Clear the Way for Mac and Sally

This last Wednesday brought us one significant small-screen anniversary, a full half-century having passed since Columbo made its debut as part of the equally new NBC Mystery Movie “wheel series.” Today offers another. It has now been an amazing 50 years since Once Upon a Dead Man—the two-hour pilot film for McMillan & Wife, another popular Mystery Movie component—was first broadcast on Friday, September 17, 1971. The teleflick’s competition that evening included the second-season opener of the ABC sitcom The Partridge Family; the debut of David Janssen’s third boob-tube drama, CBS’ ill-fated O’Hara, United States Treasury; the ABC comedy Love, American Style; and the CBS “world premiere” of Terror in the Sky, based on blockbuster best-seller Arthur Hailey’s 1956 television play, Flight into Danger.

Once Upon a Dead Man starred Rock Hudson as Stewart “Mac” McMillan, a defense attorney turned police commissioner of San Francisco, who took an extraordinarily active role in criminal investigations; and Susan Saint James (formerly of The Name of the Game) playing Sally McMillan, the commissioner’s two-decades-younger spouse, whose tendency to attract trouble was fortunately paired with her own skills at crime solving—she was, after all, born to a legendary Bay Area criminologist. Regarding the plot of that teleflick (written by Leonard B. Stern and Chester Krumholz), it found Sally drawing Mac into a charity-auction theft … which inevitably led to murder. John Schuck (who’d previously been seen in episodes of M*A*S*H, Gunsmoke, and Mission: Impossible) took the role of Sergeant Charles Enright, Mac’s phlegmatic and sometimes laughably obtuse assistant. Further filling out the cast were Jack Albertson, René Auberjonois, Kurt Kasznar, James Wainwright, the then-ubiquitous Herb Edelman, and Lost in Space’s Jonathan Harris. (Nancy Walker, who would receive three Emmy Award nominations for her supporting role as the McMillans’ grouchy housekeeper, Mildred, didn’t appear in this pilot; she only joined the series with its first regular episode, “Murder by the Barrel,” shown on September 29, 1971.)

As the TV Guide ad above asserts, Once Upon a Dead Man was intended to “generate laughs and suspense.” That should’ve been amended to read “smiles and suspense”—it wasn’t a comedy, after all. However, it did feature splendid, playful repartee between Hudson and Saint James, as well as an unusual but delightful bicycle pursuit through the streets of San Francisco, surely meant as a spoof on Steve McQueen’s squealing car chase in the 1968 film Bullitt.

Curiously, while McMillan & Wife is one of the vintage TV series (together with Banacek, McCloud, and others) added just this month to the lineup at IMDb TV, Amazon’s free, ad-supported streaming service, Once Upon a Dead Man is omitted from the episodes available. To watch it nowadays, you may have to spring for the complete series on DVD. Below you’ll find the movie’s opening title sequence.



Oh, and if you’re confused by the second new show being promoted in the ad atop this post, you’re probably not alone. The D.A., which also debuted on this date 50 years ago, was Robert Conrad’s third series, following Hawaiian Eye and The Wild Wild West. According to Wikipedia, the half-hour drama had Conrad playing Paul Ryan, “a tough-minded, hard-hitting prosecutor” for Los Angeles County. Aided by criminal investigator Bob Ramirez (ex-Dan August co-star Ned Romero), Ryan “prosecuted all types of cases under the watchful eye of his supervisor, Chief Deputy District Attorney H.M. ‘Staff’ Stafford (Harry Morgan, who directed at least one episode himself). His opponent was usually Public Defender Katherine Benson (Julie Cobb).”

Employing a half-investigation, half-prosecution format that had been used in the earlier ABC-TV series Arrest and Trial (1963-1964), and would work to superior effect on NBC’s Law & Order (1990-2010), The D.A. was a production from actor, director, and screenwriter Jack Webb, spun off from a couple of TV films made by Webb’s company, Mark VII Ltd.: 1969’s Murder One and Conspiracy to Kill from 1971, “both of which fictionalized cases prosecuted by Vincent Bugliosi, world-famous as the prosecutor of Charles Manson.” Despite helpful hype in TV Guide and other sources, the series lasted only 15 episodes, the final regular installment appearing on January 7, 1972. However, again quoting Wikipedia, "some episodes were later compiled in 1978 as a two-hour TV movie titled Confessions of the D.A. Man which aired on CBS on January 20, 1978, as part of The CBS Late Movie.”

To read more about The D.A., click here.

A Tough Guy Finally Bows Out

Robert Conrad’s image may have been served poorly by some of his best-remembered TV roles. He came off as too robust, too shallowly macho, and often too arrogant to be very interesting. Yet Terence Towles Canote, writing in his blog A Shroud of Thoughts, says that the 5-foot-8 actor (born Konrad Robert Falkowski in Chicago on March, 1 1935) was also “truly a nice guy. … When he liked you no one could be better to you. He was a man who was fiercely loyal to his friends and very protective of them. Robert Conrad may have been a tough guy, but he was one with an enormous heart.”

Conrad died of heart failure this last Saturday in Malibu, California. He was 84 years old. He’d not set out to become famous; that’s just the way things happened. The Associated Press says Conrad was “a football player in school” and his “first job was loading trucks. Then at 18 he was hired to drive milk wagons. He tried boxing and nightclub singing for a time before drifting into acting and eventually moving to Hollywood, where he found work as a stuntman.” (Even after he established himself as a leading man, Conrad continued to do many of his own stunts. The Hollywood Reporter observes that “He was one of the few actors to have been inducted into the Stuntmen's Hall of Fame.”)

In 1965 the then-30-year-old actor was hired to play U.S. government agent James West in CBS-TV’s The Wild Wild West, a historical adventure series with science-fiction elements that ran for only four seasons, but—thanks to broad and continuing syndication—made Conrad’s face one of the most familiar on the small screen. (Rory Calhoun had evidently also been a contender for that role. How different history might have been had he been cast as West, instead.) Conrad went on to headline several more TV dramas, including Assignment: Vienna, Baa Baa Black Sheep, and High Mountain Rangers (1988); guest-star in shows such as Columbo (on which he played a “loathsome” fitness franchise kingpin), Police Story, the mini-series Centennial, and the Stephen J. Cannell-created crime drama J.J. Starbuck; and feature in numerous TV films, from 1970’s Weekend of Terror to One Police Plaza, based on William J. Caunitz’s 1984 novel of that same name. He also exploited his tough-guy persona in a succession of boob-tube advertisements for Eveready batteries (that had him daring anyone to knock a battery from his shoulder) and with appearances on several Battle of the Network Stars specials, in which he came off as unappealingly hyper-competitive.

Rather than repeat what has been written about Conrad and his career in recent days, let me instead post—below—the main title sequences (where available) from some of TV shows in which he starred.

Hawaiian Eye (ABC, 1959-1963): Conrad guest-starred on a variety of small-screen series, including Bat Masterson, Maverick, Sea Hunt, and 77 Sunset Strip, before joining the cast of Hawaiian Eye. This once-popular crime drama (shot primarily on Los Angeles studio lots, not in the then-new 50th state), found Conrad playing detective Tom Lopaka, the same role he’d filled in four episodes of Strip.

The Wild Wild West (CBS, 1965-1969): As a boy, I was introduced to Conrad’s work through this show (which I watched in weekend reruns, long after its original presentation). Set during the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant (1869-1876), it starred Conrad as an incredibly resourceful U.S. Secret Service agent, James West. Together with fellow agent—and master of disguise—Artemus Gordon (Ross Martin), Conrad’s character “solved crimes, protected the president, and foiled the plans of megalomaniacal villains to take over part or all of the United States,” recalls Wikipedia. “The show featured a number of fantasy elements, such as the technologically advanced devices used by the agents and their adversaries.” A full decade after CBS cancelled this series, Conrad and Martin returned to their famous roles in a couple of rather satirical (and mediocre) TV flicks, The Wild Wild West Revisited (1979) and More Wild Wild West (1980).

The Adventures of Nick Carter (ABC, 1972): Wild Wild West ran afoul of the U.S. Congress during its fourth season, when the nation’s elected representatives pronounced themselves shocked, just shocked by the proliferation of televised violence. This series pilot was also caught up in, and doomed by, that extended frenzy. It starred Conrad as Nick Carter, a character who had debuted in 1886 as a “dime novel” detective. Planned as part of a “wheel series” called Great Detectives (which would also feature shows built around Sherlock Holmes and Hildegarde Withers), The Adventures of Nick Carter was set in the New York City of 1912 and co-starred Brooke Bundy as Carter’s quite charming assistant, Roxy O’Rourke. Its plot found Carter searching for the missing wife of a wealthy robber baron playboy, and at the same time trying to solve the murder of a close friend. Unfortunately, ABC declined to pick up Nick Carter as a series character. At last check, this pilot film was available on YouTube.

The D.A. (NBC, 1971-1972): Dragnet’s Jack Webb cast Conrad as hard-nosed Los Angeles assistant district attorney Paul Ryan in two teleflicks— The D.A.: Murder One (1969) and The D.A.: Conspiracy to Kill (1971)—before launching a Friday-night series around that same protagonist. This drama employed a half-investigation, half-prosecution format that had been used in the earlier Arrest and Trial, and would be used again to maximum effect in Law & Order. One regrettabe decision was to make this program only half an hour long, which caused problems when it came to explaining difficult court cases. Only 15 episodes were broadcast before cancellation.

Assignment: Vienna (ABC, 1972-1973): One of three hour-long Thursday-night series rotating under the umbrella title The Men, this spy show-cum-detective drama found Conrad in the role of Jake Webster, the owner of a classy watering hole in Vienna, Austria (the eponymous Jake’s Bar & Grill), who also happened to be a U.S. intelligence operative “involved in tracking down various spies and international criminals,” as Wikipedia explains. Charles Cioffi played his U.S. government contact, Major Bernard Caldwell. I enjoyed this series immensely, partly because of its Vienna backdrop, and was sorry to see it cancelled after just eight episodes.

Baa Baa Black Sheep (NBC, 1976-1978): Taking a break from crime and espionage programs, Conrad signed on with legendary TV screenwriter-producer Stephen J. Cannell to star in this sometimes poignant World War II-era drama about a squadron of fighter pilots, all “misfits and screwballs” (hence their name, Black Sheep), who were stationed in the South Pacific. Conrad portrayed their commanding officer, Major Gregory “Pappy” Boyington, a role based loosely on that of a real-life combat pilot and “fighter ace” of that same name. Among the actors playing members of his crew were James Whitmore Jr., Dirk Blocker (son of Bonanza’s Dan Blocker), John Larroquette, and Larry Manetti. Thirty-seven episodes of Baa Baa Black Sheep (also known as Black Sheep Squadron) were broadcast.

The Duke (NBC, 1979): I don’t remember ever watching this short-lived series, but it was again produced by Stephen J. Cannell, and cast Conrad as Oscar “The Duke” Ramsey, a 38-year old Chicago prizefighter who, following some bad turns of luck, decides to quit the ring and open a bar and grill. But after his business partner is killed, “The Duke swings into action, solving the murder, and finding himself with a new occupation, private eye,” according to The Thrilling Detective Web Site. Above is the main title sequence from “The Two Hundred Underwacker Street Bridge,” the second of The Duke’s four episodes, with theme music composed by Mike Post and Pete Carpenter.

A Man Called Sloane (NBC, 1979): This half-season wonder starred Conrad as Thomas R. Sloane III, a freelance spy and “Top Priority Agent” for UNIT, described by Wikipedia as “a secret American intelligence operation run by The Director, played by Dan O’Herlihy.” In these adventures, Sloane was assisted by Torque (played by Ji-Tu Cumbuka), a large man boasting an equally oversize mechanical hand equipped with interchangeable parts (saw blades, drills, and such—often useful in their high-stakes escapades), as well as by Effie, a computer that spoke with the voice of actress Michele Carey. Of Sloane, comic-book writer Christopher Mills recalls: “Though the format harkened back to the ’60s and shows like The Man from U.N.C.L.E., it was still very much a product of its time, with ludicrous plots, lots of cheesecake, and Conrad’s patented macho swagger. Needless to say, I loved it as a kid.” Mills was such a fan, in fact, that he posted reviews of all 12 episodes of this series here. The opening title sequence embedded above comes from the show’s second installment, “The Seduction Squad.” At least one full episode of Sloane is available on YouTube: “The Venus Microbe,” guest-starring Morgan Fairchild as a novice private eye.

READ MORE: “Television’s Tough Guy: Robert Conrad,” by David Hofstede (Comfort TV).

Bullet Points: Eve of Haunts Edition

• Online voting has begun in the contest for the 2014 Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Awards. There are seven categories of nominees, but the one that may interest Rap Sheet readers most is the Ireland AM Crime Fiction Book of the Year. Here are the contenders:

-- Unravelling Oliver, by Liz Nugent (Penguin Ireland)
-- The Kill, by Jane Casey (Ebury Publishing)
-- The Final Silence, by Stuart Neville (Harvill Secker)
-- Can Anybody Help Me?, by Sinead Crowley (Quercus)
-- The Secret Place, by Tana French (Hachette Books Ireland)
-- Last Kiss, by Louise Phillips (Hachette Books Ireland)

Choose your favorites here. I don’t see anything about this competition being restricted to Irish citizens, but note that the voting will close at midnight on November 21.

• Unbidden but nonetheless willing, John Harvey--whose recent Charlie Resnick novel, Darkness, Darkness, I appreciated so much--has put together a list of what he says are his 25 favorite crime novels. “It will immediately become clear there are exceptions: no Hammett, no Chandler nor other ‘classic’ crime--so obvious that to mention them was, to my mind, unnecessary; and some writers--Michael Connelly would serve as an example--are not there on the grounds that the stream of their work is so strong, I would find it impossible to lift one prime example from the rest.” Among the novels that did merit inclusion are Megan Abbott’s The End of Everything, Kent Anderson’s Night Dogs, George V. Higgins’ The Friends of Eddie Coyle, and Daniel Woodrell’s Give Us a Kiss. You’ll find all of Harvey’s picks here.

• Who remembers the 1979 TV series A Man Called Sloane? My only recollection is that star Robert Conrad left another series, Stephen J. Cannell’s The Duke, after only a handful of episodes in order to play freelance spy Thomas R. Sloane III in this nearly as short-lived Quinn Martin production. Writer Christopher Mills, though, appreciated Sloane enough to compose an episode-by-episode series of posts in a blog called Spy-fi Channel. That blog is now defunct, but Mills is in the midst of revising those Sloane posts (“editing them a bit and adding a few new thoughts and observations”) for another of his blogs, Atomic Pulp and Other Meltdowns. Keep up with his series here.

• The latest update of The Thrilling Detective Web Site is now live. It includes editor Kevin Burton Smith’s “spontaneous tribute” to the late Rockford Files star, James Garner, and expanded entries on characters ranging from Stryker McBride and Joey Fly to Yakov Semenovich Stern and Steve Allen’s Los Angeles gumshoe, Roger Dale. Smith also brings the welcome news that Thrilling Detective finally has “a decent search engine,” which you can access here.

• I must admit, I envy author-educator Art Taylor for his recent opportunity to interview Otto Penzler on behalf of the Los Angeles Review of Books. They had a nice long talk about editor Penzler’s work on a couple of new short-story collections, The Best American Mystery Stories of the 19th Century (which I reviewed here) and The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked-Room Mysteries. Penzler also clues Taylor in on what he’s been working on “since January”: another major compilation, The Big Book of Sherlock Holmes Stories.

• Edward A. Grainger (aka David Cranmer) asks, in Criminal Element, why Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer, Detective (1896) hasn’t received more attention over the years--why has it “slipped through the cracks of popular reading?” He suggests it’s “because nothing can live up to the Great American Novel--Huckleberry Finn--that preceded it. Ernest Hemingway famously said, ‘All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.’ No such praise met Tom Sawyer: Detective, with the British Guardian’s original review harshly noting, ‘The whole story is poorly conceived and badly put together.’”

• Although I’ve missed the actual anniversary, I still want to bring attention to the fact that last week the Paul Newman-Robert Redford picture Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid marked 45 years since its general release on October 24, 1969. I’ve watched that romantic adventure many times, and hope for multiple more viewings. It’s just a fantastic film, with one of the best knife-fight scenes ever!

• There are now only two weeks left before the start of Bouchercon 2014 in Long Beach. In his BOLO Books blog, Kristopher Zgorski offers a selection of interesting “non-panel-related activities which will be happening during the conference.” Those include the “Author Speed Dating” event scheduled to be held at 8:30 a.m. on Thursday, November 13, during which more than 100 authors will “pitch” their books to Bouchercon attendees, hoping to attract new readers.

• Haven’t registered for Bouchercon? You can still do it here.

• Apparently, author Max Allan Collins (for whom the adjective “prolific” seems to have been invented) composed the liner notes for a new eight-CD set called Jazz on Fillm: Crime Jazz. He describes the line-up of pieces as “astonishing”: “77 Sunset Strip,” “Hawaiian Eye,” “Checkmate,” “Shotgun Slade,” “The Naked City,” “Richard Diamond,” “Bourbon Street Beat,” “M-Squad,” “The Untouchables,” “Peter Gunn,” “Mr. Lucky,” “Staccato” and “Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer”--“both the TV series soundtrack and the music from the rare Stan Purdy ‘Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer Story’ LP,” Collins explains. A list of the musicians represented in this CD set is here.

• Patricia Highsmith--comic book writer?

• One of my fellow Kirkus Reviews bloggers, John DeNardo, this week posted a list of “10 Things This Fan Was Surprised to Learn About Science Fiction.” I was no less taken aback by one of his factoids:

Robert A. Heinlein’s 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land is about a man named Valentine Michael Smith who was born and raised on Mars. The story concerns Smith’s trip to Earth and his first-ever interaction with Earth culture. The book is considered one of the most popular science-fiction novels of all time. What surprised me was learning that in 1968, the book inspired a man to found a Neopagan religious organization modeled after the religion founded by Smith in the novel, the beliefs of which include polyamory, social libertarianism and non-mainstream family structures.

You learn something new (and maybe weird) every day, I guess.

• I’m not convinced that we really need a new, American version of Wire in the Blood, the British ITV series that ran from 2002 to 2008 and was based on Val McDermid’s novels about a university clinical psychologist who works with police on serial-killer cases. Yet Crimespree Magazine brings word that ABC-TV is developing such a program with the help of a couple of veterans from the underappreciated Detroit 1-8-7. I know I’ve asked this before (and I shall probably ask it again in the future), but why can’t Hollywood come up with new ideas, rather than recycling old ones?

• This doesn’t sound good: In Reference to Murder reports that “CBS reduced the episode order for CSI to 18 episodes, down from 22. The show is in its 15th season, and this is the first time the drama will have produced less than a full season of episodes.”

• While looking back on the 1959 thriller Night Without End, Vintage Pop Fictions remarks that its author, Alistair MacLean, “does not deserve the relative oblivion into which he has fallen.” I made that same point last year in this piece for Kirkus Reviews.

• Brian Drake interviews Anonymous-9 (aka Elaine Ash) on the subject of Bite Harder, the sequel to her 2013 novel, Hard Bite.

• Finally, since tomorrow is Halloween, I’d be remiss in not linking you up with a few associated postings around the Web. TopTenz chooses the “Top 10 Most Haunted Cities in America,” while The Bowery Boys--an excellent New York City history blog--looks back at Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s stunning announcement, in April 1922, of “an extraordinary discovery--the existence of ectoplasm, the ghostly goo that emits from mediums possessed with the spirits of the dead.” Publishers Weekly tries to identify “The 10 Best Ghost Stories,” but both The Poisoned Martini and Too Much Horror Fiction have other suggestions. Terence Towles Canote rounds up his favorite horror film postings from A Shroud of Thoughts, while Vintage45’s Blog revisits Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), the 1969-1971 British TV program about a London private eye whose late partner is still helping him solve crimes--a show I previously wrote about here. And since this post can’t be completely serious, check out Cracked History’s eye-catching rundown of the “10 Sexiest Halloween Costumes.”

Tortes and Terrorists

Assignment: Vienna’s opening and closing sequences

As a young teenager, I thought this television series was so cool. It starred Robert Conrad, who I recalled fondly from The Wild Wild West. It was shot on location in the thoroughly romantic and historic city of Vienna, Austria. And Conrad’s character was a smooth, turtleneck-wearing bar owner named Jake Webster, who just happened to be a U.S. intelligence operative “involved in tracking down various spies and international criminals,” as Wikipedia reminds me. Yet Assignment: Vienna, one of three Thursday night detective series debuting on ABC-TV in the fall of 1972 (the others were Jigsaw and The Delphi Bureau, all rotating under the rather unimaginative umbrella title The Men) didn’t make it past year one.

Actually, Assignment: Vienna seemed ill-fated from the get-go. The pilot film, shown in the spring of 1972, was actually titled Assignment: Munich and starred Roy Scheider in the Webster role, with Richard Basehart playing Major Bernard Caldwell, his U.S. government contact. But, as Richard Meyers recalls in his book TV Detectives (1981), “after the success of The French Connection (1971), in which Scheider co-starred with Oscar winner Gene Hackman, he did not want to be Webster in the series.” Much worse news came in early September of that year, when members of the Israeli team at the summer Olympic Games in Munich, West Germany, were taken hostage and then killed by Palestinian militants. Afterward, it was considered wise to move Conrad’s “assignment” to the Austrian capital, and Charles Cioffi took over Basehart’s role.

Despite these hurdles, there was still a lot going for Assignment: Vienna. It had the talented pair of Eric Bercovici and Jerry Ludwig (who’d worked previously on episodes of Mission: Impossible) as its creators and executive producers. It had a terrific, intrigue-filled theme by jazz pianist and composer Dave Grusin (who had composed the theme music for Burt Reynolds’ Dan August and Robert Wagner’s It Takes a Thief, among others). And it had that gold ’72 Corvette, behind the wheel of which Conrad sped all over Vienna, when he wasn’t manning the stick at Jake’s Bar & Grill, or dodging assassins and nabbing criminals, or swapping ripostes with the gruff Major Caldwell, who apparently had enough information on Webster’s past doings (activities that could’ve led to his deportation, if not his imprisonment in the States) to keep him in line. (Shades of Alexander Mundy’s situation in Thief.)

Sadly, though, only eight episodes of Assignment: Vienna were broadcast before this series (along with Jigsaw and The Delphi Bureau) was cancelled. I watched every single one of them, most in company with my mother, who was very fond of the Austrian capital. Conrad went on to star in Baa Baa Black Sheep, a Stephen J. Cannell series about World War II U.S. fighter pilots in the Pacific theater, and later A Man Called Sloane, in which he played another espionage agent. But I still missed Assignment: Vienna. Maybe someday, it’ll be part of a “cancelled too soon” DVD collection. That is, after DVD producers run out of eps of crap such as The A-Team and Extreme Makeover: Home Edition to peddle to the American public.

(Hat tip to Lee Goldberg’s Main Title Heaven.)