It’s “Game” Time

I mentioned recently that the film and TV Web site Modcinema is now offering a DVD version of 1966’s Fame Is the Name of the Game, the 95-minute NBC-TV movie that gave birth to the “wheel series” The Name of the Game. Shortly after posting said news, I remembered that I had in my computer files this TV Guide “Close Up” preview of Fame, which was broadcast for the first time on November 26, 1966.



One day I hope all 76 episodes of The Name of the Game will become available for viewing once more, either in DVD format or via a streaming TV service. I have had a chance over the decades to see most of them (with those starring Gene Barry and Tony Franciosa being my favorites), but their print quality has been ... well, uneven. I would be happy to binge-watch that landmark drama sometime!

Take a Ride on the Mystery “Wheels”

(Above) An early TV industry ad for The Name of the Game.

If there’s one thing I have learned over my decades as a reporter and author, it’s that some stories we write primarily for money. Some stories we write primarily for love. My contribution today to CrimeReads falls solidly in the latter category.

The subject is TV “wheel series.” You know, those rotating weekly dramas—usually crime dramas—that used to offer multiple shows or alternating protagonists under a single, umbrella title. The Name of the Game. The Bold Ones. The NBC Mystery Movie. Those are certainly the best-remembered of the bunch, though they are far from the only examples. I initially happened across this category of entertainment as a boy, when one of the original Big Three TV networks broadcast Saturday-afternoon repeats of The Name of the Game, a stylish (and, I have learned since, quite expensive for its time) program about magazine journalists seeking to unearth truths in a world too comfortable with deceit. Later, I became a huge fan of the Mystery Movies (two batches of them, on Sunday and Wednesday nights), even though my childhood bedtime required that I clandestinely listen to at least part of those shows—Columbo, McMillan & Wife, Banacek, The Snoop Sisters, etc.—on my father’s TV-band radio.

Over the last couple of decades, I’ve managed to feed my nostalgia for those and other “wheels” by purchasing DVD sets of the classic series, though many still remain frustratingly unobtainable. (Will I ever be able to see Assignment: Vienna or Tenafly again?) I have also taken opportunities to revisit the shows here in The Rap Sheet. But not until recently did I devote myself to investigating and recording the rather complicated history of those rotating dramas.

The results of that research are found today in CrimeReads.

I know I’m not alone in my enduring fondness for wheel series. The Rap Sheet’s YouTube page featuring the NBC Mystery Movie opening is, for instance, filled with wistful recollections of folks who once enjoyed its offerings. (“I can remember sitting on my grandfather’s lap watching this show. It was his favorite. Sadly both are now gone,” one viewer recalls.) I hope that others who were once charmed by these small-screen rotations, as well as others who missed out on this programming format altogether, will take a few moments to revisit the heyday of those shows today. Click here to travel back in time.

“This May Very Well Be the Beginning of the End for Earth as We Know It”

(Editor’s note: This review is submitted in association with Todd Mason’s Tuesday series of blog posts about “overlooked films and/or other A/V.” You’ll find more of this week’s picks here.)


A brief, weird trailer for “L.A. 2017.”

Pretty much everyone nowadays is quite familiar with movie director-producer Steven Spielberg. But when he initially embarked on a Hollywood career during Richard Nixon’s scandalized presidency—years before he made Jaws (1975) or Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) or Schindler’s List (1993)—the Ohio-born Spielberg worked in television, a talented individual with scant name familiarity. He directed episodes of Rod Serling’s Night Gallery, Marcus Welby, M.D., The Psychiatrist, Columbo, and Owen Marshall: Counselor at Law, in addition to a 1971 ABC-TV thriller film, Duel, that found McCloud’s Dennis Weaver being menaced by an aged oil tanker truck on a desolate stretch of California highway.

Duel, however, was Spielberg’s second feature-length small-screen production. The first was a 90-minute episode of The Name of the Game, a 1968-1971 NBC mystery/adventure “wheel series” that focused on reporters and others employed by a Los Angeles-based magazine enterprise called Howard Publications, the urbane head of which was Glenn Howard, played by Gene Barry. The third-season installment of that series entrusted to Spielberg’s direction was titled “L.A. 2017.” It was a cautionary environmental-disaster tale, set in the not-too-distant future—2017, in fact, our present time—and scripted by Philip Wylie (1902-1971), a rather controversial author of science-fiction and mystery stories, who may be best remembered today for his novels When Worlds Collide (1933) and The Disappearance (1951). While The Name of the Game was famous for being “the most expensive television program in history” (up to that point), with a per-episode budget of $400,000, Spielberg is said to have shot “L.A. 2017” for a comparatively economical $375,000.

“L.A. 2017” (which you can watch here in its entirety) was originally broadcast on January 15, 1971. It begins on a sunny California afternoon, with publisher Howard driving back to the City of Angels from the Sierra Pines Conference on Ecology, while at the same time dictating a memo about that gathering into a cassette tape recorder, the transcription of which is to be delivered to the president of the United States. Howard contends in the course of his spoken observations that the world’s natural resources are at a decisive tipping point, and that unless concerted political and economic leadership on environmental protections is exercised soon, “this may very well be the beginning of the end for Earth as we know it.” It may also mark the end of Howard, for as he wheels his sedan down a twisting mountain road, he grows sleepy and eventually loses consciousness, his car careening off the pavement.

When Howard next awakens, it’s to the sight of a pair of men in air masks knocking on his window. Outside, things appear gloomy and unwelcoming, and his two rescuers immediately fit him with an oxygen unit of his own. He’s carried to an emergency van and taken into a complex of industrial tunnels that turn out to be at the edge of what remains of Los Angeles. Doctors there determine that his health is fine. Yet he has somehow been transported (via a time warp, perhaps?) 46 years into the future! “Impossible!” Howard scoffs, as he learns more about the realm in which he’s risen—a place bedeviled by a toxic atmosphere, where what remains of the population has retreated into subterranean bunkers (L.A. has been underground ever since 1989). In this deranged new world, psychiatrists serve as the police, milk is a rare and prized libation, piped-in sounds are used to control human moods and behavior, wildlife has virtually vanished, telephones never work properly, prostitution has become a quotidian service, and for unexplained reasons, math jokes are a popular form of entertainment. Oh, and Big Business has finally succeeded in taking over the United States: it’s now “a shareholder’s democracy,” with its capital in a well-buried Detroit, Michigan.

The folks who found Howard initially suspect he’s some sort of spy, who’s infiltrated Los Angeles under the bizarre pretext of being a man from the past. Once finally convinced of his identity, however, they apprise Howard of what has befallen the globe since his car crash in 1971. According to Dane Bigelow, the U.S. vice president in charge of Los Angeles, the troubles began with enormous growths of yellow-gray algae in the Indian Ocean, “and when the stuff died, the wind carried the stench to the land. The stench, of course, was poisonous.” That algae eventually proliferated worldwide, and so did the toxins. Expensive efforts to curb this pending disaster only added “more deadly compounds to the biosphere,” slowly depleting the planet’s oxygen supply. Famines and disease epidemics struck, and the weather turned lethal, killing millions of residents before they could adapt to a belowground existence. But, Bigelow says of this new subterranean life, “Some people think it’s even better than the old one.”

Managers of this new “USA Inc.” also have big plans in mind for Glenn Howard. They want him to revive Howard Publications and put it to work molding public values, convincing the country’s perhaps one million surviving citizens to accept their privations and the order imposed upon them by the hyper-controlling state.


(Above, left) The 1971 Popular Library edition of Philip Wylie’s Los Angeles: A.D. 2017. (Right) Open Road Media’s e-book version of that same environmental-disaster novel.

“L.A. 2017” is rife with familiar faces from 1960s and ’70s TV programs. For instance, Barry Sullivan (who guest-starred in such shows as The Man from U.N.C.L.E., It Takes a Thief, Mannix, Cool Million, Harry O, McMillan & Wife, The Streets of San Francisco, etc.; and who’d previously appeared in two other Name of the Game installments) portrays VP Bigelow, while Severn Darden (Honey West, P.J., Banyon, Barbary Coast, Starsky and Hutch) shows up here as a particularly oleaginous psychiatrist-cop named Cameron. The then 30-year-old Sharon Farrell, who’d appeared with James Garner in the 1969 gumshoe flick Marlowe, and would later also turn heads in Peter Graves’ 1974 TV pilot, The Underground Man, features here as Sandrelle, Bigelow’s secretary and a potential love interest for the time-displaced Glenn Howard.

Despite Bigelow’s assertion that the bunker-dwelling world of 2017 is a great place to live, it doesn’t take the inquisitive Howard long—thanks to assistance from the alluring but unblinkered Sandrelle—to discover the nightmare side of things. Births are tightly controlled to avoid “defective” babies, and sterilizations are common. Privacy is unknown, with video surveillance monitors ubiquitous. Assigned housing is overcrowded and mostly atrocious, with “seepage from above.” And residents who aren’t fully pulling their weight, or who are unwanted for other reasons, face the possibility of being dispatched to dangerous construction sites aboveground, or being otherwise exterminated. It’s no surprise in such a society that an underground movement (“underground” being used here in the sense of “subversive”) has burgeoned in L.A., or that the principled Mr. Howard hopes to make contact with it. As things develop, however, our hero puts those dissidents at risk by trying to join their cause.

In his own examination of this 1971 episode, North Carolina film authority John Kenneth Muir proclaims that its “finest and most telling moment arises in the last act.

Glenn visits Vice President Bigelow and upbraids him for maintaining and nourishing a “totalitarian state.”

At first, Bigelow responds that “survival justifies anything” in 2017, but then he changes his tack.

He turns Glenn’s self-righteousness around on the man from the 20th century. If Glenn hates this “future” so much, why didn’t he do something about the environment when he had money, fame and power, back in 1971? Who is he to judge the future if he didn’t take responsibility for building it in the first place?

This is a really clever narrative angle, because it asks the audience, rather bluntly, to take just such responsibility for our shared tomorrows. Why aren’t we complaining more loudly that some people—in the thrall of Big Business—want to gut rules and regulations that keep our water clean, our food safe, and our air breathable?

Spielberg made this dystopian drama at a time when dangers facing America’s natural resources were very much on the minds of its citizens. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency had just been established in 1970 to help clean up the nation’s increasingly polluted air, ground, and water, and it wasn’t unknown for TV programs—not just The Name of the Game, but also such fare as the Emmy-nominated 1970 pilot film for The Senator, Hal Holbrook’s short-lived segment of The Bold Ones—to address or at least allude to the ecological damage wrought by industrial production.

Having his thought-provoking and not incidentally frightening yarn adapted as an episode of NBC’s high-profile Name of the Game might have pleased its author, Philip Wylie. But according to Lyman Tower Sargent’s 1979 reference work, British and American Utopian Literature, 1516-1975, that wasn’t the case. “Despite Wylie’s protests,” Sargent explains, “his script was drastically revised, with many of his important ideas excised and some of the scenes cut as too ‘raw’ and shocking for audiences in their living rooms. Wylie was furious: he had hoped to warn millions of viewers of the horrible consequences of pollution of the ecosphere, but the director had produced merely a cheap thriller.” The author’s response was to use “the television play as the basis for a paperback novel.” Sargent recounts that in October 1970, Wylie “turned out a ninety-thousand word novel that, except for the general outline of the plot, bears little resemblance to the televised version.”

That book, slightly retitled Los Angeles: A.D. 2017, is now easily available in an electronic version from Open Road Media, but can also still be acquired (more expensively and difficultly) in its original 1971 Popular Library paperback edition. As the late Randy Johnson observed in a review a couple of years back, Wylie’s novel begins with several chapters devoted to the ecology conference Glenn Howard was just leaving when he had his roadway accident (though in the book, he simply falls asleep at a shaded rest area). “Ostensibly a meeting to discuss the effects of pollution and global warming on the environment, Howard had come to realize it was really just industry’s attempt to soft-peddle the scientists and plan their opposition to the environmental movement,” Johnson relates. There’s no Dane Bigelow to be found anywhere in this yarn, and no seductive Sandrelle, either, though in the latter’s place is inserted Leandra Smith, a lithe blonde secretary in the employ of L.A. Mayor Robert Baker, who initially greets Howard in “an almost see-through costume” and goes on to become his “erotic companion.” What the novel does contain, however, is explicit torture and an emphasis on the evils of corporate America, plus more than a modicum of sex. As Johnson explained, “sex is wide open [in 2017 L.A.], with anybody and everybody from kindergarten age. It’s actually taught and encouraged. This would be [one] of those themes departing from the television episode ... [It] definitely wouldn’t have been allowed on 1971 television.”

There’s much about Wylie’s novel that remains interesting, particularly his reflections on the consequences of breaking down sexual mores. But he goes on and on about that subject, to a tedious length, as he sends Howard into bedroom romps guaranteed to leave any man insensate to restrictions on his other liberties. Also fascinating is the author’s portrayal of a troubled utopia, where it’s not always easy to judge whether the costs of change are greater than its benefits. And while Los Angeles: A.D. 2017 seems dated and preachy in some respects, its theme of impending ecological disaster is as current in the willfully ignorant age of Trump as it was 46 years ago.

I can certainly sympathize with Philip Wylie’s complaint that Steven Spielberg had turned his complex, message-driven tale into a “cheap thriller.” Yet after watching the artfully shot “L.A. 2017” and then reading Los Angeles: A.D. 2017, I submit that simplifying the plot and emphasizing its dramatic aspects, as The Name of the Game did, resulted in Wylie’s subject matter being far more approachable. Spielberg has said that making “L.A. 2017” “opened a lot of doors for me.” My guess is it also helped open a lot of people’s eyes, in the early 1970s, to the escalating risks facing the world’s fragile environment. Perhaps we need similar calls to action from the entertainment industry in this real 2017 to make Americans understand the enormity of the threat now posed by climate change.

Are you listening, Mr. Spielberg?

Watch It Now!

Whenever I mention in The Rap Sheet that I’ve discovered some wonderful trove of vintage TV crime dramas on the video-sharing site YouTube, I try to emphasize that interested readers should tarry not in watching those episodes, because they are likely to disappear soon. This case proves my point: Back in April, I reported that a user signing him- or herself as “Zardon4” had uploaded dozens of episodes of the 1968-1971 NBC drama The Name of the Game to YouTube. In the months since, Zardon4 greatly expanded his/her “channel” with more than 80 episodes of the 1958-1963 police drama Naked City, plus assorted installments of Journey to the Unknown, Edgar Wallace Mysteries, Barbary Coast, and other programs. Yesterday, though, when I went to see what new things Zardon4 had on offer, I found all of the videos gone and a note left in their place, explaining that the page had been “terminated because we received multiple third-party notifications of copyright infringement …”

I don’t argue with the right of TV companies to claim ownership of their productions, or with YouTube’s touchiness about posters violating copyrights. (The Web site warns users of the risks they run by uploading material that is not exclusively their own.) I simply want to reiterate this message to Rap Sheet readers: Whenever you happen across complete episodes of classic TV shows on YouTube--not just The Name of the Game, but Mannix, Alias Smith and Jones, T.H.E. Cat, or Buddy Faro (all of which can still be found there)--don’t hesitate to watch them. Their life there may be brief.

Of Returns, Releases, and Rewards

• This is a welcome surprise! TV Shows on DVD reports that Shout Factory! will release Season 1 of the 1968-1971 NBC drama The Name of the Game on October 28. As the Web site explains: “A large magazine publisher is the backdrop for this groundbreaking ‘wheel series’ featuring rotating story lines and actors. Follow ace reporter Jeff Dillon (Tony Franciosa), hard-edged editor Dan Farrell (Robert Stack), and publishing magnate Glenn Howard (Gene Barry) as they traverse the challenges and pitfalls of the publishing business. Also starring Susan St. James!” This $49.97 set will apparently feature eight discs, containing at least 26 episodes. It’s not clear whether the 1966 pilot film, Fame Is the Name of the Game, will be included.



• Online voting has finally begun in the competition to select this year’s Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award winner. As I pointed out earlier this week, there are six contenders for the title, including Peter May’s The Chessmen and Denise Mina’s The Red Road. Interested readers have until Tuesday, July 15, to click here and register their favorite work among those six. The victor will be announced on July 17 during the 12th annual Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival, to be held in Harrogate, England.

• Polish crime fiction is a thing now? The New York Times writes:

While Poland currently has one of the lower crime rates in the European Union, the country appears to be in the midst of a crime obsession--at least of the fictional variety.

According to the crime writer Irek Grin--who is the director of Wroclaw’s International Festival of Crime Fiction (Miedzynarodowy Festiwal Kryminalu)--in 2003, only four Polish thrillers were released, while last year 112 crime novels were published.

• According to The Gumshoe Site’s Jiro Kimura, Boston author Dennis Lehane has won the 2014 Falcon Award for his historical gangster thriller, Live by Night. The Falcon (literally, a wooden falcon sculpture) is presented by Japan’s Maltese Falcon Society to “the best hard-boiled/private eye novel published in Japan in the previous year.”

• Having been very fond of New Zealander Paul Thomas’ 2013 U.S. release, Death on Demand--to which I helped give the Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Crime Novel--I’m pleased to hear that Fallout, another new tale starring his “anarchic knight errant,” Tito Ihaka, is being prepared for publication later this summer. Unfortunately, it’s coming from NZ-based Upstart Press, which means it’s unlikely to reach the States. But Crime Watch blogger Craig Sisterson tells me, via Facebook, that Upstart is currently “negotiating overseas rights,” with hopes of bringing Fallout to American readers sometime in 2015.

• I don’t think anyone was really in doubt of Sherlock’s return to BBC One. Nonetheless, the UK broadcaster has made it official that the popular Benedict Cumberbatch/Martin Freeman crime drama will be back for a fourth season. Filming on a special Christmas episode will begin in January 2015, for showing later that year; and the three-episode fourth season of Sherlock will debut in the UK in 2016. No word yet on when these episodes will reach the States.

• And Mystery*File’s Francis M. Nevins looks back appreciatively at Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer, the 1958-1960 syndicated small-screen series starring Darren McGavin as Spillane’s New York City gumshoe. (See the show’s opening title sequence here.) Nevins is particularly interested in some once-prominent detective novelists and directors who had a part in shaping that first Hammer show.

Bullet Points: Post-Easter Bunny Edition

• At some point during my boyhood, one of my hometown TV stations began broadcasting reruns of the 1968-1971 NBC drama The Name of the Game on Saturday afternoons, and there was no more loyal watcher of those episodes than me. I don’t know whether I viewed every installment of that mystery/adventure “wheel series” or not, but I saw enough that even now, I count myself an ardent fan. Sadly, The Name of the Game hasn’t yet been collected in DVD format. But recently, somebody who signs him- or herself as “Zardon4” began uploading episodes of the NBC series to YouTube. The show’s first tale, “Fear of High Places”--originally broadcast on September 20, 1968, and starring Tony Franciosa and Susan St. James--can be enjoyed here. There are more than a dozen other Name of the Game episodes available on Zardon4’s page--at least till the YouTube police swoop in to remove them. Let’s hope that doesn’t happen before you’ve watched them all.

• Speaking of vintage TV crime dramas, the pseudonymous Smeghead2068 has posted something of an oddity: the sheet music from Henry Mancini’s catchy theme music for Cade’s County, the 1971-1972 series starring Glenn Ford.

• Five finalists have been named in the competition for Canada’s 2014 Bloody Words Light Mystery Award. That prize--better known as the Bony Blithe--celebrates books that feature “everything from laugh-out-loud to gentle humor to good old-fashioned stories with little violence or gore.” The five contenders are:

-- Gold Web, by Vicki Delany (Dundurn)
-- Framed for Murder, by Cathy Spencer (Comely Press)
-- Thread and Buried, by Janet Bolin (Berkely Prime Crime)
-- Never Laugh as a Hearse Goes By, by Elizabeth Duncan (Minotaur)
-- Miss Montreal, by Howard Shrier (Vintage)

A winner will be announced during the Bloody Words Mystery Conference gala banquet to be held on June 7 in Toronto, Ontario.

• I must have missed seeing this curious bit of news when Britain’s Independent newspaper carried it last month:

Inspector Morse creator Colin Dexter has written a clause into his will banning anyone else playing the part of the detective after his death--to prevent future actors “competing” with John Thaw.

Dexter, who wrote the Oxford detective novels which were adapted into the popular television series, told The Independent: “We never want to repeat what John has done.”

The 83-year-old added: “A lot of people connected with Morse didn’t want anyone coming along to say we will try and outdo dear old John. I said I’m not ever going to allow that, full stop.”

The existence of the clause was revealed in an interview with the Radio Times by actor Shaun Evans, who plays a young Morse in the spin-off called Endeavour. The producers of the series only managed to convince the author to consent to Evans, 34, as he would not be competing with Thaw’s more mature original.

• Ben H. Winters’ Countdown City (Quirk) has won the 2014 Philip K. Dick Award as the most “distinguished original science-fiction paperback published for the first time during 2013 in the U.S.A.” That novel, about a New Hampshire cop’s efforts to locate the missing husband of a childhood babysitter--even as an asteroid threatens to destroy Earth--is the sequel to Winters’ Edgar Award-winning 2012 novel, The Last Policeman.

• The prolific Max Allan Collins talks with Crimespree Magazine about his ongoing campaign to take a variety of novels Mickey Spillane was still writing at the time of his death in 2006, and finally get them finished and into print. The latest of those books, a Mike Hammer outing titled King of the Weeds, is due out early next month.

• Pierce Brosnan’s significance in James Bond history is secure.

• If you’re lucky enough to live near the British capital, note that the Museum of London will open a new Sherlock Holmes exhibit this coming fall. The point of the show is to ask “searching questions such as who is Sherlock Holmes, and why does he still conjure up such enduring fascination …”; it will also “explore how Sherlock Holmes has transcended literature onto stage and screen and continues to attract huge audiences to this day.” This exhibition will run from October 17, 2014, through April 21, 2015.

• Critic Jake Kerridge has a good piece in The Daily Telegraph about how “Margery Allingham’s books show the evolution from well-plotted, bloodless stories to psychologically acute crime novels.”

• Sigh ... Another “noir classic” I have never read.

• Ed Gorman previews Borderline, a 1962 pulp novel written by Lawrence Block (though it was originally released as Border Lust, by “Don Holliday”) that’s being returned to print next month by Hard Case Crime. “In addition to the pleasure of reading sentences that sing, stomp and strut,” Gorman writes, “there is the considerable heft of the story itself. If this was dashed off, as many of [the] soft-cores were, this is one of the finest dashing-offs ever put to paper.”

• Nick Carter--“the most famous of all manhunters.”

• And this comes from Shotsmag Confidential: “A painting of crime writer Ian Rankin has been unveiled at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. The image of the [Detective Inspector John] Rebus creator was commissioned by friend and fellow author Alexander McCall Smith. Edinburgh-based artist Guy Kinder painted the likeness after spending a day photographing Rankin. The portrait will be added to a collection at the Edinburgh gallery which celebrates some of Scotland's greatest writers.” You can see the painting here.

Death of a Dapper Dude

Damn! Just six months after The Rap Sheet celebrated actor Gene Barry’s 90th birthday, the star of such TV crime dramas as Burke’s Law and The Name of the Game has “died of unknown causes ... at a rest home in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Woodland Hills,” according to The Associated Press.

Ivan G. Shreve Jr. has posted an appreciative obit in his Thrilling Days of Yesteryear. It reads, in part:

Barry became a household name on television in the late ’50s/early ’60s by playing sharply-dressed lawmen in two popular series: the NBC-TV western Bat Masterson (1958-’61) and the ABC-TV crime drama Burke’s Law (1963-’65). The latter show may well be his best-remembered showcase; in so much as he reprised the role of millionaire police commissioner Amos Burke in a short-lived spin-off entitled Amos Burke, Secret Agent and a short-lived revival of the original Burke’s Law series seen on CBS in 1994-’95. Law was one of the early contributions to the cathode ray tube of über-producer Aaron Spelling, and was a blueprint of sorts for later Spelling productions like The Love Boat and Fantasy Island. ...

Barry also played a role in the embryonic version of what later became the television mystery hit Columbo by co-starring alongside future star Peter Falk in Prescription: Murder (1968).

Barry (born Eugene Klass) demonstrated a screen presence that was hard not to appreciate--suave, sophisticated, confident. I can’t recall seeing him in any role that I didn’t think was enriched by his participation. Rest in peace, sir.

READ MORE: “Gene Barry, Actor of TV, Film and Stage, Dies at 90,” by Michael Pollack (The New York Times); “‘Bat Masterson’ Star Played the Dapper Hero,” by Becky Krystal (The Washington Post); “Gene Barry Fought Martians with Science,” by Bob Calhoun (Open Salon); “R.I.P., Gene Barry,” by Tanner (Double O Section); “This Week in TV Guide: August 7, 1965,” by Mitchell Hadley (It’s About TV).

Fame Is the Name of His Game

Some of you will remember him as a derby-wearing lawman and gambler in the NBC-TV series Bat Masterson (1958-1961). Others will recall his starring role as a suave, millionaire Los Angeles chief of detectives--with his own chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce!--in the ABC series Burke’s Law (1963-1965). Still more are likely to put his name to the face of Glenn Howard, the urbane magazine publisher in NBC’s The Name of the Game (1968-1971). But however you recall actor Gene Barry, do you also remember it’s his birthday today? That’s right: he’s turning 90 years old.

Born Eugene Klass in New York City on June 14, 1919, the grandson of Jewish immigrants from Russia, Barry exhibited an early intelligence and an aptitude for music. He was chosen valedictorian of his high-school graduating class, and “at age 17, received the coveted singing scholarship awarded by David Sarnoff, then head of RCA,” according to the Official Gene Barry Fan Page.

Barry reportedly created his professional moniker to honor the famous stage performer John Barrymore. After taking several modest parts on TV shows and in movies, he finally captured the spotlight playing physicist Clayton Forrester in the 1953 Martian invasion classic The War of the Worlds (based on H.G. Wells’ 1898 novel of the same name). He went on to a recurring role as physical ed teacher Gene Talbot in Our Miss Brooks (which starred Eve Arden), and in 1958 debuted on the small screen as a dandified version of the real-life peace officer-turned-New York sportswriter, Bat Masterson. That series was rather tongue-in-cheek, with Barry’s Bat wielding a gold-tipped cane as a weapon, but it won the actor the cover of TV Guide and a wealth of new fans. (He’d later return to the Masterson role in a couple of TV projects in 1989 and 1991.)

Two years after Bat Masterson was cancelled, Barry returned to the boob tube as LAPD Captain Amos Burke in Burke’s Law. This was another series with a lighter side, again making use of Barry’s perceived debonair demeanor. The program placed him in a mansion, surrounded by beautiful women and big-name guest stars, and let him lay down weekly witticisms known as a “Burke’s Laws” (e.g., “History is most likely to repeat if you stick to a woman with a past”). Although it wasn’t trailblazing crime fiction, Burke’s Law did offer some unexpected plot twists. And in an April 1965 episode titled “Who Killed the Jackpot?” it introduced TV audiences to female private eye Honey West, played by Anne Francis, who’d go on to star as that curvaceous character in a spin-off series.

In 1965, Barry picked up a Golden Globe Award for his work on Burke’s Law. The show also helped establish at least one precedent for other TV series, as David Bushman of the Paley Center for Media explains:

Every week a roster of well-known guest stars popped up as suspects in Burke’s murder investigation, a shtick evocative of John Huston’s 1963 film The List of Adrian Messenger, which included cameos by Frank Sinatra, Tony Curtis, Robert Mitchum, and Burt Lancaster, and one that [Burke’s Law producer Aaron] Spelling himself later reprised in such shows as The Love Boat and Fantasy Island. By the spring of 1965, however, few viewers still cared whodunit, so Burke returned not as an L.A. cop, but as Amos Burke, Secret Agent, hoping to capitalize on 007/Man from U.N.C.L.E. mania--alas, the new format never did bond with viewers.

Amos Burke bit the dust after 17 episodes.

However, the handsome Barry was rarely unemployed for long in those days. Audiences enjoyed seeing him on their big boxy TV sets, even if he was only guessing answers to questions put to him on The Hollywood Squares. He delivered one of his finest performances as a clever, homicidal physician in Prescription: Murder (1968), the first of two teleflicks that paved the way for the NBC series Columbo. And in October 1968, Barry returned to the small screen in The Name of the Game, a path-breaking 90-minute “wheel series” that placed him in protagonist rotation with former Untouchables star Robert Stack and future Matt Helm portrayer Tony Franciosa. Barry played Glenn Howard, CEO of Howard Publications, while Stack was an FBI agent turned crime reporter, and Franciosa was the star reporter for People magazine (several years before there actually was a People magazine). The single constant player in that series was a young, mini-skirted Susan Saint James, who served all three stars (as well as other rotating leads who joined the show during its third and concluding year). In an article for the Museum of Broadcast Communications Web site, David Thorburn makes clear The Name of the Game’s significance:

One of the first television programs to deal directly with the increasing social and political turbulence of late 1960s, The Name of the Game regularly confronted such topics as the counter culture, racial conflict, the sexual revolution, political corruption, environmental pollution. Its ideology was a muddled if revealing strain of Hollywood liberalism, and its rotating heroes, especially Gene Barry’s elegant corporate aristocrat, were enlightened professionals who used the power of their media conglomerate to right injustice and defend the powerless. If many episodes ended on a reformist note of muted affirmation for an America shown to be flawed and endangered but resilient and ultimately fixable, individual scenes and performances often dramatized social evils, injustice, moral and political corruption with a vividness and truthfulness rare in television during this period.

“Both in its formal excellence and in the intermittent but genuine seriousness of its subject matter,” Thornburn concludes, “the show brought a new maturity to television and deserves recognition as an enabling precursor of the strongest prime-time programming of the 1970s and 1980s.”

Gene Barry took the lead in just one other TV serial, a 1972-1973 British work called The Adventurer, which co-starred Barry Morse and Catherine Schell. It found Barry, then in his early 50s, playing the action-heavy role of Gene Bradley, “a wealthy, jet-setting movie celebrity who indulged himself in business ventures of all kinds, but whose real job involved secret assignments for U.S. intelligence,” as the Official Gene Barry Fan Page recalls. The series featured theme music by John Barry (lots of Barrys here!), but was critiqued poorly for its improbable premise and often “impenetrable” plot lines.

Over the next two decades, Barry worked the guest-star circuit, turning up in Charlie’s Angels, The Love Boat, Hotel, a Perry Mason TV movie, and Murder, She Wrote. He broke a long hiatus away from the stage in 1983 by playing one of the two gay leads in the musical La Cage aux Folles. And he headlined the brief, 1994-1995 revival of Burke’s Law. Directed at an older audience, that show returned Burke to his duties as an L.A. police detective, this time working with his son, Peter (Peter Barton). Given the popularity back then of similarly styled programs such as the aforementioned Murder, She Wrote and Matlock, the honchos at CBS evidently thought the rebirth of a now-silver-maned Amos Burke could only be good for their company’s bottom line. The series started out with solid ratings, but its campy style didn’t wear well after the first season. It disappeared--again--after just 14 episodes.

Barry’s résumé page in the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) shows that his last appearance before the cameras was a small role in Steven Spielberg’s 2005 remake of War of the Worlds, taking his Hollywood career almost full circle. Since then, he’s lost his wife of 58 years, but not his humor. Asked by an interviewer in the year 2000 whether he ever watches his old films or TV shows, the actor said, “Rarely. I’d rather read.”

Happy birthday, Gene Barry. Wherever you are, we hope you’re engrossed in a good book right now.



READ MORE: “Burke’s Law (TV), 1963-66,” by Chuck Rothman (Great but Forgotten); “It’s Burke’s Laaaaw!” by Steve Thompson (The Booksteve Channel).

In the “Name” of Nostalgia

I’m willing to bet that I shall be the first, if not only blogger who mentions this anniversary: Today marks 40 years since the 1968 debut of The Name of the Game, an often innovative NBC-TV mystery/adventure show that was also among the earliest “wheel series” to hit U.S. airwaves. The Museum of Broadcast Communications offers some background on the show and explains its basic premise:

The Name of the Game occupies a unique place in the history of prime time-television. Notable for the ambitious scope and social relevance of its stories and for its innovative 90-minute anthology format, the series was perhaps most influential in its lavish production values, which aimed to recreate the audio-visual complexity of the movies. In 1969 TV Guide reported that the show’s budget of $400,000 per episode made The Name of the Game the most expensive television program in history. The series also functioned as a kind of apprentice field for writers and directors who later achieved great success, including Steven Bochco, Marvin Chomsky, Leo Penn and Steven Spielberg.

The two-hour pilot film for the series, Fame Is the Name of the Game, was broadcast in 1966 as the first World Premiere Movie, a weekly series of made-for-television films produced by Universal Studios for NBC. The series itself, which premiered in 1968, retained the fluid, quick-cutting visual texture of the pilot and added a pulsating jazz theme by Dave Grusin. Tony Franciosa, star of the pilot film, returned to the series as Jeff Dillon, ace reporter for People Magazine, in a rotation every third week with Gene Barry and Robert Stack. Barry played a Henry Luce-type media mogul, Glenn Howard, CEO of Howard Publications, while Stack--in a role intended to recall his performance as Eliot Ness, the crime-fighting hero of The Untouchables--played Dan Farrell, a retired FBI agent now a writer-editor on Crime Magazine. Providing continuity, Susan St. James appeared in every episode as Peggy Maxwell, who remained a research assistant and aide-de-camp to the male stars through the run of the series despite her Ph.D. in archaeology and her knowledge of five languages.

Although I wasn’t old enough to watch this show during its original, 1968-1971 Friday night broadcast schedule, I caught up with it in reruns years later. The series was particularly interesting because it took on issues that, in 1968, would still have been controversial--racial animosity, environmental pollution, and the sexual revolution. It would even experiment outside its conventional format, as in the case of a 1971 episode titled “L.A. 2017,” which imagined Gene Barry being transported into a future Los Angeles where people lived underground (to escape pollution) and under the control of a fascist government. The trio of principles--Barry, Stack, and Franciosa--were quite different from one another, so the individual stories often bore tones somewhat distinct to whoever was starring. That mix was further enhanced after Franciosa left the show during its third season (he would later reappear in Search and Matt Helm), and his place in the rotation was filled by several actors, among them Peter Falk and Darren McGavin.

“Even in its less imaginative and intellectually ambitious episodes,” the Museum of Broadcast Communications site opines, “The Name of the Game held to consistently high standards of production and acting. Both in its formal excellence and in the intermittent but genuine seriousness of its subject matter, the show brought a new maturity to television and deserves recognition as an enabling precursor of the strongest prime time programming of the 1970s and 1980s.” All of which makes it a shame that this series has yet to be released in a DVD set (though copies are available from sites such as iOffer.com). I’d like a copy for my own library.

Meanwhile, let me leave you with the opening and closing sequences from The Name of the Game, with music composed by jazz pianist Dave Grusin, who also gave us the memorable themes to Dan August, It Takes a Thief, and Assignment: Vienna, among other shows.

READ MORE: “FFB: Los Angeles: A.D. 2017--Philip Wylie,” by Randy Johnson (Not the Baseball Pitcher).