walter received an Emmy for her lead role, only three regular episodes of this series were made. A fourth--the pilot, “Amy Prentiss: AKA The Chief,” directed by Boris Sagal--was actually the final, two-hour episode of Ironside in May 1974. Prentiss found Walter, then in her mid-30s, playing an SFPD lieutenant who defies the odds to become the department’s new chief of detectives. Not surprisingly, this doesn’t sit at all well with some of her sexist male colleagues, so Prentiss has to be both tougher and smarter than her detractors. It looked like an uphill road. For instance, in the show’s first Mystery Movie installment, “Baptism by Fire,” a detective played by William Shatner just can’t give Prentiss enough grief while she is trying to concentrate on investigating a mad bomber. The show didn’t last long enough for us to see whether she could ever win over her critics. An interesting note: Helen Hunt appeared as the widowed Prentiss’ pre-teen daughter, Jill.

10. Monk (2002-2009). I must confess that I was never a big Monk enthusiast, which is why this USA Network show finds itself in my list’s No. 10 spot. I thought there was waaaaaaay too much attention paid to cop-turned-gumshoe Adrian Monk’s obsessive-compulsive disorder and too little effort made to just tell mystery stories that held together logically. The leaps of faith viewers were sometimes asked to make would have been impossible even for Olympics-trained athletes. At the same time, Tony Shalhoub did an excellent job of making Mr. Monk memorable in the annals of TV sleuths, and Captain Leland Stottlemeyer (Ted Levine) served as a splendid foil for Monk’s quirky doings. I was also quite fond of Monk’s second personal assistant, Natalie Teeger (Traylor Howard), a widow and mother who somehow managed to keep her employer in wipes and out of a straitjacket. (His original assistant, Sharona Fleming [Bitty Schram], was shrill and cartoonish by comparison.) While Monk supposedly took place in San Francisco, most episodes were shot either in Canada or in Los Angeles. Still, there were enough scenes filmed around Union Square, Nob Hill, and Chinatown to show respect for the city Monk called home.

Honorable Mention: I think the mostly forgotten Barbary Coast (1975-1976) failed in many respects, not only as a Western-detective series but as a portrayer of what San Francisco was really like during the 1870s. Still, I have a warm place in my heart for that program, which starred William Shatner as an undercover government agent working to clean up the town’s seediest quarter, and Doug McClure as the casino owner who supplied him (ever so reluctantly) with a secret deluxe apartment and valuable investigative assistance. The concept had much greater promise than was ever realized. Nonetheless, speaking as somebody with a tremendous love of San Francisco history, it was fun to journey back into the city’s past for one hour every week.

Get Wheel

I’ve been waiting for months to post this YouTube video, and with the 2007 fall television season beginning in earnest this week, now seems like the right moment.

Yeah, yeah, I know: There’s been a good deal of boob-tube nostalgia suffusing this page of late, what with our tributes to Columbo and its star, Peter Falk; our midlife mooning over The Fall Guy’s gal, Heather Thomas; and our remarks on how much better the 1972 television season was than the one before us. But allow me one more indulgence, for it was on this date, 35 years ago, that I officially became a crime-fiction enthusiast. That night, which was a Sunday, marked the season premiere of the NBC Sunday Mystery Movie, a “wheel-format” series that featured four quite different 90-minute TV mysteries in monthly rotation. Two had debuted together on Wednesday evenings during the 1971-1972 season. One had actually been introduced in 1970. And the last was brand new. All of them stirred my imagination and conspired to make me the crime-fiction fan I am today.

As originally configured, the Mystery Movie comprised a trio of series. The first of these had been introduced by a February 1970 TV flick called McCloud: Who Killed Miss USA? As Richard Meyers recalls in his 1981 history, TV Detectives, that feature found Dennis Weaver playing a matchstick-chewing marshal out of Taos, New Mexico, “who comes to New York to extradite a subpoenaed witness, only to see the witness shanghaied and find himself handcuffed to a fence along a highway. From there he gets involved with the murder of a pageant contestant and runs afoul of the NYPD ...” Inspired by Clint Eastwood’s 1969 film Coogan’s Bluff, and penned by the legendary team of Richard Levinson and William Link (who had previously created the private-eye drama Mannix), this teleflick spawned a series the following fall, part of NBC’s “umbrella rotation,” Four-in-One. It was a peculiar collection, as Four’s three other hour-long, Wednesday night components--Night Gallery, a horror anthology hosted by The Twilight Zone’s Rod Serling; San Francisco International Airport, which found ex-Sea Hunt stud Lloyd Bridges managing (and just as often policing) the Bay Area’s busy travel hub; and The Psychiatrist, with Roy Thinnes as an unorthodox “shrink”--had nothing to do with crime fiction. Only McCloud and Night Gallery survived their first year; the latter took over Four-in-One’s 10 p.m. slot by itself in 1971, while McCloud--which NBC apparently liked, but did not think could survive on its own--was tucked in with a pair of newcomers in a rotating, 90-minute slot on Wednesdays, just before Night Gallery.

The first of those two raw recruits was the aforementioned Columbo, which was also created by Levinson and Link, and starred Emmy Award winner Falk, who’d received critical acclaim but lesser ratings in a previous TV series venture, The Trials of O’Brien (1965-1966). Columbo was the first show to debut in mid-September 1971 in the NBC Mystery Movie’s new 8:30-10 p.m. slot.

The other series was McMillan & Wife, which came along just in time to save longtime film star Rock Hudson from early retirement. As TV Detectives puts it, “Hudson had proved his acting ability in The Spiral Road (1962) and Seconds (1966), but people still thought of him as Doris Day’s screen husband. When he reached middle age, his roles began to dry up, but he remedied the problem by going into TV ...” McMillan cast Hudson, then in his mid-40s, as lawyer-turned-San Francisco police commissioner Stewart “Mac” McMillan, whose lovely but trouble-magnet spouse was played by former The Name of the Game regular Susan Saint James, then in her mid-20s. (Much was made on the show, at least in early episodes, of this May-December coupling). Created by writer-producer Leonard B. Stern, McMillan & Wife has been described before as part The Thin Man, part Burns and Allen, with “Sally ... as wacky as Gracie and as prone to finding corpses as Nora (or Mrs. North, for that matter),” to quote Richard Meyers. With John Schuck as a well-intentioned but often bumbling police sergeant, and comedienne Nancy Walker as the McMillans’ housekeeper, the show was “so frothy and watchable that disbelief was suspended ...”

For reasons I no longer recall, but that undoubtedly had to do with the fact that Wednesday was a school night and I was still a young teen, I didn’t catch these three series in their first year. It wasn’t until the 1972 fall TV season--when Columbo, McCloud, and McMillan & Wife were relocated on the programming schedule under the modified umbrella title The NBC Sunday Mystery Movie, to make room for a second rotating sequence of mystery dramas, The NBC Wednesday Mystery Movie (which initially comprised Banacek, Cool Million, and Madigan)--that I finally caught up with them.

That was the same year a fourth series joined Columbo, et al.: Hec Ramsey. Produced by Dragnet’s Jack Webb, it starred Richard Boone (Have Gun--Will Travel) as a previously quick-to-draw lawman, Hector “Hec” Ramsey, who had developed a great interest in the aborning science of forensics. After taking the job of deputy police chief in an ambitious Oklahoma railroad town called New Prospect, in 1901, Ramsey set about employing his newfound knowledge to solve murders that seemed, on their face, anyway, to present no clues. In his efforts, he was hampered by an inexperienced but earnest young boss, Oliver B. Stamp (Rick Lenz), but helped by an imperturbable town doctor (played by Webb’s old Dragnet partner, Harry Morgan).

The video at the top of this post is of the NBC Sunday Mystery Movie’s main title sequence, either from 1972 or 1973, after Hec Ramsey was integrated into the mix. Even after all these years, I still get a thrill whenever I hear that dramatic theme music, composed by American arranger-conductor Henry Mancini (probably best remembered for writing the themes for The Pink Panther and Peter Gunn, and the song “Moon River” for Breakfast at Tiffany’s).

Unfortunately, times change. And TV shows--even memorable ones--disappear. By the 1974-1975 season, the NBC Wednesday Mystery Movie was no more, and its Sunday sister would revert to being called, simply, the NBC Mystery Movie again. Meanwhile, Hec Ramsey had been canceled, supposedly because of “unresolvable disagreements between Boone and Universal Studios,” which produced the western detective drama. It was replaced in the fall of 1974 by Amy Prentiss, an Ironside spin-off series in which Jessica Walter played the San Francisco Police Department’s first female chief of detectives--a position that forced her to do battle with institutional sexism (sometimes pitched her way by an overconfident detective portrayed by William Shatner), at the same time as she worked to solve crimes and rear her pre-teen daughter, Jill (played by Helen Hunt). But only a year later, Amy Prentiss was gone and McCoy, headlined by Tony Curtis, had taken its place. You don’t remember McCoy? Well, you’re probably not alone. The Web site American Classic TV Series offers this brief synopsis:

The McCoy character was a curious concept--a con man with a gambling addiction decides to turn over a new leaf and become a latter-day Robin Hood--to help those who have been financially victimized to regain their money and put the perpetrators in jail.

The concept may have had more than a passing co-incidence with that of the hit 1973 movie “The Sting” in which a con man cons a notorious mob figure and card cheat.

Only four episodes of McCoy were broadcast, before it too went to that great cutting room in the sky. The hole left behind was filled during the fall 1976 season by Quincy, M.E., starring The Odd Couple’s Jack Klugman as a Los Angeles County medical examiner who lived on a houseboat and seemed unable to resist investigating crimes that he, if nobody else, thought were damnably suspicious. Quincy lasted half a year on the Mystery Movie before being cast off as a separate hour-long, weekly series. (It continued showing on NBC till 1983.) After that, the new fourth member of the Sunday rotation was Lanigan’s Rabbi, based on Harry Kemelman’s then-popular Rabbi Small novels (Friday the Rabbi Slept Late, etc.). It starred Art Carney as a small-town California police chief who solved crimes with a modicum of divine assistance from his friend, amateur sleuth Rabbi David Small (Bruce Solomon).

Carney always proved to be a watchable performer, but Lanigan’s Rabbi (which was also created by Leonard B. Stern) may have been doomed from the outset, because the Mystery Movie formula was then in its last throes. That same season, Susan Saint James finally divorced herself from McMillan & Wife, leaving Hudson to limp along (and I do mean limp--the show was never the same) in the retitled McMillan. (Wife Sally’s obvious absence was explained by a deadly plane crash.) In 1974, all of the rotating shows had been boosted from their original 90-minute format to two hours long, and many of the stories thereafter seemed rather flabby. Other wheel series had come and gone, and collectively they seemed to have worn out their welcome. Even I, by 1976, was tuning in the NBC Mystery Movie less regularly. The prime-time U.S. TV schedule was blessedly rife with P.I. and police shows by then, and the Mystery Movie series no longer seemed as remarkable as they once had.

Yet now, 35 years later and at a time when most crime/mystery series are either too cute or overly repetitive for my taste, Columbo, McMillan & Wife, McCloud, and their companions are looking awfully good again. All it takes for me is to hear the bouncy theme from McCloud or watch the introduction to McMillan & Wife once more, and I am overcome with nostalgia for those character-driven, often quirky Mystery Movie installments that helped turn my curiosity about crime fiction into a lifelong interest.

READ MORE: “The NBC Mystery Movie” and “A Short History of
Umbrella Series,” by Mercurie (A Shroud of Thoughts); “NBC Mystery Movie Series Guide.”