Glenda Farrell (with her husband) is buried at West Point Military Academy (Section 7, Row D, Grave 11).

Famed actress Glenda Farrell (1904-1971) was one of Hollywood’s most prolific screen beauties in the 1930′s and 1940s.  She starred opposite the giants of her time:  Edward G. Robinson (“Little Caesar”), Paul Muni (“I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang”), Cary Grant (“Gambling Ship”), Dick Powell (“Gold Diggers of 1937″), Charlton Heston (“Secret of the Incas”), and many more.  She won the 1963 Best Supporting Actress Emmy Award for her performance on the TV show Ben Casey for an episode called “A Cardinal Act of Mercy.”  Later in life she turned her talents toward Broadway.  She was appearing in “Forty Carats” on the Great White Way when she was diagnosed with a terminal illness.  It was her final public performance.  She was married to Dr. Henry Ross a military medical officer who was a member of President Eisenhower’s administration.

(Perry and Della - the unbeatable team)

These topic suggestions have egged me on.  Such a strange expression – makes me think of someone pelting me with raw eggs to set me in motion.

What’s the best way to find out about new books you might like?  Go to the Word Press Home Page and click on the Books topic.  Lots of people out there are reading like crazy and sharing their experiences.  All of the e-books on my Kindle come from Amazon of course, and the reviews and suggestions there are great.  The “customers who bought this item also bought”  thing can be very helpful too if you’re looking for books that are similar to, or just as interesting as, the ones you’ve already enjoyed.  It never hurts to have friends who read a lot and like to make suggestions.  And I love bargain book tables.  Although those aren’t piled high with new books, they’re usually new to me and there’s always the possibility of discovering some obscure gem.

How do you spend the majority of your non-work time? Non-working.  Eating, sleeping, reading, blogging, playing games, keeping up a house, washing my hair.

If you were going to redecorate your home, what would you change? A better question might be, where would you start?  But frankly I’ve spent a lot of years changing things up and around, and now I’m at the point where I don’t really care that much about it anymore.  Our house is too big for just the two of us.  If we ever move to something smaller I’ll think harder about the whole decorating thing.

Are you an early bird or a night owl?  Nope I’m not really either one.  I don’t get up excessively early, and I don’t go to bed ridiculously late.  So I’m one of those boring intermediate chronotypes with no sleep disorders, unless you count liking sleep a lot as a disorder.

What creeps you out?  Unexplainable mystery noises in the dark. The kind of strange sounds you’re not quite sure you actually heard, because they might have been part of a dream, so you listen so hard you stop breathing but you don’t hear anything else.  And so you drift back to sleep.  And promptly hear something slightly different that could have come from the same unidentifiable source so you have to start the whole listening without breathing process all over again.  Or you get up to investigate and make your own mystery noises in the dark because you only knock over extremely cacophonous objects when you’re trying really hard to be quiet.

You can pick one chocolate from the box.  What kind of filling do you hope is inside?  Deliver me from sweet cream fillings that burn my throat and hard chewy centres that stick to my teeth for three hours.  Just give me chocolate covered nuts – in fact, how about a whole box of them so I don’t have to read the quide and try to figure out the pictures and decide what exactly might be inside a Himilayan Pink Salt Peanut Butter Red Velvet Dark Chocolate Truffle From Hell.

What’s your most treasured possession?  My brain.  Such as it is.

Who are your all time favourite authors?  Absolutely impossible to say because I have no idea even where I might begin.  Every single person who writes has something to say, ideas to get across, stories to tell, insights to share.  If I read a book I particularly like, I’ll always see what else that author has written but it’s not good to get bogged down in any one particular genre.  There is brilliance everywhere.  And complete garbage too, but how would you recognize the great stuff without the crap?

What were your favourite tv shows when you were a kid?  We didn’t get a tv until I was nine years old and then we had only one channel so we watched whatever stupid thing happened to be on.  We especially liked staying up later than our normal bedtime to watch a show, which meant that The Ed Sullivan Show and Bonanza (on Sunday nights all the way to ten o’clock) became our favourites by default.  Later on I liked to watch Dr. Ben Casey and Dr. Kildare, and argue with my sister about which one was more sexy and swoon-worthy.  I liked Perry Mason a lot too, because he never lost a case, and I was convinced that Della Street was the main reason why.

Now seriously, who would not prefer those sexy hairy arms and Ben’s brooding good looks to Dr. Hairless Wonder there on the right who looks like he’s fresh out of grade eight?  (My sister isn’t here to defend her heart throb from the ’60′s so I feel like being a bit ruthless).  We argued about hockey players too, pretty much just for the sake of arguing because it rarely had anything to do with the game or their hockey skills.  And then we moved on to male singers (Mick Jagger vs. Eric Burdon, for example).  It’s an endless list for a fun game of ‘have an opinion and defend it, no matter what’.   All in the spirit of egging eachother on.

I had the absolute pleasure of attending the BFI Future Film Festival this year with our short film ‘Adrift’. We were nominated for Best British Animation and the Future Film Festival award. It was such a great day to meet so many film-makers and animators, experienced professionals, the BFI team, guys from BAFTA. Some great talks and an awesome showcase of animation, films and music videos from the past few years. Almost two years on from making the animation now so it was a real privilege for it to be considered and to see it up on the big screen again. Massive shout out to my good friends Ben Casey, Matt Smart and Gonzo Martins for making the film with me – you guys are awesome!

Episode titles are the great lost art of television.

Nowadays most series don’t even bother to show them on screen, but once upon a time – back when a lot of television writers had classical educations, or literary pretensions – television episodes often had titles that were allusive, alliterative, obscure, obtuse, witty, or just weird.  And long.  Sometimes the writers got so fanciful that some poor editor would have to shrink the type size or switch fonts just to cram the title onto a single card.

For a few years, the writers of Ben Casey and Naked City and a handful of other shows seemed to be competing to concoct the most over-the-top title of them all.  Naked City had “The Man Who Kills the Ants Is Coming,” “A Horse Has a Big Head – Let Him Worry,” and “Color Schemes Like Never Before.”  Ben Casey replied with “The White Ones Are Dolphins,” “For San Diego, You Need a Different Bus,” and “No More Cried the Rooster: There Will Be Truth.”

On the comedy side, it’s no surprise that the smartest sitcom of the sixties, The Dick Van Dyke Show, got into the act, with episode handles like “I’d Rather Be Bald Than Have No Head at All,” “When a Bowling Pin Talks, Listen,” and “Uhny Uftz.”  In the seventies, a few of the better crime shows picked up the habit, none more exuberantly than The Rockford Files (“White on White and Nearly Perfect,” “The Oracle Wore a Cashmere Suit,” “Sticks and Stones Will Break Your Bones, But Waterbury Will Bury You”).

A few of these titles achieved a sort of aphoristic poetry that resonated apart from the content of the actual episode.  “There I Am – There I Always Am” (from Route 66) is a phrase that often runs through my head.  So are “The Sadness of a Happy Time” (Run For Your Life) and “Somehow It Gets to Be Tomorrow” (Route 66 again).  The shows themselves were so prodigiously good, and yet there was still a little dab of icing on the top.

Then there were the other series, the Gunsmokes and The F.B.I.s, that didn’t bother, that were content with generic descriptive titles (“The Threat”) or episodes named after that week’s guest protagonist (“Mr. Sam’l”).  Don Mankiewicz told me that they changed one of his Ironside titles just because Universal was too cheap to whip up a new optical, and instead substituted a title from some episode of some other show.  Okay, fine: like I said, treat the title as a bonus.

But then you come to the sitcoms, which – even as early as the fifties – often didn’t show the episode titles on-screen.  Invisibility tempted the writers not to care.  Why waste energy on one extra joke that nobody would ever see?  Decades later, though, the DVD menu has lifted the rock off of these groaners.  Some of them are bad enough that you’re already in a mood not to laugh before you even press play.

There are a million ways to illustrate this dearth of creativity, but let’s take just one.  Call it the Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner Rule.

After that movie, in which Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy eradicate racism forever by deciding to be nice to their daughter’s African American fiance, came out in 1967, just about every lousy sitcom on the air had an episode title that started with “Guess Who’s Coming to…” wherever.  It didn’t matter whether the story had anything to do with Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, or even if the pun was clever.  Mostly it was just, oh, there’s that movie, and we can’t think of anything better.  For the years between 1967 and about 1973, there may be no more accurate way of separating the really terrible sitcoms from the at-least-watchable ones than by determining whether or not they succumbed to the Guess Who’s Coming Rule.

The earliest examples of the Rule do not occur until 1969.  (What on earth took so long?)  In that year we find “Guess Who’s Coming to Picket” (The Flying Nun), “Guess Who’s Coming Forever” (The Mothers-in-Law),  and “Guess Who’s Coming to Rio” (It Takes a Thief).  Moving forward chronologically, we have “Guess Who’s Not Coming to Dinner” (Headmaster, and again on The Jeffersons), “Guess Who’s Coming to Our House” (Arnie), “Guess Who’s Coming to Seder” (The New Dick Van Dyke Show), “Guess Who’s Coming to Visit” and “Guess Who’s Coming to Christmas” (give it a rest, Happy Days), and perhaps the classiest of the lot, “Guess Who’s Coming to Burp” (Too Close For Comfort).  Ralph Senensky had the misfortune to direct two of them: “Guess Who’s Coming to Lunch” (The Courtship of Eddie’s Father) and “Guess Who’s Coming to Drive” (The Partridge Family).

By the eighties, it wasn’t even necessary to make a joke out of it any more.  Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner was a “classic” (actually, it’s fucking terrible), a lame punchline all on its own, so you could just rip it off!  The Facts of Life, Growing Pains, Empty Nest, Thunder Alley, Step by Step, and the notorious The Secret Life of Desmond Pfeiffer all have episodes entitled just “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.”  And they’re still at it: as of this writing the Internet Movie Database spits out 118 instances of the Guess Who’s Coming Rule, all the way up to this year’s “Guess Who’s Coming to Delhi” (Outsourced).

(I should add that I have not bothered to sort out whether or not any of these titles have a question mark on screen, if applicable, or on the script page, if not.  For the sake of sanity, I have presented them all here without the question mark.  Pedants: deal with it.)

After I got through with the Guess Who’s Coming Rule, I was going to do a count of episode titles that start with “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to . . .”  But, instead, let’s don’t.

Those close to me, in fact anyone who has had this conversation with me, has to have heard that I think this a bunch of hooey. It is my belief that TV has never been better than it is today.

I don’t know whether the entire baby boom generation has false memory syndrome, but sometimes I suspect it.

All it takes is a look back at what was popular in the past. In the 50s, which some call “the Golden Age of Television”, the top rated shows were I Love Lucy , Ozzie and Harriet, Leave it to Beaver and Make Room for Daddy (The Danny Thomas Show). There were some great comedy shows like Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows, Ernie Kovacs and Milton Berle, but these were exceptions to the very thin norm. There were also some excellent dramas, especially the live dramas like Playhouse 90. Why do we always remember the good stuff and forget the garbage?

In Canada, the only shows I remember from that era are The Plouffe Family, Wayne and Shuster and the daily 6:00 O’clock news show, Tabloid.

More important, we had few choices. There was but one Canadian network, CBC, and if you were lucky to live near the U.S. border, you might have had access to CBS, NBC and ABC.

TV was so new to us that we watched whatever was on, good or bad. I know people who actually sat in front of their televisions staring at the Indian head card that was displayed before the broadcast day began.

In the 60s, 70s, and 80s we saw the growth of the one hour drama. Police and detective shows became a staple. Everything from The Naked City and Dragnet to Columbo and Hill Street Blues, you could see the growing power of great writing and directing. The acting was still less than stellar for the most part, and the stories didn’t always ring true, but TV was coming of age. Doctors and lawyers also became prime time stars with Ben Casey and The Defenders leading up to St. Elsewhere and L.A. Law. If you can wipe the nostalgia away from your eyes, you cannot help but see the progression.

Even the sitcom, which remained the staple for big audience numbers began to come of age. From shows like The Dick Vandyke Show, where the Petrie’s had to sleep in twin beds, we saw the growth in quality of TV and the television audience with programs like The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and eventually the sublime Seinfeld.

Let’s not forget, however, the top rated sitcom for a whole lot of that time was The Beverly Hillbillies, nobodies idea of a great program.

In Canada we saw little in the way of great series during that time. There were a few successes like Seeing Things, but we had to wait for Da Vinci’s Inquest and the highly underrated This is Wonderland to get an idea of what Canadian talent could produce when given the money and the airtime.

In Canada these decades were more well-known for the rise of some of the best current affairs in the world, starting with W5 and This Hour has Seven Days and culminating in The 5th Estate and The Journal.

For the most part though, CBC and CTV made their money and grabbed their audiences with American fare. When upstart Global Television became a third Canadian network it survived its early years becoming known as The Love Boat network.

During the last 20 years TV has become a writers’ medium. I have heard many television professionals, critics and producers extolling the quality of TV writing. Many, if not most, see TV writing as far surpassing the quality of writing in feature films, where the director, not the writer, has the most power.

Drama continues to be the staple. The ten o’clock time slot on network TV has given us some of the best drama ever seen on North American Television. The West Wing, Boston Legal, and now The Good Wife, have taken television to a higher plane. Certainly the broadcast networks have been pushed by the cable networks. The brilliance of The Sopranos, Mad Men, Boardwalk Empire, Treme, Damages, and Rescue Me have never been equaled in the 60 odd year history of television as a medium. This is the kind of quality we had never even dreamed of. Even the sitcom is making a comeback both on cable and broadcast with shows like Modern Family and Curb Your Enthusiasm.

And, to make matters even better, technology is making it easier and easier to enjoy all that TV has to offer today. First there’s that 500 channel universe that has created more choice than we have ever seen. Then there’s the PVR or DVR that allow the easy taping of programs when you cannot watch them live, or even if they are on one station while you are watching another station. There’s the time shifting that satellite and cable allow. You can’t be home for a show in prime time, no matter, you can watch it from Vancouver of Seattle later on in the evening. Finally, there is the web, where whether legally or illegally everyone has the opportunity to find any show they want to see.

So, from this comfortable seat in front of the television it is all too obvious that television programming, quality and technology have never been better. I hope to never hear another whine about TV today, the truth is: if you can’t find great television today, you are at fault, not the TV networks, producers and writers.

I’m sure I missed some your favorite shows, please let me know what you think I missed.

Burns and Allen: Smart for one girl

Oct. 25: Today’s pilgrimage takes us to Queens, which we’ve previously been to only technically (LaGuardia airport is there.) We’re off to see the Museum of the Moving Image, which sounds like a likely destination and indeed, it turns out to be a can’t-miss spot for anyone interested in the history of motion picture projection systems.

First, though, there is the Astoria area of Queens. If Brooklyn looks like Toronto in the 1960s, Astoria, Queens resembles New York in, oh, maybe 1952: the place in gritty old black-and-white movies about basically good kids who go wrong because there aren’t enough after-school programs. Tucked into the upper right-hand corner of things, Queens looks like it would be good mostly because it’s handy to the bright lights of Manhattan, but there’s a culture all of its own, a quieter suburb — the streets were just about empty this afternoon — whose elevated subway runs right down the middle of the main street, rumbling by with deafening regularity. It’s like the soundtrack of West Side Story, throwing a clattering green metal shade over the dollar stores and corner groceries that appear to make up most of the shopping possibilities.

The museum is a quiet walk past a few large buildings (a union hall, a school), and kitty corner to the modernistic Frank Sinatra School of the Arts, Tony Bennett, Founder, which sign was just about worth the trip on its own. The Museum of the Moving Image was also kind of empty, which could have something to do with the fact that it’s in Astoria, Queens. But it’s exactly the kind of place I like: quirky, navigable, engaging. Designed in a vast, open futuristic style, it’s filled with bits and pieces of TV and movie lore, centred on a tribute show to Jim Henson that includes clips of Muppet shows, Muppet commercials, a 1965 short called Time Piece, and lots of drawings and other Muppet paraphernalia.

Beyond that, there are exhibits of all aspects of the movie industry: the Chewbacca mask from Star Wars, Liz Taylor’s Cleopatra wig, the script from Taxi Driver that explains how the “You talking to me?” scene was improvised, Robin Williams’ Mork suit from the TV show Mork and Mindy, old movie magazines (from the January, 1941 edition of Silver Screen: “Can A Girl Be Moral in Hollywood?”), a Ben Casey MD board game, old theatre signs (from the Depression era: Admission 30 cents; Defence tax 3 cents; total 33 cents), Linda Blair’s rotating head from The Exorcist, the prosthetic bleeding forehead from The Wrestler, and more.

There’s a room where you can sit — all alone, it appears — and watch the 1903 classic The Great Train Robbery, Hollywood’s first blockbuster. There’s a 1950s-style TV lounge where they’re showing a 1968 edition of Laugh-In, cementing the memory that Rowan and Martin were not funny and Tiny Tim was ahead of his time. You can watch snatches of Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer and the classic 1929 Burns and Allen routine Lambchops (“You’re too smart for one girl.” “I’m more than one.” “You’re more than one?” “My mother has a picture of me when I was two.”) There are old scopes that you can look through and turn a crank, flipping a series of photographs into animation: I watched Georges Melies A Trip to the Moon this way. It’s a movie that keeps coming up during this New York excursion — it’s also part of a MOMA film series and figures heavily in the plot of Martin Scorsese’s new film Hugo — which I interpret as a message, although I don’t know what. I’m being pursued by a silent film, doctor.

The museum has places where you can create your own stop-action animation and watch it on the big screen; there was only one kid at the table when I was there in the early afternoon, and his mother was sitting beside him, watching patiently as he made a story about someone slaying a dragon. You can watch clips from films and change soundtracks or sound effects to see how they affect the experience. There are old TVs and radios and movie projectors. There’s a mock-Egyptian movie theatre with a King Tut theme where you can watch an 1939 movie serial in which Mandrake the Magician keeps getting into fights and chasing around town looking for The Wasp, a bad guy played by “???,” according to the credits. I watched the movie in the company of one other viewer, a hefty young man who talked to himself frequently. We left Mandrake in a bad spot, but I suspect he’ll survive.

This far-flung museum also has a program of real movies: earlier this fall you could have seen previews of The Way with Martin Sheen and Emilio Estevez in person, or Martha Marcy May Marlene with Elizabeth Olsen, Sarah Paulson and John Hawkes in attendance. I was going to return tonight to watch a 1968 movie called The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus in the presence of director Michael Lindsay-Hogg — who recently confirmed that he is the son of Orson Welles — but I think I’ll save my return for tomorrow, when Dennis Farina will be there to screen his new movie, The Last Rites of Joe May, about a hustler looking for a last shot at greatness. Queens is just the place to see it.

Ben Casey was a TV medical drama that ran from 1961 to 1966. It was one of the most popular shows of the time and was referenced or parodied everywhere from popular music (“Callin’ Dr. Casey” by John D. Loudermilk) to The Flintstones. (“Monster Fred” from season five with Doctor Len Frankenstone, who switched Fred’s brain for Dino’s. Gotta love The Flintstones.)

When I was young I saw a couple of episodes and today it is, as far as I can tell, not broadcast anywhere. It is just another old TV show. But this is The Saturday Comics, not The Saturday Old TV Shows. So why am I talking about Ben Casey?

That’s why.

That’s a great piece of Neal Adams art, and he did it daily on the Ben Casey comic strip.

If you don’t know Neal Adams, feel free to turn in your pop culture badge now and walk away.

Some bits of his wikipedia bio:

Neal Adams is an American comic book and commercial artist known for helping to create some of the definitive modern imagery of the DC Comics characters Superman, Batman, and Green Arrow; as the co-founder of the graphic design studio Continuity Associates; and as a creators-rights advocate who helped secure a pension and recognition for Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster.

Adams was inducted into the Eisner Award’s Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame in 1998, and the Harvey Awards’ Jack Kirby Hall of Fame in 1999.

Green Lantern/Green Arrow and “relevant comics”

Continuing to work for DC Comics during this sojourn, while also contributing the occasional story to Warren Publishing’s black-and-white horror-comics magazines (including the Don Glut-scripted “Goddess from the Sea” in Vampirella #1, Sept. 1969), Adams had his first collaboration on Batman with writer Dennis O’Neil. The duo would later revitalize the character with a series of noteworthy stories reestablishing Batman’s dark, brooding nature and taking the books away from the campy look and feel of the 1966-68 ABC TV series. For now, however, they would do only two stories, “The Secret of the Waiting Graves” in Detective Comics #395 (Jan. 1970) and “Paint a Picture of Peril” in issue #397 (March 1970), with a short Batman backup story, written by Mike Friedrich, coming in-between, in Batman #219 (Feb. 1970). Batman’s enduring makeover would come later, after Adams and O’Neil’s celebrated and, for the time, controversial revamping of the longstanding DC characters Green Lantern and Green Arrow.

Rechristening Green Lantern vol. 2 as Green Lantern/Green Arrow with issue #76 (April 1970), O’Neil and Adams teamed these two very different superheroes in a long story arc in which the characters undertook a social-commentary journey across America. A major exemplar of what the industry and the public at the time called “relevant comics”, the landmark run began with the 23-page story “No Evil Shall Escape My Sight” and continued to ” …And through Him Save a World” in the series’ finale, #89 (May 1972). Wrote historian Ron Goulart. These angry issues deal with racism, overpopulation, pollution, and drug addiction.

Here is a sample of his amazing Batman covers, featuring issues from my own collection.

He didn’t take the easy way out with Ben Casey either.

Comics historian Maurice Horn said the strip “did not shrink from tackling controversial problems, such as heroin addiction, illegitimate pregnancy, and attempted suicide. These were usually treated in soap opera fashion … but there was also a touch of toughness to the proceedings, well rendered by Adams in a forceful, direct style that exuded realism and tension and accorded well with the overall tone of the strip”.

So feast on Neal Adams’ craft on the Ben Casey strip, a craft which is almost too good for a daily newspaper comic.

by CHUCK STEPHENS

Stanley Kubrick’s labyrinthine 1956 heist flick The Killing—an exploded rethink of John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle and eventual template for the narrative convolutions of Reservoir Dog—became an instant facet in the jewel that was film noir, even as it refracted many of the cinematic crime bedazzlements that had preceded it. Much of its pleasure lies purely in its casting of an array of filmdom noir’s familiar faces, the movie’s every heavily shadowed curve and intentionally left-rough spot tricked out with class-act fillies and brick-headed galoots from Hollywood’s brightest galaxies of second- and third-rung heroes. Not even Sterling Hayden—one of the brashest, snarlingest leading men the screen has ever known—could have muted the charisma that surrounded him on The Killing’s set, not even when it came from men like Elisha Cook Jr., who seemed half his size, or frails like Coleen Gray, so meek she threatens to dissolve altogether under pressure of mere proximity to the man she loves. Everyone gets their own ripe mouthful of hard-boiled dialogue in The Killing, much of it supplied by a modern master of the form: Jim Thompson, pulp fiction’s furthest-out practitioner of stream-of-cracked-consciousness and creeps-giving conversation. Thompson had recently relocated to Hollywood after the publication of two of his magnum opera, The Killer Inside Me and Savage Night, when Kubrick hired him to collaborate on a screen adaptation of novelist Lionel White’s racetrack caper, Clean Break. The first product of the reportedly strained, multifilm collaboration between Kubrick and Thompson, their incendiary script for The Killing remains cinematic legend, lightning trapped in a jar—and their cast conspires to breath sulfur and sadness into every line. Could any other group of actors have come together as such a finely calibrated machine of mirth and menace, or imbued the film’s fractured narrative and hell-forged moral nuances with as many scents of poison or shades of existential disarray?

Sterling Hayden (Johnny Clay)

Born Sterling Relyea Walter in Upper Montclair, New Jersey, in 1916, then adopted at the age of nine and renamed Sterling Walter Hayden, the swaggering, six-foot-five-inch leading man once acclaimed as “the most beautiful man in the movies” came to Hollywood from a seafaring background, and returned to the sea repeatedly throughout his career, including sailing supplies from Italy to the Balkans for the OSS during World War II, for which he was multiply decorated. He remained close to the sea throughout his life, penning a lengthy account of his love of sailing in his 1963 memoir, Wanderer, while living in one of the pilothouses of the mighty ferryboat Berkeley, then docked in Sausalito (the North Bay city where he would spend much of the rest of his life.) Both gentle and gigantic, Hayden could easily have dominated any film in which he appeared but always remained a thoughtful and carefully modulated performer, paying tremendous attention to—listening to—the actors who worked with him. No wonder he produced most of his greatest work for directors known for eliciting unsettling, off-kilter performances from their actors: Kubrick (as The Killing’s luckless Johnny Clay, and later as Dr. Strangelove’s loose atomic cannon, General Jack D. Ripper), Nicholas Ray (as Johnny Guitar himself), John Huston (The Asphalt Jungle, where he furiously demands of people, “Don’t bone me!”), Francis Ford Coppola (as the corrupt cop in The Godfather), and Robert Altman (as The Long Goodbye’s outsized, unhinged, and unavoidably Haydenesque fading writer, Roger Wade). One of the greatest of Hollywood’s twentieth-century leading men, Hayden made a number of appearances on Tom Snyder’s Tomorrow Show in the seventies, fascinating—nay, altogether addictive—clips from which can be found scattered on YouTube. Hayden died in Sausalito in 1986.

Coleen Gray (Fay)

Born Doris Jensen in Staplehurst, Nebraska, in 1922, Coleen Gray became a contract player for 20th Century Fox in 1944, stopped acting for a couple of years after having a child in her midtwenties, then rushed back on-screen with a series of standout (if largely underplayed, as was her wont) roles at the forties’ end. Though she shot her scenes as John Wayne’s ill-fated betrothed for Howard Hawks’s Red River in 1946, the film wasn’t released until ’48, by which time Gray had been featured in two 1947 favorites: with Richard Widmark in Henry Hathaway’s snickering Kiss of Death, and with Tyrone Power in the geek noir milestone Nightmare Alley. In the fifties, she continued down noir’s crooked highway in The Sleeping City and Kansas City Confidential, and supported Ronald Reagan in the Allan Dwan western Tennessee’s Partner. By 1960, she was reduced to sucking men’s pineal glands dry in search of eternal youth as The Leech Woman. Though she worked in television for several decades, Gray increasingly turned her attention to her religious and political beliefs in the sixties, testifying before Congress in 1964, as part of “Project Prayer,” in favor of prayer in schools, and later working with born-again Watergate crook Chuck Colson’s Prison Fellowship; she also appeared in the Reverend Billy Graham’s 1986 production, Cry from the Mountain. Gray currently resides in Los Angeles.

Vince Edwards (Val Cannon)

Though eventually better known as the suave, pensive surgeon Ben Casey (the title character of one of early sixties television’s most popular medical dramas), Vince Edwards—a former national championship swimming star from Ohio State University (born in Brooklyn, 1928)—kicked off his headlining screen career as Hiawatha in Kurt Neumann’s 1953 western of the same name, and could occasionally be found playing handsome, cold-sweat psychopaths in crime thrillers throughout the fifties. The pair of films Edwards made with director Irving Lerner—Murder by Contract and City of Fear—are both masterworks of late-model noir: in the former, Edwards is a contract killer with the pathological patience of Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman and a mortal fear of murdering women; in the latter, he’s a feverish escaped con carrying what he thinks is a container of dope—though it’s actually full of radioactive powder that’s slowly causing his innards to mutate and melt. (Martin Scorsese has professed his fondness for both of these low-budget, stylistically inventive Lerner sleepers.) Ben Casey had been a Bing Crosby television production, and Crosby encouraged Edwards’s singing career throughout the sixties as well. Edwards also directed several episodes of Ben Casey, and later directed episodes of the original Battlestar Galactica. He died in Los Angeles in 1996.

Jay C. Flippen (Marvin Unger)

Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1899, and billing himself as “the Ham What Am” by the midtwenties, the craggy, snaggly-faced Jay C. Flippen—veteran vaudevillian, early radio sportscaster, jazz singer, blackface comedian, and friend of the great African American performer Bert Williams—cut a broad if little-recognized swathe across much of twentieth-century culture. A stage performer infrequently seen on-screen until the late forties, he appeared as “T-Dub” in Nicholas Ray’s They Live By Night and soon became a familiar Hollywood face, working with director Anthony Mann and Jimmy Stewart in Winchester ’73 (where he’s kissed by Shelley Winters), Thunder Bay, and The Far Country. (The palpable homoerotic dimension of Flippen’s love for his former cellmate Sterling Hayden in The Killing lurks only barely beneath the surface of many of those Mann/Stewart films as well.) Flippen shared the screen with Marlon Brando (The Wild One), John Wayne (Jet Pilot, Hellfighters), and Henry Fonda (Firecreek), and sang in Fred Zinnemann’s Oklahoma. He turned up often in early sixties television, on sitcoms like The Dick Van Dyke Show and Ensign O’Toole. A leg amputation left Flippen in a wheelchair in his later years, but he continued acting at the peak of his powers through his final, and perhaps most memorable, role as the Manichean Nixon-era power broker Luther Yerkes, in Russ Meyer’s (woefully undersung) censorship satire The Seven Minutes. Flippen died in 1971.

Ted de Corsia (Policeman Kennan)

As blocky and imposing as an onrushing Mack truck, Ted de Corsia, born in Brooklyn, 1903, began his film career fairly late in life, debuting in 1947 as a sneer from the shadows in Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai, and famously fell to his death from a steel-girdered bridge in Jules Dassin’s The Naked City the following year. He became a regularly featured film noir nightman and frontier badass for the remainder of the fifties. De Corsia worked for directors as varied as Vincente Minnelli (Kismet), Joseph H. Lewis (the same year’s The Big Combo), and John Sturges (Gunfight at the O.K. Corral), and had appeared in André de Toth’s Crime Wave along with his Kubrick costars Timothy Carey and Sterling Hayden in 1954; in 1956, the year he appeared in The Killing, he performed in at least six other features and more than half a dozen TV shows. Bat Masterson, Rawhide, Green Acres, I Dream of Jeannie, Get Smart, The Monkees—the burly, often comedic but always potentially brutal de Corsia continued to be an omnivore of television guest slots until his death in Encino, California, in 1973.

Marie Windsor (Sherry Peatty)

“I don’t think I’ll have to kill her,” Sterling Hayden muses with a grin over Marie Windsor’s pretending-to-be-sleeping body in The Killing. “Just slap that pretty face into hamburger meat, that’s all.” More than a few film noir fellas have felt that way about the characters that the strikingly big-eyed Marie Windsor specialized in: gold diggers, two-timers, doe-eyed spider women, lethal dolls. (“I know you like a book, you little tramp,” Hayden later snarls at her. “You’d sell out your own mother for a piece of fudge.”) Born Emily Marie Bertelsen in Marysvale, Utah, in 1919, Windsor—a onetime Miss Utah who studied acting with the immortal Maria Ouspenskaya (sayer of The Wolfman’s immortal “Even a man who is pure at heart . . .” sooth and also acting teacher to, among others, Elaine May)—has become one of the legendary figures of film noir, an O.G. queen of the Bs best remembered for films like The Narrow Margin and Force of Evil. In fact, she appeared in genre nuggets of every stripe, from straight-up westerns like R. G. Springsteen’s Hellfire (one of Windsor’s personal favorites) to Preston Sturges’s western farce The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend, the 3-D science fiction hokum of Cat-Women of the Moon, old Hollywood wheezers like Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy, and Roger Corman no-budget drive-in quickies like Swamp Women. She even played Josephine to Dennis Hopper’s Napoleon in Irwin Allen’s The Story of Mankind; the Marx Brothers and Vincent Price are in it too. Windsor won a Look magazine award for best supporting actress for her part in The Killing, and remains a favorite of noir aficionados everywhere. Though largely retired from screen acting by the midseventies, she stayed busy as a painter and sculptor and was active in the Screen Actors Guild. Windsor died in Beverly Hills in 2000.

Elisha Cook Jr. (George Peatty)

The quintessential American character actor, Elisha Cook Jr. (Cookie to his friends) held center stage at the fringes of Hollywood cinema for decades, appearing as all manner of bug-eyed mugs and heat-packing psycho-sidekicks in hundreds of film and television classics. The word gunsel seems carved to fit Cookie, as John Huston must have seen at a glance when he cast him as the slapped-around pistol punk Wilmer in The Maltese Falcon. Cook got his first big break in theater, anointed by Eugene O’Neill himself for a memorable part in Ah, Wilderness! in 1933. His first picture was shot in New York in 1930, but his film career proper began in Hollywood in 1936: by 1941, the year he appeared in The Maltese Falcon, Cook had already worked for directors Mervyn LeRoy, Robert Florey, Tay Garnett, and John Ford (in Submarine Patrol). Endless inimitable turns in film noir staples ensued: across from Humphrey Bogart again in The Big Sleep, seconding Lawrence Tierney in Born to Kill, and perhaps most indelibly as the speed-freak drummer in Robert Siodmak’s extraordinary Phantom Lady. (Cook would later claim Barbara Stanwyck as the foremost influence on his acting.) An encyclopedia would be required to trace Cook’s myriad TV appearances from the sixties to the end of the eighties, and he continued in features nearly as long: slain in Shane and deformed by Boris Karloff in Voodoo Island in the 1950s, back in Rosemary’s Baby, Blacula, Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, Robert Aldrich’s Emperor of the North Pole and Wim Wenders’s Hammett. A lifelong outdoorsman, Cook was born in San Francisco in 1903 but for much of his life kept a residence far from the film business, in a cabin in the High Sierras; he died in Big Pine, California, in 1995.

Joe Sawyer (Mike O’Reilly)

“Tough-looking, square-faced, fair-haired, large-headed, solidly built American actor who played top sergeants, taxi drivers, crooks, sailors, and sundry denizens of working-class districts” is how David Quinlan’s once-indispensible Illustrated Encyclopedia of Movie Character Actors sums up Joe Sawyer (born Joseph Sauers in 1906 in Guelph, Ontario)—not a bad description at all, never mind that Sawyer was Canadian. My parents’ generation grew up knowing Joe as Sergeant Biff O’Hara in the Rin Tin Tin dog-adventure movies and radio and television shows. John Ford used Sawyer (then still Sauers) often in the thirties and forties, in The Informer, The Grapes of Wrath, and many other films; so did Raoul Walsh and Charles Vidor—indeed, it would be difficult to find a major Hollywood director from the Golden Age who didn’t direct Sawyer at one time at or another. IMDb lists more than two hundred film and television appearances, many of them uncredited, and there were probably many more: Sawyer appeared in sixteen films in 1936 alone. Sawyer died in Oregon in 1982.

James Edwards (Parking Attendant)

A forerunner of Sidney Poitier in the struggle to bring dignity to Hollywood roles for African Americans, James Edwards (born in Indiana, 1918) earned a B.S. in dramatics at Northwestern University but turned seriously to acting only after being wounded in combat during World War II; his first big break came from Elia Kazan, who directed him in the controversial Broadway hit Deep Are the Roots, where he costarred with Barbara Bel Geddes. He had a beaming, sometimes glowering countenance and a lush sonority in his delivery that riveted the viewer to whatever he was doing—a talent that led to a standout turn in Mark Robson’s Home of the Brave in 1949, which should have made Edwards a star but instead, after much critical praise, left him feeling embittered and betrayed by Hollywood’s high racial walls. He continued acting—in Sam Fuller’s The Steel Helmet, Douglas Sirk’s Battle Hymn, Anthony Mann’s Men in War, and as one of Lawrence Harvey’s ill-fated platoon buddies in John Frankenheimer’s paranoid masterpiece The Manchurian Candidate—along the way becoming friends with Woody Strode, the athlete turned John Ford mainstay with whom Edwards would share many of his struggles in the industry. Though his final role was as George C. Scott’s valet in Patton, Edwards never lost the poise and bearing he’d carried with him throughout his career—or the intensely human seething that seemed always just below his placid surface, raging to break free. Edwards died in San Diego in 1970, only fifty-one years old.

Timothy Carey (Nikki Arcane)

One of the most gargantuan and adorable scenery chewers the cinema has ever known, the six-foot-four Timothy Agoglia Carey had a growl so loud and a grimace so creepy he could have frightened Beelzebub off a toilet seat—and a warm if slightly warped grin so goofy and infectious he could charm a kitten out of a tree. A beatnik/hepcat/margin dweller before there were terms for such things, Carey was born in Brooklyn (are you sensing a pattern here?) in 1929. He was fired from the set of Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole (for scene-stealing as an extra) almost before his career began; appeared across from Robert Mitchum and Susan Hayward in Henry Hathaway’s White Witch Doctor, with Brando in The Wild One and One-Eyed Jacks, and, uncredited, in André de Toth’s Crime Wave and Elia Kazan’s East of Eden; got mercilessly stomped (for real) by Richard Widmark in a scene for Delmer Daves’s The Last Wagon; and showed up as the face of evil in Bob Rafelson’s Monkees’ trip Head and on a hundred other oddball occasions, from Mermaids of Tiburon (a.k.a. Aqua Sex) to Beach Blanket Bingo and Chesty Anderson U.S. Navy. Carey’s career cornerstones include his work for Kubrick in The Killing and Paths of Glory and for John Cassavetes in Minnie and Moskowitz and The Killing of a Chinese Bookie. In 1962, Carey wrote, directed, and starred (as God) in The World’s Greatest Sinner, a monomaniacal vision of scuzzball grandeur with a soundtrack by Frank Zappa; his years-long plans to complete and market a TV sitcom pilot called Tweet’s Ladies of Pasadena never came to fruition. In recent years, outtakes from the photo shoot for the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album have revealed an image of Carey, posed holding his rifle in The Killing, positioned directly behind, and entirely occluded by, George Harrison’s head in the finished LP sleeve shot—lurking, once again, in the shadows of the glamorous, at once present and gloriously little-known. Carey died of a stroke in 1994.

Kola Kwariani (Maurice Oboukhoff)

“Kola (Kwariani), 280 [lbs.], was a brutal Georgian who learned wrestling from his mother, a six-foot-three-inch 205-pounder. Kola’s mother learned wrestling from her mother.” So wrote Gay Talese in the New York Times in 1958 of Kola (Nicholas) Kwariani, who was known in New York chess-playing circles simply as Nick the Wrestler. Born in Kutaisi, Georgia, in 1903, Kwariani spoke eight languages and wrestled Gene “Mr. America” Stanlee in a famous golden era match. Though his film career was confined to his work in The Killing and a 1952 episode of Columbia World of Sports entitled “Rasslin’ Rogues,” Kwariani’s outsized presence, innate intelligence, and extraordinary cauliflower ears made a lasting impression. Moreover, Kubrick gave him one of the best speeches in the film, and it’s well worth remembering here: “You know, I have often thought that the gangster and the artist are the same in the eyes of the masses. They are admired and hero-worshipped, but there is always present an underlying wish to see them destroyed at the peak of their glory.” Kwariani died in New York in 1980.

Jay Adler (Leo the shark)

Born in New York City in 1896, Jay Adler—brother of the famous teacher, Stanislavskian, and Group Theater founder Stella Adler—came from an acting dynasty and enjoyed a long and varied career on Broadway, in Hollywood, and on television, with bits and standout small parts in Robert Wise’s Three Secrets, Joseph H. Lewis’s The Big Combo, Vincente Minnelli’s Lust for Life, Alexander MacKendrick’s Sweet Smell of Success, and Jerry Lewis’s The Family Jewels. He died in Los Angeles in 1978.

Tito Vuolo (Joe Piano)

“Squat, voluble, and Italian-born, Tito Vuolo could not avoid being typecast as the jolly Italian in office,” writes IMDb minibiographer Guy Bellinger of the actor behind The Killing’s motel operator Joe Piano. So thoroughly does Bellinger seem to grasp the Vuolo gestalt that we’ll quote him at greater length: “Vuolo portrayed dozens of Italian barbers, pizza makers, vendors, grocers, waiters, hotel or restaurant proprietors. He played them well, but he was at his best when he was not restricted to stereotypes, particularly in films noirs where his good nature created a powerful contrast with the atmosphere of moral decay prevailing in such films as Kiss of Death, The Web, T-Men, The Racket, and, what is probably the best of them all, The Enforcer, as the taxi driver witnessing the murder at the beginning of the film.” Little more need be added, other than to note that Vuolo was born in 1893 in Gragnano, Italy, worked (often uncredited) for directors Michael Curtiz, Stanley Donen, King Vidor, and Anthony Mann, and died in Los Angeles in 1962.

Joe Turkel (Tiny)

Joe Turkel worked thrice for Stanley Kubrick (tying with Philip Stone for most credited appearances in a Kubrick film): first here, in what amounts to a glorified if pivotal bit as second gun in The Killing’s climactic shoot-out (you’ll glimpse him in one other scene too, if you’re quick), then as Paths of Glory’s Private Arnaud, and finally—and perhaps most famously—as Jack Nicholson’s chimerical bartender Lloyd in The Shining. Born (like so many of his Killing castmates) in Brooklyn, in 1927, Turkel is also intimately familiar to his many fans as Blade Runner’s Dr. Eldon Tyrell, the replicant industry pioneer and power broker who meets a squishy end at the hands of one of his proudest creations: Rutger Hauer. Deep genre divers will also remember Turkel as Jake “Greasy Thumb” Guzik in Roger Corman’s great 1967 pop art/gangland mashup, The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Now retired from acting, Joe Turkel lives in Southern California.

Rodney Dangerfield (Onlooker)

The thirty-five-year-old Rodney Dangerfield (born Jacob Cohen in Babylon, New York, in 1921) received neither respect nor screen credit for his legendary (if peripheral) “role” as an onlooker during Kola Kwariani’s racetrack dustup in The Killing. Fans of the harried-to-the-point-of-hallucinations comic genius’s Easy Money and Back to School—and even hard-core Rodneyists who go all the way back to 1971’s The Projectionist—must, however, now admit that the Dangerfield filmography truly begins here, in these few fleeting frames from The Killing, back in 1956. Dangerfield died in Los Angeles in 2004.

Art Gilmore (Narrator)

You may not know Art Gilmore if you fell over him in the dark, but if you were going to the movies or watching TV in the mid-twentieth century, you’ve heard his voice a hundred times. The narrator of countless coming attractions trailers and educational shorts, and the voice of dozens of unseen radio announcers in movies (Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, for one) and on TV shows, Gilmore (born in 1912 in Tacoma, Washington) finally began to come out from the sound booth and appear on-screen around the time he started working for Dragnet creator and entertainment mogul Jack Webb in the early fifties; in the sixties and seventies, he appeared frequently as police captains and lieutenants on the Webb-produced hits Adam-12 and Emergency. Gilmore’s voice also introduced Ronald Reagan’s career-changing speech “A Time for Choosing,” in support of Barry Goldwater at the 1963 Republican National Convention. Sonically inclined liberal cineastes have been searching for ways to forgive him ever since—even as we admit that classics like The Killing couldn’t possibly have been the same without him. Gilmore died in Irvine, California, in 2010.

(THE CRITERION COLLECTION  2011)

“THE KILLING” 1956 directed by Stanley Kubrick

Landers is best known for his five-year run on Ben Casey as Dr. Ted Hoffman, sidekick to the brooding brain surgeon of the show’s title.  Diminutive and eminently reasonable, Hoffman often acted as a calming influence on the towering volcano that was Dr. Casey.  Landers’s other claim to fame, as a coffee pitchman in a series of commercials for Taster’s Choice, also made good use of his mumbly bedroom voice and his air of approachable warmth.

All of that just shows what a good actor Landers could be.  In life, Landers was a bantamweight tyro, a heavy drinker who spent more than a few nights in jail.  Many of his stories revolve around his sudden flashes of anger, and the consequences of on-set outbursts.  He has mellowed somewhat with age, but even in his final year as an octogenarian, Landers seems capable of scary explosions of temper.  During the hamburger incident – and in fairness, that patty did appear scorched to excess – I was sure that we narrowly avoided one.

(And yes, Landers is 89, not 90.  All the reference books give his date of birth as April 3, 1921, but in fact it is September 3.  At some point, someone’s handwritten 9 must have resembled a 4.)

As he talked about working for Hitchcock and DeMille, Landers was expansive, but also genuinely modest.  “Why do you want to know all this crap?” he asked more than once.  A moment of honesty finally won his respect.  “Why did you decide to interview me?” he wanted to know.

There were several possible answers, but I went with the most accurate.  “Because you’re the last surviving regular cast member of Ben Casey,” I replied.

“That’s a good reason,” Harry agreed instantly.  But when I asked him to comment on some of the widely publicized conflicts among the show’s cast members, he would only go so far.  “No, it’s no good,” he said after interrupting himself in the middle of an anecdote and casting a wary eye in my direction.  “You’re too smooth!”

Retired now, Landers lives with his son in the San Fernando Valley.  He misses his old house in Sherman Oaks and, even more, the vibrant street life of Manhattan.  Until recently, he visited New York City several times a year.  So many of hangouts closed and so many of his East Coast friends passed away, though, that after a time Landers found himself seeing shows, dining alone, and going back to his hotel to watch television.  He stopped going back.  But he’s still active, and still pugnacious: his residuals are so “pathetic” that he doesn’t cash some of the checks, “just to drive the accounting offices crazy.”

As we wrapped up, he insisted on picking up the check.  “I’m a gentleman of quality,” said Landers.  “You can’t bribe me, kid.”

How did you get started as an actor?

I was working at Warner Bros. as a laborer.  There was an article in the Warner Bros. newspaper that they distributed throughout the studio, and they mentioned my name.  In World War II, I did what I think any other kid my age would have done.  I was a little heroic on a ship that was torpedoed, and I saved some lives.  It was no big deal.

How did you save them?

Well, this torpedo was hanging by the fantail.  Some kid was trying to get out through a porthole.  One kid was frozen on the ladder.  I just moved ahead with a flashlight, and had people grab hold and go towards the lifeboat.  Just a little immediate reaction.  I think if you’re a kid, you don’t realize what you do.  You just do it.

So anyway, one day I was out in the back of the studio, where the big water tower is, and I’m pounding nails, and a limousine drove up and a man got out.  His name was Snuffy Smith.  He asked for me, and somebody indicated where I was pounding nails.  He said, “Bette Davis wants to see you.”

I said, “What?”  I was scroungy, stripped to the waist, matted hair, sweaty, angry.

He said, “Yes, she wants to see you.”

So I grabbed a t-shirt and put it on, and got into the limo.  Now I was fear-ridden.  On the ship, I wasn’t.  How old was I?  I was in my early twenties, I guess.  I remembered Bette Davis as a kid, watching her movies.  To this day, I think she’s still the motion picture actress in American cinema.  She’s incredible.

So they asked me onto the stage, to Bette Davis’s dressing room.  They were shooting.  There was a camera and all the sets.  The man went up and said, “Miss Davis, I have the young man.”  So she said, “Come in, come in.”  I walked in and there she was, seated in front of the mirror.  She looked at me and shook my hand.  She asked me a few questions.  She said, “What can I do for you?”

Maybe when I was a kid in New York City, in Brooklyn, I always realized I’d wind up in Hollywood someday.  I never knew why or what, but it was a magnet.  Motion pictures is better than sex!  And she said, “What can I do for you?”

I used to watch the extras.  Beautiful little girls walking around, and they were always rather well-dressed and doing nothing, and I’m sweating and pounding nails.  And they were making more money.  I think I was making like nine or ten dollars a day.  I said, “I’d like to do what they’re doing.”

She said, “You want to be an extra?”

I said, “Yes, ma’am.”

Then she picked up the phone and she spoke to Pat Somerset at the Screen Actors Guild.  Put the phone down.  A few seconds later the phone rang.  She said, “Yes, Pat.  Bette here.  I have a young man here, and I will pay his initiation.”  That was the end of it.  She told me where to go.  She wrote it down: The Screen Actors Guild union on Hollywood and La Brea.  We talked for maybe three more sentences, said goodbye and shook hands.

The next time I ran across Bette Davis was at a party at Greer Garson’s house.  By that time many years had passed; in fact, I was in Ben Casey.  I was with Sam Jaffe and Bettye Ackerman.  They knew Greer – Miss Garson – very well.  There was Bette Davis, and she didn’t remember me.  I [reminded her and] a little thing flicked in her mind.  It was just a very brief kind of a [memory].  That was the last time I ever saw her.

That was before the strict union rules.  Now you give an [extra] special business or a line, they automatically have to become a member of the Screen Actors Guild.  Every now and then they would say, “Hey, you.  Can you say this and this?”  They’d give me one or two short lines.  So I’d be in a short, fast, little scene.  But I always knew this was going to happen.  It was just a progression.  I met a young man who was going to an acting class, Mark Daly, who’s dead, many years ago.  He always had books under his arm.  I said, “What are you reading?”

He said, “Plays.”

I never read a play in my life.  I said, “Oh.”

Then he said, “Harry, what are you doing tonight?”

I said, “Nothing.”

He said, “I’m going to an acting class.  Come on down, you might like it.”

I went down there and I met the person who ran the studio.  It was an incredible place, called the Actors Lab.

That was the left-wing theater group, many of whose members got blacklisted during the McCarthy era.

Yes.  Most of them did.  It was a residual effect out of the Group Theatre.  That’s where I met some of the people who became fast friends of mine.  The one woman I met was Mary Tarsai, who was sort of the administrator.  She wouldn’t say no to me.  She was afraid I was going to kill her.  I was interviewed to become a member.  You had to audition and all that stuff.  So it was like, okay, come to class next Thursday.  Then I met people like Lloyd Bridges, and an incredible actor and an incredible man who was an associate producer on Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Norman Lloyd.  What an amazing man.  Beautiful voice.

Stella Adler taught me, and threw me out of her class.  She called me a gangster, and she was right.

Why did she call you a gangster?

I don’t know.

Then why do you say she was right?

Well, I was rebellious.

Many of the Actors Lab members were later blacklisted because of their political views.  Were you?

No.  No, because I was not that prominent.  They were after the big names, like J. Edward Bromberg, Morris Carnovsky, who were – I’m not going to go into whether they were communists or not.  Hume Cronyn.  But it was immaterial to me.  See, I knew what they wanted.  The desire to overthrow the government was the least motive in their minds.  They were political activists who wanted a better life for the people.  No discrimination.  So I was very sympathetic to what they had to do and say.

Once there were a bunch of us picketing Warner Bros. studio, from the Lab, and we were rounded up and taken over to the Burbank jail.  They put like seven, eight of us in a holding cell.  The door was unlocked.  I walked out.  My mother lived in Van Nuys, and I got to my mom’s house in a cab or whatever, had some lunch, spoke to her, and I went back to the jail.  Opened the door and went back in.  People said, “Hi, Harry.”  They never knew I was gone.

The Actors Lab was in Los Angeles, but you went back to New York at some point.  Why?

I missed New York.  By that time I was out of New York City for quite some time, but I just wanted to go for the adventure.  I drove to New York with two guys.  One became a very famous actor, Gene Barry.  Marvelous man.  And a guy named Harry something – Harry Berman, I think.  Big, tall, huge heavy guy.

This would have been the late forties, early fifties.  Tell me about some of the young actors you got to know in New York during that time.

Ralph Meeker.  Good friend.  Very tough man.  Great fighter, wrestler.  Robert Strauss.  Harvey Lembeck.  I was in a play with Marlon Brando that I walked out of, stupidly.  Luther Adler was directing.  Adler begged me not to.  It was dumb.  There was a hotel in New York called the Park Central Hotel, on 55^th and Broadway.  There was a gym, and I used to worked out there, and Brando used to work out there.  We became friendly, and we liked each other immediately.  We knew all the same people.  Robert Condon, Wally Cox, an incredible man called Red Kullers [whom Cassavetes enthusiasts will remember as the man in Husbands who sings “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?”].  Brando and I got along very well.  We double-dated a few times, and I did a movie with him, The Wild One.

Murray Hamilton was the most talented.  He was an amazing actor.  There was never a finer southern gentleman who ever lived.  And very liberal politically.  Married one of the DeMarco sisters.  Murray got married in my old house up in Sherman Oaks.  When Murray would come in to L.A. – he hated Los Angeles – he, after working, would go back to New York.  We all had to stuff him into a plane.  Fear of flying.  He would have to be stoned before he would get on the plane.

One day he came up from downstairs and opened the door.  He used to call me Hesh, and I used to call him Hambone.  He said, “Harry – Hesh – you have to do me a favor.”

I said, “What?”

“You have to keep me off the sauce.”  Now, Murray was an alcoholic.  I was.  Strauss, Lembeck, Meeker, all very heavy drinkers.

I said, “Okay.”  He was doing The Graduate.  Remember The Graduate?  He played that beautiful girl’s father.  He said, “Now, the director [Mike Nichols], he said ‘Murray, you have to stop drinking.  We can’t see your eyes any more.’”

How did you stop drinking?

I didn’t.  I think just, as the years went on, these people went out of my life.  I just slowly but surely stopped [carousing].

Tell me about doing live television.

Some were small parts, some I was a star.  One with James Dean, I was the lead, opposite Hume Cronyn.  Cronyn was my teacher at the Actors Lab, the best teacher I ever had.  He was the star, he and Jessica Tandy.  I was in love with Jessica.

What did you learn from him?

I learned you cannot get on stage without knowing your lines.  There was a time when I was able to do an improvisation on anything, and I thought that I was a very good actor, or a great actor.  I hit my marks and people hired me all the time, so I must have been pretty good.  I never felt that I had the freedom, the confidence, to really have the opportunities to let go and do it.

What live shows do you remember?

I did so many live TV shows.  One of my best moments on live TV was a very famous show called “The Battleship Bismarck,” on Studio One.  I played a fanatical nazi on the battleship.  There’s the set, the battleship, and I was here saying everything like “Sieg heil!” and “Achtung!”  I’m on the set, talking, during a rehearsal break or something, and I looked over and said, “Oh, my god.”  I flipped.  Over there was Eleanor Roosevelt.  I didn’t ask permission, although I’m a very polite man, respectful of my peers, superiors.  I just said, “Excuse me,” and walked up to her.  I’m not very tall, and she was, and I’m in my nazi uniform.  I said, “Mrs. Roosevelt – ”  She grabbed my wrist and said, “Dear boy, what are you doing?!”  The uniform I had on.

Ernie Borgnine and I were cast in Captain Video.  We got paid $25 an episode, and we shot it in New York City.  We had to learn a whole script a day, for $25.  We did it for two weeks.  We would write the cues on our cuffs.  It was impossible.  We worked so well together.  A very sweet guy.  The last time I saw him, Ernie knew the dates, and he said, “Who cast us in the show?”  I said, “Uh….” and he said, “Elizabeth Mears!”

You were in the classic Playhouse 90, “Requiem For a Heavyweight.”

I replaced Murray Hamilton in that show; I don’t remember why.  The only thing I really remember about the show was that [Jack] Palance was not very friendly.

The famous story about that show is that Ed Wynn couldn’t remember his lines, and right up to the last minute they were going to replace him with another actor.

I never knew Ed Wynn prior to that, but his son I’d worked with quite a few times in the movies.  Keenan Wynn would beg him: “Come on, Dad, you can do it, come on, you can do it!”  And the old man did it, and it was a marvelous performance. 

Do you remember any incidents where something went wrong on the air?

I remember I was supposed to be on the set of Tales of Tomorrow, and I was in jail.

What happened?  Did you make it on the air?

Yes!  Bob Condon, the brother of Richard Condon, who wrote The Manchurian Candidate, bailed me out of jail.

And why were you there in the first place?

I destroyed an apartment house.  The night before I had a date with a beautiful girl from Westchester County, the daughter of an actor and a crazy girl, just a nut.  I went down to her apartment on 37^th Street or 38^th Street, and I took Bobby Condon with me.  He and I were good friends.  I spoke to her – I think her name was Betty – and I said, “I’m bringing a friend.  Get a girl.  The four of us will go out.”

Well, we went down there and she was pissed at me.  I knocked on her apartment door, and she wouldn’t let me in.  I said, “Will you open the door?”  Blah, blah, blah, blah.  “Come on, open the door.”  And I became angry and I kicked the door in.  Dumb.  I was a kid.  I kicked the door in, and that was it.  But as I walked out of the apartment house, I wrecked the entire apartment house.  Like three, four banisters on the stairs, I kicked the spokes out, [pulled down] the chandeliers.  Went home.  About five o’clock in the morning, six in the morning, the cops grabbed me and threw me in jail, and they threw Bobby Condon in jail.  They let him out immediately, but they kept me in just because of my attitude.

So one of the cops called over and said, “Yeah, he’s in jail.”  So they had a standby actor walking [in my place] all camera rehearsal.  Meanwhile the jailers were cuing me for my cues.  They loved it!  I had grabbed my script and my glasses [when the police arrived].  But they bailed me out just in time to get me to the set.  I got there just in time.  I needed a shave.  I had scrubby clothes.  Gene Raymond was the star of that show.  He looked at me like, “Oh, wow, who are you?”

The producer never forgave me, but the show was marvelous!  One of my better performances.

Above: Landers and Gene Raymond on Tales of Tomorrow (“Plague From Space,” April 25, 1952)

You were in Rear Window.  Tell me about Alfred Hitchcock.

I was prepared to dislike him.  I don’t know why; I was a great fan of his.  When we got on the stage, he said, “All right, kiddies, show me what you’d like to do.”  That was all improvised: we’re in a club, she picks me up in a club coming out of a movie.  We get through doing it and he says, “Oh, that’s marvelous.”  He says, “Harry, come here.  Look through the camera.”  I didn’t know what the hell I was looking at.  But he was gentle, and sweet, and so nice to work with.  Which surprised me.

You were also in The Ten Commandments, Cecil B. DeMille’s last film.

I played three different parts.  I was the first guy in America in fifty years who screamed at Cecil B. DeMille on the set, in front of God and everyone.  Everybody’s dead silent.  DeMille’s blue eyes went [looking around in search of the culprit].  The assistant director goes, “Harry, get back where you belong.”  I said to myself, “I’m fired.  That’s it.”

Why did you yell at him?

By that time, I’d watched DeMille scream at actors, and he could be very, very cruel.  He did not know how to direct actors.  He directed donkeys and elephants and mass crowds.  With actors, he didn’t know.  When I got on the stage first time, one of the actors said, “With Cecil B. DeMille, raise your hands all the time.  ‘Yes!’ ‘Yes!’”  I said, “Oh, okay.”

Anyway, in the scene, I’m on a parallel.  I’m an Egyptian architect, and I’m surveying.  I look up this way, and I’ve got a flag, and I look this way, and this way.  A good-looking guy, John Derek, played Joshua, and he breaks loose from his Egyptian captors.  So I jump off the parallel – the only reason I got the job is because I was always very well-built – and I grab him, hit him, knock him on the floor, and jump on him.  Then some other people grab him.  DeMille is sitting with his binder.  Looking through his viewfinder, he says, “You!  Move three inches to your left.”  So I knew he meant me.  I moved three inches, maybe five, maybe six.

Now when DeMille spoke, he had somebody put a mike in front of him.  When he sat, somebody put a stool under his ass.  So he’d never look [at anything].

That legend is really true?

Absolutely!  I was there.  So the mike is in front of him, and he said, “I said three inches, not three feet!”

I went insane.  I picked up John Derek, I pushed him like this.  I walked up to DeMille, I got very close to him.  I cupped my hands.  I said [loudly], “Mr. DeMille!”  Now this is a huge stage of donkeys and hundreds of people.  “Mr. DeMille!  Would you like to go over there and measure me?”

He was flabbergasted.  Prime ministers would come to see this man.  He was Mister Paramount.  And, anyway, I thought I was fired.  I came back the next day.  Next day, nobody spoke to me.  Not one actor.  Two days later, I’m walking on set.  DeMille looked at me and said, “Good morning, young man.”  Turned away and walked straight ahead.  I’m saying, “Wow, what goes with this?”  Nobody knew why I was still on the set, why I was still working.

Now, every actor in Hollywood worked on The Ten Commandments, and a lot of them weren’t even given screen credit.  I got paid $200 a day, six days a week, plus we always went overtime – $250 a day.  And I worked on it for three months.  I was making more money than John Carradine, who was an old friend of mine, more than Vincent Price.  I was papering my walls with checks from Paramount.  One day, the assistant director, a great guy, says, “Harry, I gotta let you go.  The front office is screaming about it.”  He’d told me this once before, about a month before.  He said, “Harry, we’ve got to let you go.”  Because they’d never put me on a weekly [deal].  They said, “Get rid of him, or he’s going to make [a fortune off of us].”

When I was fired by the assistant director, I climbed up to tell DeMille.  He was always up on a parallel.  By this time I’d grew to love the old man.  I really did.  I realized how incompetent he was!  I walked up and he waited, and then he looked and said, “Yes . . . young man?”  He always wanted to call me by name, but he could not remember my name.

I said, “Mr. DeMille, I just wanted to say goodbye and I wanted to thank you very much for just a great time.”  And I really meant it, in my heart.  I said, “It was a great experience.  I appreciate it so much.”

The assistant director was waiting at the bottom of the parallel.  He climbs up the ladder.  DeMille said, “Where is this young man going?”  And the assistant director looked at me, and looked at DeMille, and said, “Nowhere, sir.”

I stayed on the picture for another full month, at $250 a day overtime.

Here’s the end of the story.  Months later I’m walking through Paramount, on an interview for something, and as I’m walking out, walking towards me is Cecil B. DeMille and his film editor and somebody else.  He stopped, and he went like this [beckons].  I walked towards him.  He extended his hand and said, “Hello.  How are you?”  And then he looked very deeply into my eyes and said, “Is there anything I can do for you?”

I’m not very smart when it comes to that.  I said, “No, sir, but I thank you very much for the offer.”  He said okay.

As I walked away, I realized the whole thing.  DeMille, in those days, was probably in his sixties.  I was in my thirties.  I must’ve reminded him of someone he knew as a kid, who was a very good friend of his, or a relative.  I took DeMille out of the twentieth century and took him back to when he was a child, or a youngster.  We saw each other and he would sense-memory back to somebody in another life.  That’s the only reason he tolerated me, I suppose.

What made you think that?

Every time we spoke, he turned to his left, like there was a name on the tip of his tongue.  Like he wanted to call me John or Bill or something.

I see – that’s why he was always blocked on your name.

Yeah.  And he was always busy, people talking to him, and when I spoke to him, all of a sudden everything evaporated and he just zeroed in on me for a moment.  And then he was back to [what he was doing].  So that’s the only logical conclusion I could come to.  Or maybe it was because I screamed at him.  I felt so secure, I got my own dressing room, and I changed a whole huge scene in the movie by telling the assistant director the dialogue was incorrect grammatically.  I brought my little immigrant mother on the stage and introduced my mom to Cecil B. DeMille.  “Madame, it’s such a pleasure meeting you.”  I felt very confident with the old man.

How did you get the part on Ben Casey?

There was a show called Medic, with Richard Boone.  I did one of the episodes.  It was a great show.  One of my better moments.  [A few years later] I was walking down the streets of MGM to go to my barber.  I had a barber there who used to cut my hair.  As I’m walking down the studio street, my agent walked up.  He said, “Hey, Harry, what are you doing?”  I told him [nothing].  He said, “Do you know Jim Moser?”  I said, “Yes.”  He produced and wrote Medic, and he produced Ben Casey and did the pilot.

Anyway, he arranged an interview for me.  It was on a Friday.  I’ll never forget this.  I went there and read for him and Matt Rapf and I forget the studio executive’s name.  I did four or five pilots prior to that, and you could almost tell when you had something.  When I got home I called my agent and I said, “I think we have a series.”

Monday, he called me and said, “They want you back for another reading.”

So I went back to the studio.  There was Vince Edwards, who I knew in New York City.  Knew him quite well.  They handed us each a script and we started reading.  And Jim Moser got out of the chair, he grabbed the scripts, threw them up in the air, and said, “That’s it.  You guys are the parts.”  That’s how I got it.

Landers and perpetually scowling Vince Edwards (right) on Ben Casey.

What was Vince Edwards like?

Amazing man.  One of the smartest, stupidest men I’ve ever known in my life.  Complete contradiction.  It’s too long to go into.  He was abusive to many people.  He was petty in many ways.  He was far more talented than he gave people a chance to realize.

He had a photographic memory.  Every now and then we’d have time to rehearse.  We’d sit around the table and read our scenes.  Vince would read a script once and he knew every line.  Every dot, every comma.  He knew everything.  Sam Jaffe and I had difficulty, especially with the latin terms.  Vince would just glance down and he’d get every paragraph, like that.  Jaffe and I used to look at each other and go, “Wow.”

It was also his downfall, because he never bothered to study, to learn his lines.  He was a much better actor than he gave himself a chance to be.  He had charm.  He had a great voice.  He sang very well.  He had an incredible since of humor.  He was quick as a cat.  Very witty.

I’ve heard a couple of things about Edwards during the production of Ben Casey.  One was that he spent all his time at the racetrack.

Sure.  I’m directing one of the episodes, okay?  Now, Vince is an old friend of mine.  I knew him in New York City.  When he first came out here, he stayed at my house.  When he had an appendicitis attack, I got him to a doctor.  My mother used to feed him chicken soup.

Vince, lunchtime: “I’ll be back.”  He didn’t care who [was directing].  He was ruthless.  He’d go, and [after] the hour for lunch, “Where’s Vince?”  We had to shoot around him.  He’d show up around three, four o’clock.

We haven’t gotten in Franchot Tone.  What a man, what a man.  He was brilliant.  Do you know who he is?

He replaced Sam Jaffe as the senior doctor for the last season of the show.

Yeah.  Sam Jaffe left for two reasons.  It’s a sordid story.  But Franchot Tone was amazing.  He was the son of a doctor.  Very rich.  Responsible for the Group Theatre.  When they ran out of money, when they were doing Odets plays and all that, he would [write a check].

Now, I’ll tell you a story about him.  He would talk to no one.  It took months before he would relate to anyone in the cast.  On any level.  I became his buddy.  The reason?  Right before we’re shooting, he came out and said, “Harry, I understand you have a dressing room upstairs?”  I did.  I had three dressing rooms, one upstairs – the editors had their own private dressing room there – one on the stage, and one downstairs with Vince.  He said, “Can I have the key?”  He looked over, and there was a pretty little extra in the doorway.  So I slipped him the key.

After that we became very, very good friends, and he turned out to be a marvelous source of information about all the Group Theatre actors.  Tone was a total alcoholic.  He was a marvelous, compassionate, bright guy.  But when he came to the studio, the minute he passed the guard, the phone on the set would ring: “Watch out, Franchot’s on the way over.”  Franchot had a rented Chevrolet.  The sides were bent like an accordion.  He would hit the sides of the building: boom, boom, boom.  He’d get out, staggering.  He and his companion, carrying two big paper bags loaded with ice and whatever they were drinking.  Scotch.  Clink, clink, clink, went the bags.  They’d go into the room, and that was it.

One day, when I was directing the show, he looked at me and said, “Harry, you know, you do something that the other directors don’t do.”

I said, “What’s that, Franchot?”

He said, “You always have me seated when we’re in a scene.  Why do you do that?”

Well, I didn’t want to tell him that he was swaying in and out of focus all the time.  I said, “Well, Franchot, you’re the boss of the hospital and this guy is your subordinate, so it’s just proper etiquette.”

He said, “Oh, yes, dear boy, thank you, I see.”  With a little smirk on his face.

Franchot Tone as Dr. Freeland on Ben Casey.

I want to go back to Sam Jaffe.  I heard that he left Ben Casey because of conflicts with Vince Edwards.  Is that accurate?

Partially.  Yeah, I’d say it was accurate.  If Vince was in a bad mood – if you’re the star of the show, you’re a total, total dictator.  The atmosphere on a set is dictated by the star.  Vince was the boss.  And Vince usually was in a pretty good mood, but he had an assistant who worked for him, an ex-prizefighter.  What I’m going to tell you is too sordid, it’s such a cheap kind of a . . . oh, why not?  They would do thievery.  Christmastime, they would collect money to buy gifts for everyone.  They kept half the money.

But Edwards was making a fortune as the star of the show, right?

Yes.  He blew it all.  He owned an apartment house with Carol Burnett out in Santa Monica – they were business partners together.  Vince sold out his rights to get some more money to go to the track.  I’m at Santa Anita one day with Jack Klugman, and I go to the men’s room.  I look out and I see Vince walking towards the men’s room.  I don’t want to bump into him, so I made a sharp left back into the bathroom, got into a stall, locked the stall.  I was waiting for Vince’s feet to go out so I could leave, because he invariably hit you up for money.  If you were at the track, and you saw Vince coming towards you, you immediately pulled out like two twenty dollar bills and put it on the table.  Because he’d hit you up for money.  “See, Vince, that’s it.  That’s what’s left of my stake.  I came in with three hundred dollars,” and whatever.  Some bullshit.  And he knew it.  He owed me a lot of money.  I’m a schmuck.

So he really stole the Christmas gift money from the cast and crew of Ben Casey?

Yeah.  They would give people extra business.  You know what that is, an actor gets extra business?  He gets an increase in his pay.  It makes him eligible to become a member of the Guild.  So they would create extra business for extras, and if you did extra business you would pick up an extra hundred dollars.  So Benny Goldberg, his little thuggy partner, would collect the money.  It was petty.  I remember once – I don’t know why I’m telling you all this shit.  I can’t do it.  It’s too demeaning.  You’re too smooth.  No, it’s no good.

Well, it sounds as if Edwards had a very serious addiction.

Oh, enormous.  He had a huge problem gambling.

Do you think he liked doing Ben Casey?  Did he like acting, like being a star?

I don’t know.  Did he like doing it?  Sure.  He was making a lot of money.  There was an episode where – I’ll tell you this, I don’t care – Jerry Lewis was directing one of the episodes of Ben Casey.  He and Vince got into it.  Bing Crosby got on the phone – he was the boss, you know that, he owned the show – and Vince disappeared.  All of Vince’s lines went to me and Jaffe.  And Jerry Lewis directed the show without any problems.  We were all pros.  But he was a difficult guy in many ways, yes.  In many ways, no.  Instead of focusing on his acting, his focus was get it done and go to the track.

Did your earlier friendship mean that you were on better terms with Vince than the rest of the cast was?

Yeah.  By far.  Absolutely.  I could get away with murder with Vince.  He was afraid of me.

He was bigger than you, though.

Ah, he was full of shit.  He was blown up with drugs, but he had the wrists of a fifteen year-old girl.

What kind of drugs was he on?

I don’t know.  I think, in those days, enhancement drugs.

Steroids?

Yeah, steroids.  Oh, yeah, he was a two hundred-and-ten pound phony baloney.  But it was all right.  He was very smart.  Big ideas.  But a dumbbell.  Didn’t know how to treat people.  He believed that they tolerated and hated him.

But there was only one Ben Casey, and it was him.  Nobody could take that show over.  Nobody.  He was it.

I think that surly quality of his made the character, and the show, unique.  He wasn’t a wimp like Dr. Kildare.

Yeah.  I knew actors who were up for the role.  Russell Johnson, from Gilligan’s Island, was up for it, and two or three other actors.  But Vince got it, and was marvelous in it.

Did Jim Moser have a lot of involvement in Ben Casey?

No, outside of writing.  He was the producer, but he was never on the stage.  Matt Rapf was one of the producers.  They rarely came on the stage.  I think it was part of the caste system in Hollywood.  When you reach a certain level, you don’t go back.

Tell me about Sam Jaffe and Bettye Ackerman, who played Ben Casey’s leading lady.  Were they together before the show began?

Already married.  She was his student.  After Sam died, she moved to South Carolina.  She would come out here and she would call me and I would have lunch with her, maybe once or twice a year.  She became a Tennessee Williams type of lady.  She developed a slight little Southern accent.  She reverted back to her youth.  She was a marvelous lady.  Her brother was a doctor.  She was very well-schooled.

I became Sam Jaffe’s son in some ways.  Just chemistry, mutual likes, politics.  People we knew.  He’d always call me up: “Heshel, how are you?”  When he died, the whole town came out.

If people called you Hesh or Heshel, that makes me wonder: Is Harry Landers your real name?

No.  Harry Sorokin.  Landers is my mother’s maiden name.  It’s an old Russian name.  Seven children.  We all took my mother’s maiden name but one brother and the girls, because my father walked out on seven kids.  I, and my brothers, out of outrage and heartbreak about my father deserting us, disassociated ourselves from him.  A dreadful man, really, a very bad man.  But I loved him, in retrospect.

Let me try this one more time though: You said there were two reasons why Sam Jaffe left Ben Casey.  What was the other one?

It was Vince’s gopher, who was a rated prizefighter, one of the top fifteen, twenty, I think a lightweight.  Not a very nice man.  Jaffe, I realized, had developed an intense dislike for him.  And his dislike for Vince, as the years went on, increased, because Vince would do things that were not very nice.  Scream at a makeup man, just stuff that no gentleman of quality would do.

I haven’t ask you much about your character on Ben Casey, or what you did with it.

I don’t know, what’s your question?  How did I interpret the part?  I didn’t.  Well, I was the second-in-command.  Vince was the chief resident and I was the second in command of whatever the unit was, and I was just playing footsies to Vince.  He was the big wheel.  That’s all it was.

The classic “best friend” role?

Yes.  I was just his best friend on the series, and Jaffe’s good friend, but I didn’t have any – my part was indistinguishable.  Anybody could have phoned it in.  It was not a challenge.

Were you content to be in that kind of secondary role?

Sure!  They paid me very well.  I became very well-known, and if you’re rather well-known, you’re treated with a – it’s a great lifestyle.

The show was very popular.

Huge!  For two years we were number one, number two.  I remember once in Louisiana, visiting my ex-wife in Baton Rouge, walking down the street and people screamed.  They would tear the clothes off you.  You’d walk into a restaurant here, you couldn’t pay the tab: “Please come back.”  You go to a movie, you never wait in line.  You’re ushered right in.  I was a half-assed movie star for a while.  I was halfway up the ladder.  I like that title.  I’ll write a book: Halfway Up the Ladder.

Do you remember any other Ben Casey episodes that used you prominently?

“Minus That Rusty Old Hacksaw.”  Gloria Swanson played my mother.  First time I came on the set, I probably had an eight o’clock call, and she was probably there since five in the morning, being made up.  When people introduced themselves, she would extend her hand.  People would kiss her hand.  I never kissed anybody’s hand.  So she extended her hand and I took it and said, “How do you do?”  I shook it.

Slowly but surely, and I say this without any reservations, she fell madly in love with me.  Everybody in the studio thought I was having sex with Gloria Swanson.  Totally impossible.  She was old enough to be my grandmother.  Last time I saw Gloria Swanson, she gave me a big hug and a kiss on the cheek, and she took my hand and squeezed it.  I opened it and in it was a piece of paper, and she said, “I suppose you can’t be reached?”  And I said no.  She said, “Here’s my phone number.  Call me.  Please call me, Harry.”  That was the end of Gloria Swanson.  I wasn’t very bright about those things.

In one of the episodes, I’m dying of some sort of unknown disease, and they have a big microscope and they look at my body for what was making me sick, a pinprick or whatever.  There were a couple of other episodes [in which Ted Hoffman figured prominently], where Vince was ill or he didn’t show up or whatever.  But Vince was very zealous about his position in the show and who he was.  There was a while – I don’t mind saying this – where you could not hire an actor as tall as Vince, or taller.  They once hired an actor who was taller, and when they were in a scene together, Vince sat or the other actor sat.  It was never eyeball to eyeball, because Vince would not put up with any kind of competition.

Gloria Swanson and Harry Landers on Ben Casey (“Minus That Rusty Old Hacksaw,” March 15, 1965).

You and Vince both directed episodes of Ben Casey.

He was a very good director.  He was a better director than I was.  For one reason: Vince had a photographic mind, as I told you.  He was mechanical.  All of the actors who I ever directed loved me.  I’m the best acting teacher, best acting director in the world, including Elia Kazan.  I’m brilliant at it.  But I never really mastered the camera.  I should have gotten the cameraman aside, but I did not; I winged it with the camera, and it showed.  But, you know, they hired me.  I did three shows, so they must have saw something they liked.  I was adequate.  Out of Ben Casey, I got a Death Valley Days to direct.

Did you do any more directing after that?

No.  I’m the second laziest man in America, and probably the most undisciplined person that ever lived.  If I had disciplined myself, I would have had a very large career.

Here’s a TV Guide profile of you from the Ben Casey era. I’m curious as to how much they got right.  Were you in fact an unofficial technical advisor on Action in the North Atlantic (1943)?

That’s true.

And your wife was Miss Louisiana of 1951, 1952, and 1953?

Yes.  But I’ve been divorced for years.  If I had a brain in my head I would have stayed married.  I would’ve been the governor of Louisiana years ago.

Is it true that you got the audition for Ben Casey because you saw Jim Moser stranded on the side of the road after his car broke down, and stopped to help him?

That was made up by the publicity guy.

Do you remember doing Star Trek?

Yeah.  I was a guest star, and it was a dreadful experience for me.  I had just got out of the hospital.  I’d had a lung removed, and I was not steady on my feet.  Usually I was one take, two takes, print.  I was always great with dialogue.  This time I was not good.  The producer, who produced Ben Casey, insisted I do the job.  He said, “Oh, Harry, you can do it.”

Oh, right, Fred Freiberger produced the final season of Star Trek.

Yeah.  What a guy!  He was a member of the Actors Lab.  But I was not happy with that show.  It was not one of my better [performances].

Why did you have a lung removed?

I was on location doing a movie with Elvis Presley.  Charro, I think it was.  I was working in Death Valley.  I was a gym rat, and I came back and I felt a pull in my right lung, and I had it x-rayed and I had a growth.  It was not a good moment for the doctors or Harry.  They could have treated me medicinally, but in order to play it safe, they decided to remove the upper right lung.  This involved a lot of money.  Maybe they were right, but I don’t think so.  An incredible, painful nuisance.  They cracked every rib in my body.

Landers with William Shatner (left) on Star Trek (“Turnabout Intruder,” the final episode, June 3, 1969)

Is that why you didn’t act much in the years immediately following the Star Trek episode?  You kind of disappeared for a long time.

I just didn’t want to work.  I don’t know why.  I had a lot of money.  In fact, I even turned down a lead opposite Shelley Winters in some movie she was doing.  I always felt that once you reach a certain plateau, which I did, people always want you.  What I didn’t realize was: out of sight, out of mind.  All of a sudden it was like, who? what?  So I just sort of disappeared.  It was a period of eight, ten years where I didn’t work.  I didn’t care.  I don’t think I had an agent.  I didn’t bother.

What were you doing during that period?

Collecting art, and selling art, which I do today.  I’m a huge art collector.

What kind of art?

All kinds.  I’m very good with antique art, old art.  I know the Picasso, Chagall, Miro, Calder and all that stuff, but I’m partially colorblind, so I stay away from that.  I buy antique art.

You mentioned that Jack Klugman was a friend.  Is that why you appeared several times on Quincy?

Yes.  I didn’t want to do them.  Walking by Universal, going in and out, Jack saw me and he stopped.  “Harry, get in here!”  He said, “Please do one of the shows.”  They were minor parts.  I just did them to please him, and I enjoyed every moment of it.

Finally, I guess we should talk about Taster’s Choice.

Out of the blue my agent called me: “They want you to do a commercial.”  I said, “Okay, I’ve done a few commercials.  Quite a few, in fact.  What is it?”  One of the sponsors’ wives saw me in one of the episodes of Ben Casey.  I did the video version here, on tape: “Hi, my name is Harry Landers, and I drink Taster’s Choice coffee because it gives me diarrhea.  Taster’s Choice coffee comes in small packets.  It’s instant brewed coffee.  It’s fucking delicious!”  I do a lot of improvising.  So, I did it, and then they flew me to Chicago to do the audio version.  It was on the air so often, it got to the point where the disc jockeys would say, “Who the hell is Harry Landers?”

This interview was conducted in Sherman Oaks, California, on April 30, 2010.  The image at the top is from The Untouchables (“Portrait of a Thief,” April 7, 1960). I’m not entirely clear on what this is, but it features Harry in a recent acting role.

I once went to a wedding in Poulton, that of a close friend, one of those friendships you make in adulthood that you never think could ever be as deep and meaningful as the ones you make in your childhood and teens, or even at University…although I personally would not describe my University years as the best of my life….I digress, but said bride had asked me to speak, in a sort of best man/woman capacity, so it was with a sense of purpose that I left the church looking for the reception venue.

The reception could not have been in a more prominent hotel – Blackpool’s fabulous Imperial Hotel. Don’t forget I’m from around these parts so how hard can it be to drive, what, 5 miles? But boy oh boy did I get lost – in Cleveleys!

It’s like the end of the earth. It’s like there is no soul to the place but a massive great apron, criss-crossed by tram lines and bespattered with cars not knowing where they’re going.

I actually drove out and back into Cleveleys several times before having a near nervous breakdown and going down a route I thought totally inaccurate and freeing myself from the vortex.

A ray of sunshine in an otherwise grey landscape

The classic utility glove - ah you can smell the rubber!

These were taken by another good friend, the wonderful Kath Walker. You may know her from such tweets as @kathwalkerart.

It’s been a week for artists and beaches. My sister sent me a link to a piece of footage from the Guardian website documenting the new Turner Gallery at Margate. Or do they call it an artist’s space? I don’t know but it all sounds like classic bullshit to me. The building whose light is described as capricious (oh perrrrrleeease) looks like something Staples may have purhcased to fill with stationery for the masses. I can’t criticise the light, I’m sure David Chipperfield’s anticipation of light, its uses when lighting installations etc etc have been taken into consideration to a great degree, but I pale when I listen to creative types bang on these days. And as my husband knows to his cost, once I’m on my soapbox about the Turner prize there’s no stopping me.

The building, situated on Margate’s seafront, is meant to emulate boatsheds. I’m sure it does. But we live in tough times and erecting something which looks like a glorified pre-fab could not scream EMPEROR’S NEW CLOTHES more if it tried.

I’m ever conscious of the spend these days. I listen to Radio 4′s Today programme daily and whince at the latest financial crises to hit our world, so cannot help but wonder if this money would not have been better spent keeping a library open, or even converting a library into a double space. Apologies if this has been privately funded, I was so bored by the footage I had to mentally switch off.

This morning’s Lancashire Evening Post billboards shout the news that Preston is, after all, going to demolish its bus station. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a pretty building. In fact it’s pretty grim. But it’s iconic. It’s from an era when cast concrete was funky, cool and could be so again. It’s home to a multi-storey car park which creates a safe passage for night time concert goers to walk through to the Guild Hall. I point this out as my 76 year old mother, a regular visitor to the Liverpool Philharmonic concerts, feels suddenly wrong footed. Where will she park? Will she feel safe? No. One of two things will happen. I will take her or she will stop going.

John Lewis say they intend to move onto the site. Surely John Lewis have a creative design team when it comes to their stores. Surely they could convert the place into one of Britain’s funkiest looking shopping destinations? It appears not. They don’t even have to try too hard. Ben Casey has mocked up a superb impression of what we could do with the place.  I silently weep for the crap that will be erected in its place. Whoopee, another faceless prefab….but hey….may be the light will be suitably capricious to entice us into parting with our cash for some JL goodies.

A sad day for Prestonians as we look towards 2012 and the Preston Guild 20 years celebrations. And our city’s motto? Proud Preston.

I’m not proud today, not by a long chalk.

RIP Uncle Leo!

From CNN:

“It was very peaceful,” his daughter, Michele Lesser, told CNN, saying the family had hoped for a quick and painless death. “He was a great grandpa, and an amazing father. He had a heart of gold — and a sense of humor of platinum.”

Best known as Jerry Seinfeld’s Uncle Leo on TV’s “Seinfeld,” Lesser made more than 500 film, television and stage appearances. His TV roles ranged from “Studio One in Hollywood” in 1949 to a 2009 role on “Castle.”

In addition to “Seinfeld,” he had a recurring role as Garvin on “Everybody Loves Raymond.” He also appeared on “ER,” “Mad About You,” “Thirtysomething,” “Falcon Crest,” “Quincy M.E.,” “The Rockford Files,” “Kojak,” “The Bob Newhart Show,” “The Mod Squad,” “Green Acres,” “All In The Family,” “The Monkees,” “Get Smart,” “My Favorite Martian,” “Ben Casey” and “The Untouchables.”

This is one of my concepts of the perfect woman.

I kinda remember Barbara Hale from playing Della Street, the Gal Friday on the old Perry Mason show with Raymond Burr in the 50s and 60s…but actually I don’t remember that show very well because while I was growing up I was more interested in the Twilight Zone, Outer Limits, Ben Casey, and 12 O’Clock High and magazines like Famous Monsters of Filmland and giant comic book creatures like Fin Fang Foom. But I loved Barbara as a naughty minx in this movie when I saw it last night in my current state of maturation as a 57-year-old connoisseur of noirishly deceptive doxies. Yes, my eyes have been opened to an actress whose other works I must readily explore.

Barbara sings the same song in The Houston Story that made Rita Hayworth famous in Gilda a decade earlier, “Put the Blame on Mame,” and Barb’s equally sexy in a sultrier, more “MILFy” kind of way.

This is from the trailer for The Houston Story.

I don’t know if Miss Hale really sang the song or it was dubbed, but the camera stays on her in closeup the whole time, and her facial expressions, and the way she moves her mouth and the way the light flatters her gorgeous cheekbones, made it something I’m glad I recorded on the DVR. If you get to see this movie when it shows up again on TCM, watch how she moves her lips on the word “boys” in the lyric, “Put the blame on Mame, boys…”

In her other scenes in the flick, she really brings the tough babe to rich life with everything from the smallest furrowing of her brow to the freshening of her lipstick. What a dame!

Looking her up on the web after seeing the movie, I found some of these shots at a great tribute site called Big Dave’s Barbara Hale Annex. I also read somewhere else that she may have been a model back in the 1940s for the famed pinup calendar painter Gil Elvgren, the creator of timeless works like this (which can be found at the fine site Pinup Files).

It's a sad day when a grown man envies a cocker spaniel...

Well, with Barb’s stems and that wholesome but saucy face, I can sure believe that Elvgren, who was to pinups what Michelangelo was to ceilings, would have loved her!

With women like this on their side, how could our World War 2 soldiers NOT have beaten the Axis?

The URBIS looks great from the outside

On Wednesday, I went to the URBIS in Manchester. It’s a great looking building.

There were two reasons for my trip to the URBIS. Firstly was the D&AD exhibition of all of their annuals since its beginnings in the 1960s. It was interesting seeing how it had envolved over the last five decades but because the annuals were encased in glass and only one page displayed, the exhibition felt a little…stunted. Here was an opportunity to display 50 years of work, but it had been reduced down to just a few examples. The others from my class who had also come to see the exhibition felt the same way, asking “Is this it?”. It felt like a bit of a let down.

However, more importantly than the exhibition and the main reason I had decided to come was because I had been selected for a portfolio surgery. A portfolio surgery, as I found out a few weeks ago, was a chance to spend 20 minutes with someone from the design industry and simply get a chance to talk about your work and invite comments on it. An opportunity that I didn’t want to miss out on. After signing up for one, I was happy when I recieved an email saying that I had been chosen to have my work looked at by a company called Thoughtful.

I hadn’t heard of Thoughtful before so I spent some time doing some research into them, getting to know them via their website and their blog. I think it’s so important for someone like a design agency to have their own blog because it makes the company so much more accessible to the public and those people who may potentially hire them. Thoughtful’s posts were interesting to read and I left a number of comments to which I recieved a nice email from Stuart Price, one of the top guys at Thoughtful saying thank you for the comments.

Putting my portfolio together prior to the surgery was a relatively easy task as I had already done it a few months ago for Univeristy. However, I had been wondering how to organise it so that it was in an order that would create the best impact. In total, I had 18 pieces in my portfolio, but since I only had a maximum of 20 minutes with the guys from Thoughtful, I knew that I had to trim that down. I managed to get it down to 15 instead, with more emphasis on my better projects, allowing me to spend more time talking about them and less time about some weaker projects.

CD packaging

In addition to my work, I wanted to leave Thoughtful with a copy of my work. However, just handing over a CD seemed a bit of a missed opportunity and so I created some simple packaging for it, along with including my business card and some of my stickers. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to show that I already had my own brand.

Lots of goodies inside

The interviews were being held in a large room, full of other design agencies. This included elmwood and The Chase. I could see into the room through the full length glass windows and managed to spot the Thoughtful team. It’s quite strange recognising someone you’ve never actually met before. I also noticed that Thoughtful had chosen to bring some students along with them who they were currently working with as placements. I think it’s such a great idea to give them a chance to see so many people’s work.

Just before my interview, there was a talk from Ben Casey from The Chase about the D&AD exhibition. While it was very interesting to listen to him, as said before, there’s only so much you can say about such a small exhibition. Plus, I had to leave half way through because it was time for my interview.

I have to admit that I was a little nervous about the interview. I suppose I was treating it like a job interview in some respects. I’d shown my portfolio to other people before so it wasn’t the first time I’d done this, but every time is always different.

I sat down and Chris Jeffreys introduced himself to me, one of the guys from Thoughtful. He asked me if I minded if the three students sat in and looked through my work and I said I didn’t mind at all. It was quite interesting showing my work to four people instead of one.

As I began talking about my first piece of work – my Oxfam posters – Chris interrupted me saying “I’m sure I’ve seen these before”. “You have”, I said, “On my website”. “Oh, you’re Neil!”, he said, referring to the fact that I had been commenting on their blog. It felt quite nice being known without having met Thoughtful and even nicer that they had taken the time to look through my work on my website.

Chris critiqued my work for 20 mintues, saying what was good and what was bad. He noted that one of the things that I could possibly add to the portfolio was the actual artefacts that I had produced, such as my 10×10 book. I very much agree with that and next time I have an interview will definitely bring it with me.
The 20 minutes flew over so quickly that it felt like I had only been sitting there for a few seconds. I think I was right to reduce the amount of work in my portfolio and ideally, perhaps should have reduced it even further because it did feel like I was rushing towards the end to make sure I got through it all. I think next time, ideally, I should have about 10 pieces of work instead of 15.

A Thoughtful gift

At the end of the critique, I thanked the four of them for their time and Chris gave me a book called “It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want To Be“. I think it’s such a nice gesture to offer everyone a free book, especially one which had obviously been thoughtfully selected. In return, I gave them my CD with my work on it, shook the hands of all four of them and said goodbye. My only regret is not being able to spend more time talking to them.

Thoughtful seem like, well, a thoughtful design agency to me. They come across as a company who are very easy to approach and I think that was reflected in my critique with them. I’ll be continuing to read their blog and see what else they get up to this year. Having the opportunity to discuss my work with them was a really useful experience and one which I hope I have many more of.

I wish I could say something positive about Pollack the man, who I found rather smug and standoffish during my only encounter with him, or about his movies.  Pollack’s films tended to garner praise for their “adult” good taste and their classical, old-fashioned style.  I thought they were banal and middlebrow, and that none of them excepting a few of the earliest ones did anything to stimulate the senses or the intellect.

But Pollack was an ideal episodic television director, and for a short time, a tremendously important one.  Between 1961 and 1965, Pollack enjoyed a meteoric rise from assignments on a few journeyman westerns (Shotgun Slade and The Tall Man) through the top episodic dramas (Ben Casey, The Fugitive, The Defenders) and into the handful of remaining anthology hours (Kraft Suspense Theatre and the Chrysler Theatre, both shot on film, not staged live) still on the air in the mid-sixties.  That wasn’t as unusual an accomplishment as it sounds.  In television at that time, one tended to either get stuck in the episodic rut for a long haul, or make the leap to features quickly; ambitious young directors and their agents understood that the clock was ticking.  Stuart Rosenberg, Elliot Silverstein, Robert Ellis Miller, and Mark Rydell were the Big Five along with Pollack who vied for the top TV jobs throughout the early sixties and then got their first important movies between 1965-1967; if one compares their television resumes, the chronologies and the shows that crop up look a lot alike.  But Pollack was younger than any of them and among his contemporaries he may have the record for the smallest number of TV segments done before the pole-vault into the big leagues was achieved.

Pollack in a rare leading role (he began as an actor, but mostly in supporting parts) in the 1960 Alfred Hitchcock Presents segment “The Contest of Aaron Gold”

And how does the early work stand up today?  Energetic, inventive, youthful, far livelier than the most TV episodes of the time, but notably devoid of personality.   The shows are kid-in-a-candy-store exercises in technique, all tracking pull-backs and crane shots, most of it just restrained enough to complement the material rather than overwhelm it.  Pollack’s Cain’s Hundreds and “The Black Curtain,” a flavorful, seedy Cornell Woolrich adaptation for The Alfred Hitchock Hour, are experiments in noir lighting and composition, deliberate studies in a particular style. 

The film critic Scott Foundas, one of the few to write about Pollack’s TV period, describes a “dazzling … cubistic montage of bustling street scenes to suggest the disorientation felt by a timid Native American boy ill at ease in the big city” in the Ben Casey “For the Ladybug … One Dozen Roses.”  “Karina,” a Frontier Circus, begins with an abstraction, a harlequin against blackness, walking straight into the camera.  A moment later a shot of Elizabeth Montgomery’s gartered legs glimpsed in a crystal ball ripple-dissolves into the real thing.  Then a shot of her as a black-clad wraith, cape swirling, running into and over the camera.  That’s all in the teaser – and everything after the opening titles is routine.  These sound like gratuitous, indulgent flourishes wedged incongruously between whole acts of standard rhythmic shot-reverse shot framing that Pollack couldn’t vary and keep to his tight production schedule – and that’s exactly what they are.  But the truth is that so much of television looks so monotonous, one tends to take the visual pleasures where they come without dwelling too much on how unmotivated or immature they might be.

Since Pollack was working on the best TV shows in Los Angeles, the material was very good – the writers Pollack worked with, Howard Rodman and Stirling Silliphant and S. Lee Pogostin, put more of a personal stamp on the episodes than he did – and so were the performers hired to guest-star.  That was Pollack’s saving grace: he was good with actors.  “King of the Mountain,” a Cain’s Hundred, is a fine three-character piece with Edward Andrews as a corrupt cornpone bigwig and Nashville‘s Barbara Baxley as his sullen, suffering wife.  Robert Duvall, not always his subtle, reliable self this soon, has key early roles in that segment as a crooked, slow-moving sheriff’s deputy who finds the buried vestiges of his decency, and in Pollack’s Arrest and Trial (Rodman’s “The Quality of Justice”) as a child killer.   There are delicious riffs from Pat Hingle as a smiling, straight-out-of-Jim Thompson psycho lawman (Cain’s Hundred‘s “The Fixer”) and a Vegas high-roller in a string tie (Kraft‘s “The Name of the Game”); and Cliff Robertson, going from broken-down fighter pilot on Ben Casey (“For the Ladybug … One Dozen Roses”) to a compulsive gambler on the Chrysler Theatre (“The Game”).  And, of course, there’s “A Cardinal Act of Mercy,” the Ben Casey tour de force in which Pollack coaxed perhaps the finest of Kim Stanley’s few recorded performances out of the fragile actress.  She won an Emmy.  Already Pollack was forming, not a stock company of character actors, but a model in miniature of the succession of crucial star relationships (with Robert Redford, famously, but also Jane Fonda and others) that would drive his movie career.

Dutch angles, not dated at all: Piper Laurie in “Something About Lee Wiley”

As one of the top-of-the-heap young directors, Pollack enjoyed a certain amount of control over the material he worked on, a considerable rarity.  It was during the anthology period that he first connected with David Rayfiel, later the most important of his screenwriters, and I’m guessing that Rayfiel’s TV scripts for Pollack bear the director’s clearest thumbprint out of all his small-screen work.  “Something For Lee Wiley,” a lush twenties melodrama about a female singer blinded in a riding accident, was a 1963 Chrysler with a terrific star turn by Piper Laurie and some gorgeous color photography (Pollack’s first).  Foundas wrote that its “air of dreamy fatalism and a jagged use of flashbacks . . . directly anticipates They Shoot Horses Don’t They?“  That gets at another influence that Pollack’s work begins to show around this time, an influx of dutch angles, freeze frames, interpolated stills, and tricky edits.  Perhaps Pollack merits another award: as the director who imported the biggest undigested European New Wave influence into sixties television.  The obvious contemporaneous reference point is Arthur Penn’s Mickey One, the mid-sixties American cinema’s boldest attempt to grapple with the New Wave form in the raw; Pollack’s most avant-garde TV efforts hold the same fascination as the Penn film, more fascinating objects than real successes.  Oh, and there’s the jazz music, another New Wave signpost that Pollack appropriate with as much constancy as possible in episodic TV: “Lee Wiley” was scored by Benny Carter, “The Watchman” (the second Rayfiel script, for Kraft) by Lalo Schifrin.  Early harbingers of the inexcusable Dave Grusin muzak to come.

The Pollack-Rayfiel collaboration curdled on “The Watchman,” a talky, pseudo-existential mess that limned the thirty-year relationship between a Spanish guerrilla (Telly Savalas), his Boswell (Jack Warden), and the woman they shared (Victoria Shaw).  Pollack pulled off some stunning beauty shots, stumbled over a clumsy expository gimmick (Warden addresses a psychiatrist who remains off-camera), and emphasizes the romance between Warden and Shaw.  It was the same trick he’d fall back on in The Way We Were – duck the half-baked ideas in the script and pour on the emotion.  (There’s at least one more Pollack-Rayfiel effort, an unsold pilot called “The Fliers,” starring John Cassavetes, that I’ve been unable to see.)

Pollack would’ve blanched at my assessment of his film career; he disowned his early works, like the earnest, urgent The Slender Thread, and most especially his TV work.  I can guess why: he probably felt there were too many camera moves, too many crude cuts, in comparison to the smooth style of his features.  In his book Female Brando: The Legend of Kim Stanley, Jon Krampner got some good, specific quotes from Pollack about that Ben Casey segment, so the memories were there if Pollack chose to dredge them up.  But in virtually every other interview I’ve read, when he was asked about his TV work, Pollack copped a superior attitude, putting down both the shows and his own contributions to them.  Which is fine if you’re, say, Robert Altman and your style really did evolve into something revolutionary; conversely, if your career has instead yielded sentimental, brain-rotting slop like The Way We Were (which is the blacklist rendered as a Hallmark card) and Out of Africa, then curt dismissals of the rambunctious, promising early impulses might be taken as snooty and ungracious. 

I don’t make that comparison arbitrarily, for Altman was another contemporary of Pollack’s who moved up from TV into features in the late sixties.  Altman worked on Kraft Suspense Theatre, too – got fired off it, actually; he had a hard head and his ten-year trudge through TV had a lot more detours and tangents than Pollack’s.  Altman’s TV segments are eccentric, personal, audacious, while Pollack’s are clever, imitative, pretentious, ultimately writer- and actor-centric.  You can see the blueprint for their film careers right there in the television resumes.  Altman, for what it’s worth, seemed to cherish his TV work in his later years, took pride in it alongside his films (almost to a comic extent, considering how powerful some of those are), even recorded audio commentaries for DVDs of his Combat episodes.

In mid-1965, Pollack directed “The Game,” a Chrysler Theatre which was, like his earlier Kraft piece “The Name of the Game,” a taut, claustrophobic gambling story set entirely within the interior of a casino.  It’s a remarkable work that I’ll write about in another context later.  Even before “The Game” won him an Emmy the following year, Pollack had run into some sort of conflict with the suits at Universal and turned the final editing over to his writer, S. Lee Pogostin.  The statue clenched Pollack’s ability to flip the bird to TV for good (he’d already finished The Slender Thread).  Robert Altman’s exit from TV came around the same time, when he told Variety that Kraft’s Suspense Theatre was as bland as its cheese (it wasn’t, but no matter) and necessarily had to clean out his office at that enterprise; it was a long winter before MASH.  Pollack wafted out of TV on the golden wings of his Emmy.  He was 31 – the same age I am now.

Jack Warden (note how skillfully Pollack integrates his shock of red hair into the mise-en-scene) and Telly Savalas in “The Watchman”