Where I've been

If you're a particularly eagle-eyed and regular visitor to this establishment, you may have noticed a change in the wording of my profile, at right.

It no longer says "freelance."

This is because I am once again a full-timer after five years of freelancing.

A local firm unexpectedly made me an offer last month and I started a few weeks ago, so I've been busy, and time has slipped away.

I did mean to write about the recent passing of actor William Windom, who was a mainstay of television when I was growing up. I first knew of him as the slim and handsome lead actor in the sitcom "The Farmer's Daughter." I especially liked him in "My World and Welcome to It," the undeservedly short-lived series based on the works of James Thurber, whom Windom later played in a one-man show.

In later years a not-nearly-so-svelte Windom played the local doctor and confidant of Jessica Fletcher on "Murder, She Wrote" with an accent as thick as New England clam chowder, but I'm sure he was glad to get the work.

I was surprised that the obits I saw neglected to mention his particularly fine work in Rod Serling's "They're Tearing Down Tim Riley's Bar," one of the best episodes of "Night Gallery," in which Windom plays an advertising man whose career -- and life -- are on the skids. I've read that Windom himself thought this was one of the best things he ever did.

I'm not about to argue with that.

Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques, Sacré Bleu!

From John Kobal's interview with actress Ann Sheridan, as reprinted on a website dedicated to her:

"Ross Hunter offered me a part in a film he was making, 'The Art of Love,' but I didn't feel right for that." (Ethel Merman later played it. It was a madam in a French brother.)

The Barkleys vs. the Cartwrights

I was never a big fan of “Bonanza,” though I often watched it with my family on Sunday nights.

When the Cartwright family’s saga made its debut in 1959, NBC made a big fuss about it because it was one of the first shows (and I think the first western) made and telecast in color, and the network pretty much had a monopoly on color, at least for many years. By a strange coincidence, the network also had a parent company, RCA, that was in the business of making color television sets.

So NBC was hoping that people would go out and buy RCA color TVs so they could watch “Bonanza” – and particularly the show’s surroundings – in what NBC loved to call “living color.”

My parents’ attitude toward this prospect could be summed up with another pithy two-word phrase: “fat chance.”

We couldn’t afford a color TV. I don’t think we had color TV until the early 1970s, when I was about to begin college.

Oops – your honor, let me rephrase that: We didn’t have a color TV set until the early 1970s.

For there was one period, in the 1960s, when we did have color TV of a sort.

Some enterprising soul had invented a rectangular plastic sheet that you could place over a black and white TV to make it seem like a color TV. It had a thick strip of blue at the top and green at the bottom, with a more neutral color in between.

My mother bought it, and we six kids played along with it for a while; we knew it was the best my parents could do.

But that didn’t stop us from lusting after the color TVs we saw each week at a local department store. This was also when you could control the colors with knobs on the set, and it was sometimes fun to look at a color TV that had been tampered with (though not, of course by us, oh no). Purple Rice Krispies? Who knew?

So for me, color TV was not a selling point for “Bonanza.”

It also didn’t help that the show was on Sunday nights, which to me often had an ominous feel because I knew another week of school was lurking around the corner.

And although I don’t remember the early “Bonanza” episodes, some of which might have been interesting (Robert Altman was one of the directors, and he later dedicated the “The Long Goodbye” to the memory of Dan “Hoss” Blocker), the episodes I recall often had a leisurely, even sluggish pace. Not to mention the uniquely unsubtle and intrusive music scores by David Rose, who early in his career must have traded his baton for a trowel.

And the characters, for the most part, were at best bland, with the possible exception of Pernell Roberts’ Adam, but even he didn’t stay for very long; Roberts eventually quit the show, figuring he could do better. Years later, he was back on Sunday nights as “Trapper John, M.D.” In 2010 he went to the Great Actors’ Studio in the Sky, where perhaps, at this very moment, he and McLean Stevenson are teaching a seminar on Great Career Moves.

No, “Bonanza” was just another weekend ritual that you had to get through, like my mother’s overcooked rump roast.

But then, in the mid-1960s, came “The Big Valley” and the Barkleys, led by Victoria (Barbara Stanwyck), the widow of rancher Tom Barkley.

The Barkleys were far more interesting than the Cartwrights. What can you say of a western – or any other TV series – whose first episode contains a scene in which the young female star is on horseback, going after someone with a whip?

That young star was Linda Evans, later of “Dynasty,” playing Audra Barkley, and she was batting her lash (but not her eyelashes) at an equally young Lee Majors.

Who was Majors’ character? Well, that was the point of the whole first episode. Matter of fact, I remember how shocking it was when Majors, having finally made it to the family mansion, proclaimed that he was “Tom Barkley’s bastard son!”

Whoa. You never heard language like that on TV. And especially not on “Bonanza,” at least not at that time; some years later, in one of the first episodes written by Michael Landon, someone did utter the B-word in an episode about a dying unwed mother, but the effect just wasn’t the same.

By the end of the first “Big Valley” episode, Majors’ character, Heath, was accepted, if grudgingly, into the Barkley family, which also included three brothers: Nick, a headstrong, take-no-prisoners guy (Peter Breck, at left with Anna Lisa, from his earlier series, "Black Saddle"); Jarrod, a cerebral, cautious lawyer (Richard Long, below); and Eugene, who was such a cipher I’m not even going to look up the name of the actor who played him, especially considering that after a few episodes, Eugene was banished to TV limbo, where I suspect he occasionally ran into what’s-his-name, Richie Cunningham’s brother, after he vanished from “Happy Days.”

“Big Valley” had a number of memorable episodes. One I remember featured a nun played by an actress named Ellen McRae, better known today as Ellen Burstyn. But one episode that especially stands out, and perhaps best shows the refreshing difference between “Big Valley” and “Bonanza,” is “Court Martial."

A former Union general, played by Henry Jones, is visiting the Barkleys; Nick was one of his junior officers during the war. While he’s there with Victoria, Audra and Jarrod (Nick and Heath are away on a cattle drive), five former Confederate soldiers break in, take the three Barkleys hostage, and put the general on trial for alleged war crimes. When Nick and Heath unexpectedly return, they too are taken hostage.

Near the end of the episode, the general breaks down and confesses, and then comes the twist: The whole thing is a sting, arranged by Jarrod, and the ex-soldiers are really government agents.

After the general is hauled away, Jarrod approaches Nick, who is understandably upset.

I’m sorry we had to do this, Jarrod tells him, but it was the only way we could get him to confess.

Now if Adam had said this to Hoss, the big guy would have said, “It’s OK, brother. You’re right – it had to be done.”

Whereas Nick socks Jarrod a good one and stomps off.

Which is a lot more believable.

Of course, “The Big Valley” had its share of less memorable moments. Like “Bonanza,” it did not do comedy well; you know it’s a bad sign when the series’ composer pulls out his repertoire of “cute music” cues to let you know that yes, folks, this is going to be one knee slapper fer sure.

And occasional stunt casting – Milton Berle? Buddy Hackett?! – didn’t work either.

But you could tune in to “The Big Valley” and enjoy the travails of a family whose members were not clean-living goody-two-shoes, but real people whose boots were perpetually caked with the grime of the real world – or at least a world that was as real as 1960s TV would permit.

Gore Vidal

Early one Sunday afternoon some years ago, I was fiddling with the remote, looking for something to look at before I had to get ready to go to work at the newspaper.

I noticed that one of the public-affairs channels was showing an interview with Gore Vidal, who died this week.

It was three-hour, live interview. And this was a channel that did not have commercial breaks.

I'd seen Vidal on TV many times, though I hadn't read his work much. I'd read his essay on Edgar Rice Burroughs in a special anniversary issue of Esquire, which also featured one or two essays by Nora Ephron.

I'd also once bought a paperback copy of one of Vidal's historical novels, "Lincoln," I think. I read some of it, liked what I read, put it down somewhere and never quite got back into it.

I'd also read two of the three mystery novels Vidal wrote under the name Edgar Box. The hero and narrator was a PR guy whose attitudes and style made it clear that he was a stand-in for Vidal. The mysteries were quick reads and amusing enough, but with a humor that was brittle and distancing. The plots weren't much, either; the mysteries seemed to be resolved not so much by clever deductive reasoning as by inertia.

And I'd also enjoyed the movie version of Vidal's play, "The Best Man." I've seen it several times and will do so several times more if I get the chance, partly because of the writing but mostly because of the performance of veteran character actor Lee Tracy as a former president.

So on this Sunday afternoon I figured I'd kill some time by watching the Vidal interview, just to see what the old gadfly was going on about now.

Little did I suspect that I was about to witness one of live TV's most embarrassing moments.

I tuned in about 20 minutes into the interview -- the live, three-hour, no-commercial-interruption interview.

Vidal was, not surprisingly, in the midst of saying something or other.

When he finally stopped, the woman who was interviewing him had a sly look on her face.

She said something like this:

"Before we went on the air, you were telling me about this plan you found out about, a plan that practically nobody knows about, but involves this great conspiracy, and I think our viewers would really like to know about it!"

I'll never forget the look on his face.

Or what he said. Or how he said it.

"I ... just ... told ... you!"

The director mercifully did not cut to her reaction.

All I could do was feel sorry for her, knowing that she had about two hours and 40 minutes of air time to fill with this guy.

On live TV.

With no commercial interruptions.

And surely there would be a post-show meeting in the producer's office.

I switched to something else soon after.

Perhaps the interview eventually got back on track, and perhaps Vidal and the interviewer established some kind of rapport.

And perhaps the next time one of the cats in our household captures a mouse, he'll set it free without killing it or even toying with it for half an hour.

William Asher

Among people of my generation, I'm sure I'm not alone in saying that "Bewitched" was on my family's must-watch list.

This was the era of shows that had outlandish or otherworldly gimmicks -- "I Dream of Jeannie," "My Mother the Car" and one that I suspect few remember, "My Living Doll," which starred Julie Newmar as an amazingly lifelike (OK, I really mean "sexy") robot named Rhoda. (I think she had on and off buttons on her back that were disguised as moles.)

The first few seasons of "Bewitched" were quite good. One key reason was Bernard Slade, who was the script consultant early on and later wrote "Same Time, Next Year. " Slade wrote one of my favorite early episodes, featuring two old pros: Marion Lorne, as Aunt Clara, and the incomparable Charlie Ruggles, as an old flame of hers who was trying to hide the fact that his skills as a warlock weren't anywhere near what they used to be. (You've probably guessed by now that Aunt Clara had similar concerns about her own powers.)

As someone who paid a lot of attention to TV credits when I was a kid (this being long before the phrase "Get a life" was coined), I noticed that many episodes of "Bewitched" were directed by someone named William Asher, who for some years also served as the show's producer. Mr. Asher, who died this month, was also the husband of the show's star, Elizabeth Montgomery, who was the main reason I watched the show.

Yes, I admit it: As a red-blooded preteen I had a crush on Ms. Montgomery. A big one. I also was not immune to the charms of Meredith MacRae and Diana Rigg. And if Ms. Rigg was anything like her character, Emma Peel, on "The Avengers," she could also protect me from evildoers.

(Hey, I said I was red-blooded. I didn't say I wasn't a wuss.)

Around this time, CBS began showing repeats of "I Love Lucy" on weekday mornings, and I eventually noticed that Mr. Asher also directed many of these shows, including the one in which Lucy and Harpo Marx re-enact the mirror scene from "Duck Soup."

(This episode also featured Lucy's "frenemy," Carolyn Appleby, played by Doris Singleton, who also died recently. )

And then the Saturday night late show began showing the Frankie Avalon-Annette Funicello beach movies, and guess who directed those? (OK, so they weren't great works of art, but they weren't meant to be, and they did provide work for folks like Buster Keaton.)

Mr. Asher also somehow found the time to direct a gangster movie called "Johnny Cool," with Rat Packers Peter Lawford and Sammy Davis Jr. -- and Ms. Montgomery.

I get tired just thinking about his output.

His career eventually slowed and he wound up directing things like "The Dukes of Hazzard," which I did try to watch once. Perhaps I was tired that night, but boy did it seem like slow going, though I was glad to see that it provided character actors like Denver Pyle and Sorrell Booke with steady paychecks.

But I am grateful to Mr. Asher for providing me with many enjoyable hours.

And while I'm at it, another pioneer TV director died earlier this year.

I mostly associate John Rich with "The Dick Van Dyke Show" and "All in the Family," but during his long career he also worked on "I Married Joan," "The Brady Bunch," "Gunsmoke," "Bonanza" and even "The Twilight Zone."

Wow.

And somehow I can't help thinking that when RCA first telecast that famous test pattern, the one that so many of us baby boomers remember, it was Mr. Rich's voice that could be heard saying "OK ... stand by ... cue the Indian!"

Encyclopedia Brown

The Encyclopedia Brown tales weren't the first mystery stories I ever read, but they might have been the first that I could completely understand.

I had tried to read the Perry Mason books because I liked the TV show, but I was too young to understand the plots. (During the show's later years, Raymond Burr acknowledged that the story lines were sometimes too complex even for him.)

But the Encyclopedia Brown stories, written by Donald J. Sobol, who died this month, were fairly -- but not insultingly -- simple. And although I remember them as being clever, more than 40 years later I can't remember any of the telltale clues. Instead I remember Encyclopedia himself -- a nerd (before the term was invented) who lived in the town of Idaville and was quietly competent and fearless. I liked how he stood up to Bugs Meany, the neighborhood tough kid, and defeated him with logic. (Then again, Bugs was not exactly the Napoleon of Crime.)

While Encyclopedia was fearless, he wasn't foolhardy. One of the few details I remember from the Brown canon is the time he prepared for an interview with a suspect who had an intimidating dog by sticking some doggie treats in his pocket so he could surreptitiously slip a couple to the animal and in effect neutralize him. (When it came to paying to get information, Paul Drake was merely Encyclopedia Brown with a bigger allowance.)

You might have (correctly) guessed by now that although I lacked his probity, I did identify with Encyclopedia Brown, whose real name, by the way, was Leroy. And how could I not, being someone who, on a visit to the beach, was the kind of kid who was likely to have sand -- or even entire hourglasses -- kicked in his face?

I could never be a Schwarzenegger, let alone a Chicago gangsta.

But I could easily settle for being as "bad bad" as Leroy Brown of Idaville.

At the (old) movies: 'G Men'

Notes from a gathering of the local cinephile society....

A guy walks into a nightclub where a female singer he knows is performing a fairly elaborate number with the help of a singing and dancing chorus line.

A master shot shows the guy, the singer, the chorus line and the patrons, who are waving party favors and tossing what look like small Styrofoam balls at each other.

Cut to the singer, who playfully tosses a few of these spheres at the guy.

Cut to the guy, who smilingly tries to fends off this attack and gives the woman a shy little wave before he eventually leaves....

I've seen a lot of movies and read a lot (maybe too much) about movies, so when I watch a scene like this it often occurs to me that the shot of the singer tossing the little balls at the guy and the shot of the guy's reaction might well have been done at different times.

So that a) when the balls were tossed at the guy they might well have been tossed by a prop man and b) the guy might well have been smiling back and waving at the prop man, a stand-in -- or maybe nobody at all.

The fact that none of these thoughts occurred to me as I was watching this scene from "G Men" is a testament to the genius of James Cagney.

(And, of course, the brilliance -- and beauty -- of Ann Dvorak, at right, who plays Cagney's singing friend.)

In this 1935 Warner Bros. film, directed by William Keighley, Cagney plays Brick Davis, a lawyer who decides to join the Department of Justice as an agent after a friend, also a government agent, is gunned down.

One complication (from the Department of Foreshadowing) is that Brick's law school education was paid for by an older mobster named McKay in hopes that Brick would stay on the straight and narrow. (Yep, mob bosses do that sort of thing every day.)

You can pretty much write the rest of the movie yourself. Brick's boss, played by a post-Kong Robert Armstrong, is wary of him.

And Robert, of course, has a sister, played by Margaret Lindsay, whose ostensible opinion of Brick is, of course, at least as low as her brother's, though you know that deep down she Really Likes Brick. (And you know this partially because so many of the characters Lindsay was saddled with playing had all the depth of a wading pool.)

At one point Brick is teamed with a young agent played by Lloyd Nolan, making his film debut. But you sense right off that this character has the life expectancy of anyone who ever worked alongside Dirty Harry Callahan, and sure enough, Nolan is gone before too many reels have slipped through the projector, the victim of a gang led by a boss played by Barton MacLane, who would re-emerge years later as the general on "I Dream of Jeannie."

And who is MacLane's girlfriend? Yup, Ann Dvorak. (Sound of one shoe dropping.)

The plot builds to the climatic scene where the gang has kidnapped Lindsay and is holding her at a hotel run by (cue that other shoe) McKay, who doesn't want anything to do with the gang and winds up getting killed -- as does Dvorak.

Cagney winds up with Lindsay in what is supposed to be a happy ending -- but heck, we all know, don't we, that Dvorak would have been a much better match for him, or at least a lot more fun.

Although I've been kidding the plot, I don't mean to put this movie down. This kind of plot might have been fresh back then. Or maybe, to the people making it, it was already at least a little old-hat.

But there are just so many ways to do a genre movie, just as there are just so many ways to play football or baseball or some other sport. The enjoyment -- the thrill, even -- is in the execution, and the team behind "G Men" racks up a very respectable score.