Mon 2 Aug 2021
Reviewed by David Vineyard: Two Annoying TV Detectives at Work.
Posted by Steve under Reviews , TV mysteries[10] Comments
Two Annoying TV Detectives at Work
THE CASE OF THE THE DANGEROUS ROBIN. “Zippered Notebook.” Syndicated, Ziv Productions. 20 December 1960 (Season 1, Episode 10). Rick Jason, (Robin Scott), Jean Blake. Guest Cast: Susan Cummings, Walter Klemperer. Directed by James Goldstone.
THE CHEVY MYSTERY SHOW. “Enough Rope.” NBC, 31 July 1960 (Season 1, Episode 10). Host: Walter Slezak. Cast: Richard Carlson, Joan O’Brian, Bert Freed. Teleplay: William Link and Richard Levinson. Director: Don Richardson.
Following the success of Richard Diamond and Peter Gunn a number of cool detectives tried their wares on the small screen, a few interesting like Johnny Staccato and most missing the boat all around like The Case of the Dangerous Robin (that title is moronic).
The dangerous Robin is international insurance investigator Robin Scott (Rick Jason), a slick buttoned-down sleuth with a regular girl friend (unlike Lola Albright she can’t sing and the byplay is about as sexy as spending Saturday night home with your family).
Seems Robin’s girl plans to cook him a nice meal, but he has been called out of town, to Belgium, where scientific notebooks his company insures have been stolen from a scientist working for Werner Klemperer and trying to evade his bosses man-eating wife.
We get a few stock shots of Antwerp, but the footage Jason is in is strictly Southern California architecture and fauna. They do throw a few foreign cars in though and a couple of accents and a phony name on a hotel front.
Jason, who did his best work as a regular on Combat, is flat here, delivering his lines in what I am sure everyone thought was Craig Stevens Peter Gunn style cool, but which seems almost zombie like even when Robin is being shot at. (I was rooting for the assassin by this point.)
You know you are in trouble when you wish it was Ray Danton starring instead.
Nice score by David Rose, but that and the titles are the only highlights.
It looks, sounds, and feels like amateur night at the dinner theater.
Robin’s technique is unique though. He just accuses everyone and annoys them until someone confesses. Which will bring us shortly to our next annoying sleuth.
“Enough Rope†appeared on The Chevy Mystery Show, hosted by Walter Slezak, and appears to have been done live on film, meaning it is pretty set bound and there is little sign of second takes, but it doesn’t quite have the same cachet as real live television. It’s done in color too, which also takes away from the effect.
You will quickly recognize “Enough Rope†as “Prescription Murder,” the pilot film for Columbo with Gene Barry a psychologist who commits the perfect murder, only to find it investigated by Peter Falk’s Lt. Columbo, the greatest annoying sleuth of all time.
Here Richard Carlson is Dr. Ryan Fleming who murders his wife with the help of his secretary mistress (Joan O’Brian mostly semi comatose) and Columbo is veteran character actor Bert Freed. Freed was always good, and often played frustrated cops (The Gazebo), but smart as his take on Columbo proves he is just another cop despite delivering some of the exact same dialogue that will shine in the hands of Peter Falk.
“Enough Rope†wasn’t brand new even then. It was originally written as a vehicle for Bing Crosby (likely inspired by his laid back private detective in Top O’ the Morning), but played on stage by Thomas Mitchell. I’m not even sure this was its first outing on television as it showed up later as a black and white episode of another anthology with Lou Jacobi as Columbo.
It’s hard to keep a good plot down, but until the magic of Peter Falk it pretty much managed to fail in every medium it appeared in.
For now these are available on YouTube if you want to see them. I can’t really say much for the Jason entry other than it is only twenty five minutes long and quickly over.
“Ropeâ€, despite the flaws of the format, is fairly good. Carlson was a capable actor, and like Gene Barry able to be sympathetic, arrogant, and evil all in the same take. Freed is pretty much himself as he was in most roles, but like good character actors that is what you want from them.
Once in a while in the episode, the plot crammed into fifty minutes, you get a little glimpse of Columbo, though you can’t help but see and hear Falk while watching, missing the cadences and quirks of his performance that made the character into what it became.
Unlike other Columbo episodes how he traps the killer in this one might even hold up in court if the defense wasn’t very good.
There is no real tie to these two save they are old television programs and I watched them the same day and thought it unusual both featured such annoying detective characters, both of whose success was blatantly based as much on their ability to annoy suspects as detect crime.
And to think Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Thorndyke wasted all that time on science and detection when they could just have accused everyone until someone breaks and tries to kill them.
August 2nd, 2021 at 11:51 pm
I’m thinking that Matt Houston was probably the most (unintentionally) annoying TV detective I’ve ever experienced. Annoying, not in a ‘good’ way. Any P.I. rich enough to drive a Pierce-Arrow or whatever brand of car that was…yuck. Matt Houston deserved a brutal beat-down by T.J. Hooker.
I really wish I’d seen David Jansen as Richard Diamond.
August 3rd, 2021 at 2:51 am
First off:
“Enough Rope” was NOT written as a “vehicle for Bing Crosby – in fact, it wasn’t even a vehicle for Lt. Columbo.
Watch the show, and you’ll see that Columbo is clearly a subordinate character – he comes
in halfway through to annoy Richard Carlson.
When Levinson & Link made it into “Prescription: Murder” for the stage, Columbo is still in support of the murderous shrink: Thomas Mitchell’s health was chancy, and anyway Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Cotten were the stars here.
It wasn’t until 1967, when Universal TV picked this up for a TV movie, that Bing Crosby’s name even came up – and even here, L&L had Lee J. Cobb’s name in reserve (they both made it clear that Cobb would have been their preference).
Peter Falk had to sell L&L and UTV on using him as Columbo, mainly because he seemed to be too young for the part (he wasn’t yet 40).
By the way, “Dear Uncle George” on The Alfred Hitchcock Hour in 1963 – that’s after The Chevy Mystery Show, three years after.
MeTV ran this one the other night: “Lt. Wolfson” is again a subordinate character – Lou Jacobi doesn’t even get star billing for the part.
This is known as coincidence: L&L simply liked using that kind of character – putting the cop front and center just happened to work for Columbo, particularly when Falk got hold of it.
There isn’t always a grand design, you know …
August 3rd, 2021 at 11:33 am
If I had to choose between Bing Crosby and Lee J. Cobb, I’d rather go with Cobb too. In terms of TV history, I’m glad they decided to go with Peter Falk, either by luck, inspiration, or persuasion. He and Columbo became identified as one and the same.
August 3rd, 2021 at 5:54 pm
Tom Selleck appeared in a few episodes of ‘The Rockford Files’ as a high-priced, handsome, wealthy, cigar-smoking p.i. who annoyed the heck out of Jim Rockford. Of course this is not the same kind of delicious annoyance, which Falk was as Columbo. Or for that matter in his role as a pastiche of all hard-boiled dicks …Sam (-something) in Neil Simon’s “Murder by Death”.
August 3rd, 2021 at 8:31 pm
Sam Diamond, of course!
August 3rd, 2021 at 8:05 pm
I’ll point out Peter Falk shows up fairly late in PRESCRIPTION MURDER to annoy Gene Barry too, and I’m pretty certain isn’t top billed, I’m not sure even then he was meant to be the star to the extent he became one. The next entry with Lee Grant feels much more like a pilot for the Columbo we know.
The important thing about the character is it is Peter Falk’s interpretation that turns him into what he became. Many of the lines delivered by Freed, and I suspect Mitchell, are the exact same things said by Falk. It is literally all in the delivery. Of note almost all the tropes we associate with Columbo but the car and the trenchcoat are present in Freed’s performance right down to the cigar and the references to Mrs. Columbo.
The DANGROUS ROBIN was colorized in the print I saw, and just in case that was the problem I turned the color off, and it was just as bad in black and white.
August 3rd, 2021 at 8:30 pm
Yes, the YouTube video was colorized. I don’t know by whom or even more importantly, why. Why would anyone take the time and effort to colorize a D-level TV show such as that one?
August 4th, 2021 at 12:07 am
Just back from checking the DVD:
In Prescription: Murder, Falk is billed first.
Gene Barry is second.
Katherine Justice is third and pays $2.40.
By 1968, Falk had been staying clear of TV; Barry was more established at MCA, making Falk the Major Get for the occasion.
There’s always a pecking order …
Now that I think of it, my family was surprised to see Peter Falk get top billing in Prescription: Murder; aside from some variety shows, he had done very little TV during that time.
“Lt. Columbo” played more like a guest role in Gene Barry’s movie – but as we all saw, that wasn’t the case …
August 4th, 2021 at 7:17 pm
Mike,
Falk had starred in a series at this point, TRIALS OF O’BRIEN that ran one season (even had a novelization by Robert L. Fish) and had guest starred in quite a bit of dramatic television before that (87th PRECINCT, NAKED CITY, several anthology series), but mostly concentrated on movies.
It may have been that at this point Barry was a television star and Falk a movie star that was at work here as much as the aspect of it being a pilot, but I was surprised how relatively late he came into the story, likely because he was more a secondary character in the earlier incarnations.
Does anyone know if Levinson and Link were consciously copying the inverted story style created by R. Austin Freeman? I know they were behind the Hutton EQ series, and a fair knowledge of the genre is reflected in their work, but the structure of this and other Columbo’s are very much like Freeman’s model and I’ve never seen anything about whether they were aware of his work and consciously modeling on it, or got the idea elsewhere.
August 4th, 2021 at 9:01 pm
From STAY TUNED by Richard Levinson and William Link (copyright 1981):
… Each and every Columbo would make use of the so-called “inverted” mystery form, a method of storytelling invented by an English writer named R. Austin Freeman in the early part of the century …
From this forty-year-old excerpt, I think we may safely infer that Levinson & Link were aware of inverted mysteries as a form when they wrote Prescription: Murder, and indeed beyond …