Wed 25 Jan 2012
A TV Movie Review by Michael Shonk: THE OUTSIDER (1967).
Posted by Steve under Reviews , TV mysteries[22] Comments
THE OUTSIDER. Made for TV “World Premiere” movie. NBC-TV/Huggins-Universal Productions, 21 November 1967. Cast: Darren McGavin as David Ross, Edmund O’Brien as Marvin Bishop, Sean Garrison as Collin Kenniston III, Shirley Knight as Peggy, Nancy Malone as Honora, Ann Sothern as Mrs. Kozzek, Joseph Wiseman as Ernest, Ossie Davis as Lt. Wagner. Music: Pete Rugolo. Director of Photography: Bud Thackery. Written and Produced by Roy Huggins. Directed by Michael Ritchie.
The Outsider is a story suitable for Black Mask magazine, a noirish tale of a loser PI on a simple case that spins out of control with a lying client, violence, betrayal, drugs, seedy L.A. music club life, a femme fatale, and doomed characters.
The story opens (as will the later series episodes) with David Ross narrating over an action scene that takes place later in the story. Ross is in a car driven off a cliff. He survives and the narration says, “My name is David Ross, and you may be wondering how I got into a situation like this.â€
Flashback to the beginning. Rich business manager Marvin Bishop hires PI David Ross to find out if one of his employees, Carol is stealing from him.
After spending the night trailing Carol, Ross is woken early by his client. Bishop is less than impressed by Ross. But Ross makes no apologies for his rundown apartment, that he is broke, never finished high school, has no office or secretary, and drives an old car.
He tells Bishop about trailing Carol to a jazz club where she met her boyfriend Collin. Collin has no past beyond a few years ago when the cops caught him shaking down homosexuals.
That night Ross walks into a trap. Collin uses a garrote on him and tries to learn why Ross is tailing them. Carol panics, spoils the trap, and the two run. Shortly after, Ross finds Carol dead in her bedroom. After he calls the cops, the phone rings, it is Collin.
Ross picks up his rich girlfriend Honora, an expert in L.A. club scene. Honora knows Ross will never marry, that would mean joining the world and Ross will always be an outsider. They search for Collin and find him at a Rock music club. Ross and Collin fight. Ross leaves the unconscious Collin for the cops and heads to question his client.
Bishop is unhappily married, and was having an affair with Carol. He had really hired Ross to learn if she was cheating on him. Bishop claims he did not kill Carol.
Cops question Ross. Collin has an alibi. The cops then discover Ross had served six years in prison for killing a man. Ross explains he was 19 and riding freight trains when a yard bull caught him and started to beat him with a nightstick. Ross hit him once killing the man. He had received a full pardon.
Ross has no idea what Collin is up to or who killed Carol. But Collin is equally curious about Ross. Ross finds Collin while Collin and the femme fatale are in the middle of an LSD trip supervised by Ernest the drug guru while Collin’s Mom watches TV game shows. But once available, Collin refuses to answer Ross’ questions.
Frustrated, Ross returns home. Bishop arrives and tells Ross to drop the case. Ross refuses. Bishop leaves and is shot at the bottom of the stairs.
The cops question Ross, but after a phone call, let him go.
Ross returns home knowing Collin is waiting inside, when Ross outsmarts Collin, the femme fatale knocks Ross out from behind. They think he is dying and panic. They take him to the cliff for the scene from the opening as they send Ross and car over the cliff.
There is a short gunfight. Ross then drives away with the femme fatale. He promises to help her escape if she tells him everything. She does. What she and Collin were doing had nothing to do with Carol’s murder and Bishop’s shooting. Ross hears on the car radio the cops have caught the killer. Ross takes the femme fatale to the cops. She reminds him of his promise to let her go. To which he happily replied, “I lied.â€
Roy Huggins (Maverick, Run for Your Life) was at his best here as writer and producer. His dialog was as hardboiled as Philip Marlowe and the handling of the club scenes and drug use was less melodramatic than usual for TV. The Outsider also featured many examples of Huggins odd humor, such as Ross keeping his telephone in the refrigerator.
Director Michael Ritchie (Prime Cut, Fletch) captured the noir style with a mix of 60’s b&w psychedelic style. He was nominated for a DGA award for this TV Movie.
Darren McGavin (Mike Hammer, Kolchak: The Night Stalker) carried this movie as the admirable loser PI David Ross, a character without ego and comfortable with his limitations.
The Outsider TV Movie was part of an experiment by Universal and NBC looking for better ways to find TV series. Universal’s “World Premiere†movies were a test for the 100-minute (plus commercials and stuff) format as a pilot. It resulted in three new series for NBC’s 1968 fall schedule, Dragnet 1967, Ironside, and The Outsider.
In the book TV Creators: Conversations with America’s Top Producers of Television Drama by James L. Longworth (Syracuse University Press, 2002), Huggins discussed why he refused to be involved with The Outsider TV series:
The “shit†factor was most likely the growing concern over violence on television. Huggins was wise to avoid the headaches that Gene Levitt would experience when he produced The Outsider series.
Next time, we will examine The Outsider TV series.
January 25th, 2012 at 7:18 pm
Too bad this series is not available on an “official” dvd release. I have the pilot and some of the episodes on bootleg dvds. I’ve enjoyed the show even though the dvd quality is not that good.
January 25th, 2012 at 7:37 pm
I watched every episode when the series was on, relishing every minute of it, all the while knowing that it wasn’t going to last long. It was too good, even with the problems the producers had in getting it on the air (which I assume Michael will be going into next time).
I probably have bootleg copies from the same original source you do, Walker, but I’ve been reluctant to watch them, just in case the show doesn’t match up to my memory of it.
Darren McGavin was perfect in the part, a near polar opposite to Craig Stevens in PETER GUNN, but as an “outsider” through and through, maybe even more believable.
January 25th, 2012 at 9:46 pm
This was part of a mini PI comeback in the movies and TV in the latter part of the ’60s as the spy craze began to cool off. HARPER, PJ, THE OUTSIDER, THE MONK. The bridge between the big wave of PI shows in the ’50s and the ’70s renaissance of CHINATOWN, NIGHT MOVES, HICKEY AND BOGGS, ROCKFORD, VEGA$, CITY OF ANGELS …
January 25th, 2012 at 10:11 pm
The episodes I will be reviewing (once I am finished watching them) are:
“One Long-Stemmed American Beauty”
“I Can’t Hear You Scream”
“Tell It Like It Was…And You’re Dead”
“The Girl From Missouri”
“A Bowl of Cherries”
“Through a Stained Glass Window”
“48-hour Mile” (episodes: “Flipside” and “Service For One”)
“Anatomy of a Crime” (episodes: “Tell It Like It Was…And You’re Dead” and “There Was a Little Girl.”
Huggins was eager to move up to theatrical films and this pilot showed it. December 1967 Huggins was all ready working on “The Big Prize,” a TV Movie for CBS and Universal.
#3 Fred: I have plans to look at the evolution of THE ROCKFORD FILES. THE OUTSIDER was a favorite series of a young writer trying to break into television, Stephen Cannell. THE OUTSIDER was cancelled before Cannell could submit his unsolicited script.
There is still argument over who created ROCKFORD FILES but most site THE OUTSIDER as one of the major influences.
January 26th, 2012 at 12:21 am
Steve mentions in Comment #2 that Darren McGavin was the opposite of Peter Gunn, and some of the scenes in THE OUTSIDER really show the difference. Peter Gunn was well dressed, sophisticated, and lived an upscale life. McGavin starts off some episodes waking up in a one room apartment that looks like a dump, eating a piece of burnt toast and drinking sour milk.
January 26th, 2012 at 1:16 am
Walker, I liked the opening title scene you mentioned in the beginning, but I have changed my mind. That scene comes from the pilot. The series drops the apartment and has Ross live in a typical PI office.
But your point is right, Ross was a reaction to the pretty rich PIs working the 60’s beat (remember Gunn’s two floor apartment?).
January 26th, 2012 at 6:17 am
Director Ritchie went on to some worthwhile feature films like DOWNHILL RACER and PRIME CUT.
January 26th, 2012 at 9:49 am
#7. Dan, Ritchie had a varied credit line that included SMILE, THE CANDIDATE, and BAD NEWS BEARS as well.
January 26th, 2012 at 2:34 pm
The Rockford connection seems right on to me, especially since Ross and Rockford both served time in prison on trumped-up charges. What’s particularly interesting to me — some of the other people here have touched on this — is that in the fall of 1967, when this TV film aired, there was only one regularly scheduled private-eye show on any of the three networks, that being Mannix, which premiered that September (I am deliberately excluding here procedurals, like Dragnet and The FBI). As best I can determine through my research, a P.I. hadn’t cracked the top ten since 77 Sunset Strip in 1960-1961. It is really not until the mid-seventies that you start to see the genre bounce back commercially, with shows like Rockford, Barnaby Jones, Cannon, Charlie’s Angels, etc. Creatively, I would argue, this mid-seventies period produced two of the greatest private-eye shows of all time: Rockford and Harry O. This same period is well-known for its revisionist iterations of the private eye in films like Hickey & Boggs and The Long Goodbye. I would argue that The Outsider can, in some ways, be seen as heralding this trend, although I personally find it clearly inferior to works like Harry O and Rockford.
January 26th, 2012 at 3:41 pm
David, Huggins claimed THE OUTSIDER had nothing to do with ROCKFORD FILES, but that RF was MAVERICK as a PI. He also claimed MAVERICK was CHEYENNE in opposite world. He never realized both Bret and Bart were the same character with different actors and it was Garner not his character that made MAVERICK great.
Cannell’s version is more interesting. He used his unsold THE OUTSIDER script as part of ROCKFORD FILES pilot. Garner sides with Cannell.
But there is a twist. Cannell also says Rockford was a character from a TOMA episode that would have been made if TOMA had not changed into BARETTA.
January 26th, 2012 at 4:49 pm
Michael, I get such a kick out of all these first-person accounts of TV history by Huggins and the like, because of course they are all pushing their own agendas, not to mention that the human memory is imperfect even under the best of circumstances. I am reminded of how the late Howard Rodman recalling his inspiration for the character of Harry Orwell, cited a scene in Nathaniel West’s “Day of the Locust” that, it turns out, doesn’t even exist.
January 26th, 2012 at 5:02 pm
THE OUTSIDER TV Movie got Michael Ritchie a DGA (Directors Guild) nomination. Huggins claimed Ritchie won the award (he didn’t) because of his great script.
There is bs everywhere but when it comes to the creative arts bs rises to astoundingly entertaining levels. One of the reasons I love Hollywood.
January 26th, 2012 at 6:21 pm
I forgot MANNIX in the list of late ’60s/early 70s PIs! Very popular show. And CANNON, which debuted a short time later. And HARRY O, which David mentions. As I recall, MANNIX started with a gimmick that the character was on old-school PI, a fish out of water who worked for a big investigative company that had largely moved into the computer age. Joe Campanella played his boss and friend. I believe the second season ditched the big company and Mannix worked on his own out of the usual one-man office with an attractive secretary who happened to be African-American.
I wonder if the just-scraping-by milieu of THE OUTSIDER was influenced by the scenes of Paul Newman in his low-rent apartment and office in HARPER.
January 26th, 2012 at 9:02 pm
Fred, I did a review of a MANNIX episode from first season.
https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=9268
TCM just showed HARPER tonight. Harper is Ross MacDonald’s Archer. In WILLIAM GOLDMAN FIVE SCREENPLAYS (Applause), Goldman writes a short essay about the movie and explains the name change.
“It was called ARCHER then, because that is the name of the Ross MacDonald series character, Lew Archer. But as I remember, the producers had not bought the rights to the series, just to the one book on which the movie is based, THE MOVING TARGET. So we needed a different name and Harper seemed OK, the guy harps on things, it’s essentially what he does for a living.”
But one could say David Ross, Rockford, Mannix and countless other TV PIs owe more to Archer than Spade or Marlowe.
January 26th, 2012 at 10:39 pm
#5. Walker, just saw an episode that used the apartment. That makes the titles work better. It was a McGavin interview that said the apartment was not in the series.
But I still wonder if the opening was too cutesy (the phone in the refrigerator gag from the pilot) for a noir PI series. What do you think?
January 27th, 2012 at 12:08 am
Michael, the phone in the fridge works for me. I did laugh when I saw it but not because it was too cute but because I see it as just backing up the fact that here is a nonconformist PI who doesn’t want to hear the phone ringing. Maybe he has a hangover, isn’t getting enough sleep, doesn’t like to be bothered, etc.
Now I do have to admit, I feel the same way about phones. Though I have a cell phone, I seldom carry it with me because I don’t want to be bothered answering it while I’m out driving, shopping, buying beer, or in a bookstore. If the call is important the caller will eventually get back to me while I’m at home and maybe I’ll answer it then.
Usually I’m annoyed when the phone rings because it’s interrupting my reading or watching film noir movies. The PI feels the same I guess, so he sticks it in the refridgerator.
Now that I’ve babbled on about this so long, I think I’ll get my cell phone and put it in with the lunch meat. But then again, this will just give my wife added ammunition that I’m a crazy collector of old books and magazines. Which I am…
January 27th, 2012 at 1:41 am
Walker, while it is not stated in the pilot, Ross pulls the phone out of the refrigerator after he finally got some sleep after the case and his client had been keeping him up for a few days.
In the pilot, the phone rings as soon as he removes it from the refrigerator. He answers it and it is his client bugging him again. He cuts the client short, giving him a few excuses before he hangs up on him – one of the reasons was the phone was freezing. It was a typical Roy Huggins moment, the kind that made me a fan of his work.
But how and the heck did Ross get the refrigerator door closed with a phone with a cord? (remember it rang as he took it out) Typical “who cares its funny” Huggins moment.
January 27th, 2012 at 9:00 am
I think we have detecting a great phone motif here with TV private eyes, a real love-hate relationship: they need a phone to get clients, and hence, to make a living, but on the other hand a ringing phone inevitably leads to trouble of one sort or another — hence the whole Rockford Files opening and also the scene in Harry O where he lets the phone ring and ring and ring, saying in voice-over that where he really wants to be is in Idaho Falls, Idaho, because that’s where the circus is, and when he finally does answer it his first words are: “You must have your heart set on talking to somebody at this number.”
January 27th, 2012 at 9:16 am
Fred, regarding Mannix, your memory is accurate. He originally worked for a high-tech detective firm named Intertect, which was always a strange fit because Joe was more brawn than brains, and by the second season he had struck out on his own and picked up a secretary, Peggy, played by Gail Fisher. Mannix was created by the highly regarded tandem of Levinson and Link, who were responsible for many TV sleuths (most notably Columbo) but also a number of socially conscious TV movies, and developed by Bruce Gellar. Mannix is best remembered today for its violence. In “The Producer’s Medium,” Levinson and Link say: “When we created Mannix, it was before we developed that kind of social conscience. We had nothing to do with the series. And the people who made it — we think made it well — don’t agree with us.”
January 31st, 2012 at 12:47 pm
That “shit factor” that Roy Huggins referred to …
… in an early issue of Mystery Scene (back when it was in newsprint form), Huggins made it very clear what he was referring to: Darren McGavin’s acting.
His exact words were “Darren McGavin is the world’s worst actor.”
Huggins goes on to say that as producer, he had to edit around “tics” of McGavin’s that he felt distracted from the story, and always instructed directors to to shoot around McGavin’s mannerisms whenever possible.
We have to allow here for the fact that Roy Huggins had a history of butting heads with his lead actors (his famous quote: “Jim Garner have a love-hate relationship – I love him and he hates me.”). Likewise, Darren McGavin’s own track record of feuds (Burt Reynolds’s qoute: “McGavin is going to be very disappointed on the first Easter after his death.”).
So who to believe?
Everybody … and nobody.
They’re all just being people.
January 31st, 2012 at 4:19 pm
Mike, you could be right about the “s” factor.
But what Huggins didn’t mention in that interview was he had recently signed a deal with Universal for a 15 million dollar program for the next 12 months. He had five projects going including one with dreams of theatrical distribution (what I don’t know). When THE OUTSIDER aired, Huggins was busy with a TV Movie-pilot for CBS about auto racing (“The Prize” or “The Big Prize”).
As usual, “reality” is a lie perspective tells us exists.
June 14th, 2023 at 11:18 pm
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