Reviewed by DAVID L. VINEYARD:         


“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):

    “The sergeant is a good officer, he just didn’t know you.”

    Nick Stone: “Yeah, like everyone else.”

TIGHTROPE!

   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.

TIGHTROPE!

   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.

TIGHTROPE!

   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.

    “Beautiful, beautiful. Just like pulling a rabbit out of a hat. Beautiful …”

   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.