Mon 15 Nov 2010
A TV Review by David L. Vineyard: TIGHTROPE! “Night of the Gun.”
Posted by Steve under Reviews , TV mysteries[7] Comments
“Night of the Gun.” An episode of Tightrope! (Season 1, Episode 17). First air date: 29 December 1959. Mike Connors as Nick Stone. Guests: Mike Kellin, Whit Bissell, Barbara English, Paul Langdon. Teleplay by Frederic Brady. Directed by Paul Wendkos.
Policeman Paul Langdon explaining why a detective roughed up undercover cop Nick Stone (Michael Connors):
Nick Stone: “Yeah, like everyone else.”
Tightrope! ran for a single season in the 1959-1960 television season for 37 episodes and featured the adventures of undercover cop Nick Stone, as played by Michael Connors. Stone was a cross between Peter Gunn and James Bond, plying the mean streets in first person-narrated tales of crime, murder, betrayal, about a man on the tightrope as a undercover policeman.
Created by Clarence Greene and Russell Rouse, Tightrope was a fast paced half hour show that moved like the bullets that frequently flew from Connors’ gun. A typical episode featured beautiful sexy women, bizarre villains, twisty plots, and enough violence for three other series.
Opening each week with Connor’s patented fast draw, the series had only one continuing character, Stone, and found him each week in a new city with a new assignment.
“Night of the Gun” is perhaps the best of the series, a tough and dark little tale that finds Nick helping the local police to find a witness on the run (Whit Bissell). Also hunting for Bissell is Larry Maddox (Mike Kellin), a club owner who sidelines as a killer for hire.
It’s Kellin and his performance as Maddox that raises this above the rest. Maddox is an effeminate sadist, one part hipster, one part Liberace, who lives for trouble and pain: “Beautiful, beautiful.”
Nick knows the best way to find Bissell is to follow Maddox to him, so he attracts his attention, then befriends the bizarre hood who sees a kindred spirit in Connors. For a show from 1959 the homo-erotic content of these scenes is pretty obvious, and though a couple of pretty girls are thrown into the mix, it’s clear that Kellin’s bizarre hit man isn’t interested in them all that much.
I was reminded a bit of Lee Marvin and Earl Holliman’s homo-erotic hoods from Joseph L. Lewis The Big Combo and George Sanders as the strange forger and thief from John Larkin’s Quiet Please, Murder!, but Kellin’s character is even more outlandish.
The opening scene where he kills a frightened and desperate witness is as sadistic a display as you ever saw on the small screen.
This kind of show lived or died on the shoulders of the hero, and here Connors, in his first series, shines. Nick Stone is tough and smart, but he is also haunted by his job. He’s not always sure that there is a purpose to what he does, and longs for the comradeship of his fellow officers, a good woman, and a nine-to-five life, even as he wears expensive clothes and hangs out in the fanciest nightclubs. Each show features at least one scene of Nick alone in a crowd on a busy neon-lit street in a large city, alone even among the throng.
As Connors gets closer to Kellin we begin to see just how crazy his Larry Maddox is, and it is a great bizarre performance, a mix of beatnik and hood, flamboyant and equal parts sadist and masochist.
Finally when they go to meet Whit Bissell — who thinks Maddox is helping him to get out of town — Maddox figures out Connors as Nick is a cop and gets the drop on him, but didn’t figure on that patented fast draw.
Connors went on to fame and fortune as Mannix, and Kellin had a long career as a character actor, including right after this a turn as the Chief Mate on The Wackiest Ship in the Army.
Whit Bissell was in a little bit of everything from his role as the General in The Time Tunnel to his essay as the mad doctor in I Was a Teenage Frankenstein ( “I know you have a civil tongue in your head, I put it there!”).
An attempt to revive the character of Nick Stone and series with Christopher George was a failure, but Stephen Cannell’s legendary Wiseguy with Ken Wahl owed a lot to this.
Tightrope! isn’t available on DVD, but a few episodes are around, and well worth catching even if they are in less than pristine condition. It was a smart well written and directed series mindful of Dashiell Hammett and Alex Raymond’s early Secret Agent X-9 with its lone hero living a lonely and dangerous life without friends or allies.
Tightrope! was a solid entertaining cop series with a bit more meat on the bone than usual. If you have never seen any of these you are in for a treat, and if you recall them but haven’t seen them for a long time you will be surprised just how good they were.
November 16th, 2010 at 12:12 am
I remember watching this series. It should be out on dvd one of these days, in fact I see that Ioffer.com has bootleg copies for sale of 37 of the episodes.
November 16th, 2010 at 1:25 am
I have a set of four episodes of TIGHTROPE! that I bought from Martin Grams at a Pulpcon or one of Rich Harvey’s show several years ago, and I watched them all about a week ago.
Like M SQUAD, it was filmed in black and white, and both series take full advantage of it. Big city toughness is an underlying theme of each, although neither is quite as gritty as they might have been, but they’re close.
Perhaps as close as network standards allowed at the time.
I thought I’d read somewhere that there were 39 episodes, not 37, but if I did, I can’t find the source now. So, Walker, if you can buy 37 episodes on ioffer, then the good news is that the complete run does exist.
The quality of the four I have is acceptable or better, but they’re rough enough on occasion that a commercial release ought to have some improvements.
In terms of the stories, as David says, they were quite good, but I have a feeling that the restriction placed on them by the rather narrow story line, and the less than 30 minute time limit, that you probably ought not to watch too many in a row.
Incidentally, I spelled the series with the exclamation point, based on the image of the opening credits and the title of the magazine, but I seem to be alone in this perhaps excess of pedanticism.
November 16th, 2010 at 1:54 am
I used to buy a lot of VHS of old movies and such from Rex Miller, and knowing me and since many films didn’t take up an entire T-120 or T-160 tape he would stick an episode of this, M-SQUAD, or THE THIN MAN on at the end, so I have a few of these that way — dubs, but superior dubs.
The thing I notice about this and M-SQUAD, as well as quite a few series from the general period, is a tendency to be very violent, dark, and offbeat. The half hour series like this one seemed to go out of the way to go darker, and while the plots — like this one — were often standard there seemed a real effort to elaborate on that with kinky characters like the killer Kellin plays here. These shows were no more realistic than what is on today, but seemed to come from a darker and more noirish sensibility.
It’s ironic that the series being made today for the most part are much more simplistic about the good guys and the bad guys, and the violence more cartoonish.
There is more skin showing today, and they are more likely to take you up to the bedroom door — or just inside it — but these shows often inferred more than actually made it on screen, and those inferences weren’t always as wholesome as what passes for seduction on today’s series.
There is a noirish quality to many of these series that ran much deeper than just the black and white look and jazzy themes. Admittedly some contemporary shows are much darker than anything from that era, but in general most of the popular crime shows today feature Boy Scouts in comparison.
Maybe the actors — Connors, Marvin, John Cassavettes, Craig Stevens, Darren McGavin … had a harder edge to them than the more boyish types in today’s shows — they certainly seemed more mature, wary, scarred, and damaged, and the mean streets a bit meaner.
Granted there are series like THE WIRE and THE SHIELD much darker than anything these series attempted, but they are exceptions.
What I remember about TIGHTROPE was that while you knew every week Connors Nick Stone was going to triumph, you had a rather bleak outlook, that the show went out of its way to instill, that ultimately he was going to end up in an alley somewhere with a bullet in his back when his luck ran out. It added a certain nuance to the overall series that even WISEGUY never quite captured.
It may be as simple as the fact that most of the characters on current series don’t feel like adults whatever their age. They are played for ‘cute’ and for playful generally, where Connor’s Nick Stone was a seriously haunted and dark character much closer to the criminals he pursued (and more comfortable with them) than his fellow cops.
Most of todays shows are geared at the younger audience, where the shows in this period were aimed at adults. They might throw something in for the younger crowd (Kookie on 77 SUNSET STRIP), but in general the target audience was past 30, not 18 to 24.
November 16th, 2010 at 2:38 am
Steve
As far as I know the proper title is TIGHTROPE! with the exclamation point.
And I agree about not watching too many of any of these half hour series in a row (PETER GUNN might be the exception). Still, if the plots were pretty standard, and there was a limit to what they could show, they suggested some very dark characters with a few broad strokes.
Actually, the variation within the boudaries of time and the basic storyline of TIGHTROPE! for the stories is fairly good. Almost every week Connors fast draw was going to be the deciding factor in his survival, but he takes on a variety of situations and criminal types over the episodes I’ve seen.
Without the week to week soap opera elements that almost all shows rely on today many of these shows managed to suggest a certain darkness in the protagonists you don’t see much today. If you watch a few TIGHTROPE! episodes you start to pick up that Connor’s character’s time is running out, and that he is on that fine edge where he will either slip and get killed or slip and go too far over to the other side. It’s never spelled out, just hinted at in a brief bit of dialogue here and there or his own narration.
While you certainly know he is always going to do the right thing, there is also some attempt to show the attraction of evil (something expanded on in WISEGUY) within the bounds of censorship and the format. The title itself gives you the key to the series — the longer he stays on the tightrope the more likely he is to fall off.
I can’t think of any series on today with a protagonist as alone as Connor’s Nick Stone was. In fact it’s hard to think of many series that only had a single contiuning character who remained virtually friendless and operated in the cold so to speak as much as Nick Stone did. Even THE FUGITIVE had a few friends he could rely on.
I don’t want to oversell this. It was a good half hour series making use of stock footage, inexpensive sets, and the usual suspects of guest stars and bit players, but within that format and those restrictions it was also pretty dark and noirish. It never really developed any of the darker themes, but unlike many shows today, it did at least suggest them.
For a half hour crime drama there was an awful lot of sub-plot suggested and unlike a lot of characters then and now who you suspected led a more or less normal life off screen, you had the impression this guy’s life was a continuing hell of lonliness, one night stands, and sudden violence. That’s pretty dark for television then or now.
November 16th, 2010 at 9:11 am
I remember watching it too.
I also remember when he was ‘Touch’ Connors in some really bad early Roger Corman movies.
November 16th, 2010 at 3:42 pm
Hey, I just wanted to note my appreciation for the kind words for Mike Kellin. He gives an extraordinarily good performance in a Twilight Zone episode, The Thirty Fathom Grave (one of the hour long episodes from the not so highly regarded forth season, but a sometimes quite eerie ghost story). I’m always interested in catching performances by him now. Near the end of his life he played the father in Midnight Express.
August 22nd, 2017 at 7:17 pm
Wow! I just went back into time. 1959. My parents let me watch Tightrope every week during its only season, primarily because it was on before nine p.m. Or maybe because its star was Armenian too. I dunno. But, I do remember Mike Kellin’s episode and his moment of death where he still could not help admiring Mike Connor’s sneaky fast draw that put two slugs into his worthless body. Kellin’s take of a thorough dirtbag is the quintessential model. I made sure my younger five year old brother Cedric got a full description of the death scene. We both regurgitated it for decades. But, today is the first time I have seen the episode since it came out in 1959 or 60. At 72, my life is now complete…Thanks.