Sun 14 May 2023
A PI Television Episode Review: PETER GUNN “The Kill†(1958).
Posted by Steve under Reviews , TV mysteries[9] Comments
PETER GUNN “The Kill.†NBC, 22 September 1958 (Season One, Episode One). Craig Stevens (Peter Gunn), Lola Albright (Edie Hart), Hope Emerson (Mother), Herschel Bernardi (Lieutenant Jacoby). Guest Cast: Gavin MacLeod, Jack Weston. Music by Henry Mancini. Written and directed by Blake Edwards.
As opposed to my recent encounter with the first episode of Surfside 6, this is, wow, the way to start off a brand new private eye TV series. Introduce the characters: a tough but suave PI; his girl friend, singer in the night club where he spends a lot of his time; the tough lady owner of said night club; and the cop who’s actually a good friend of the aforementioned PI.
Then explain who they are naturally, and show the relationships between them by seeing them in their usual haunts and as they interact with each other in the every day (or night) course of business.
And have a story that’s wrapped up in 30 minutes (although certainly rushed a little at the end), and still have time for the PI and the girl take a break outside the club between sets talking about life, love and maybe, the future. All in the realm of totally cool, but when Mother is seriously injured in an explosion in the club, Mr. Peter Gunn (the PI) gets to show how tough he is too, and the thugs responsible for the explosion will back me up on that statement, you can count on that.
Although several others of the same overall genre came before it, Peter Gunn the TV show was a breath of fresh air in the business, what with the noirish atmosphere throughout the show, and the music – by Henry Mancini – that took the genre to new heights. This is a TV show that all private eye aficionados can’t afford not to know about, nor miss. (Unfortunately if you don’t have it on DVD (all three seasons, two on NBC, one on ABC), right now the bad news is that you’ll have settle for watching it on FreeVee, with dreadfully awful commercials.)
May 14th, 2023 at 11:38 pm
David Vineyard did a remarkable job covering not only the PETER GUNN series, but the two movies that were produced in its wake. The photos are gone, but here’s the link to the post:
https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=5382
Note that this appeared on this blog almost 13 years ago. Wow.
May 15th, 2023 at 10:57 am
I did a little comparison of Peter Gunn and the TV version of Michael Shayne some years back:
http://bookthemdanno.blogspot.com/2016/03/peter-gunn-vs-michael-shayne.html
May 15th, 2023 at 11:08 am
A terrific piece, Patrick. Thanks for sharing!
And as for which show was more noir, I agree with you. PETER GUNN, by a factor of ten to one. Maybe even more.
May 15th, 2023 at 1:31 pm
Thank you, sir! It was fun to write.
May 15th, 2023 at 6:51 pm
Ironically, save for the Mancini theme, the most important impact of PETER GUNN may be what I mentioned in my earlier article, that Gunn provides American audiences a bridge between the rough tough beer and burger Mike Hammer style hero and the suave sophisticated buttoned down suits and hedonism of the James Bond PLAYBOY style.
I’ve heard it speculated the series was supposed to be set in St. Louis (the movies were clearly LA), and it does seem to fit the geography of the unnamed city with it’s broad river and river front. The town might also be Kansas City but doesn’t seem big enough for Chicago.
In a way the series reminded me of Will Eisner’s post War version of the Spirit, with Gunn a sort of catalyst for criminals, clients, and weirdos in a not quite real setting exaggerated out of Film Noir and German Expressionism. We aren’t that far from Denny Colt, Commissioner Dolan, and Ellen and the rest of the comic book cast of eccentrics right down to the, sometimes, explosive violence.
I don’t really think it could be reinvented today. Audiences wouldn’t understand the shadowy near surreal world Gunn worked in. The Jazz club with its Beat sensibility, the almost cartoonish cast of informers, the one dimensional (because there wasn’t much room for more in half an hour) bad guys, and the stripped down minimalist sets done in Late Fifties early Sixties modernist discomfort (was furniture ever more uncomfortable and more functional?), can’t be recreated.
GUNN was perfect for a moment in time, the end of the Post War era and the beginning of the turbulent Sixties. In its own way it is more Caligari than Philip Marlowe, attractive and bizarre shadows in an almost Kabuki setting moving to haunting blood pumping music and stylized hip dialogue just outside of normal time and space.
The closest I have ever felt to PETER GUNN since was the anime COWBOY BEBOP (not the live action) that captured some of the feel and style.
May 15th, 2023 at 8:54 pm
Your comparison of Will Eisner’s THE SPIRIT and PETER GUNN is one that hadn’t occurred to me before. I’m going to have to mull it around for a while, but at first glance, so to speak, it seems to be right on target.
I love it when I’m given something like this to mull around for a while. Mulling is lots of fun. Thanks!
May 16th, 2023 at 2:40 am
One other source of GUNN fixes is early Monday mornings on the MeTV broadcast network…less convenient than FreeVee, but recordable on VCRs, fwiw (similarly bad ads, and some annoying attempts by latter-day distributors to rebrand the episodes as their own productions on some episodes). Leaving aside whatever’s gray-marketed at the moment on video streaming platforms.
May 16th, 2023 at 10:14 pm
In 1990 we were living in Santa Fe and were fortunate enough to be invited to Greer Garson’s birthday party at the eCollege of Santa Fe, which she and her husband supported. Star-studded. Cesar Romero, Marsha Hunt, Alexis Smith, and Craig Stevens. He was fabulously handsome, as you would think, but somethign was wrong with her, not that she wasn’t all over him, they were lovely together, but she seemed to have lost her looks. As for Greer, she ws not allowed to appear, to doctors’ orders, so our host was Billy Crystal who was shooting his great Jack Palance picture, City Slickers. He and I, out of a significant crowd are the only two standing.
May 17th, 2023 at 10:30 am
A party to remember. Thanks for sharing, Barry!