Altman finally brought his TV years to a close at Universal, where he began a short-lived tenure as a director for two Kraft-sponsored anthology series: Kraft Suspense Theatre and Kraft Mystery Theatre. He directed only a handful of episodes before bristling (again) at the restrictions placed upon him, quickly getting fired (again) after giving a front-page interview to Variety in which he famously called the Kraft shows' stories "as bland as its cheese."
"The Long, Lost Life of Edward Smalley" feels something like the aftermath of Combat!, as a shell-shocked (in the vernacular of the time) vet confronts a lawyer at gunpoint several years after the end of WWII. In flashback we see the wartime trial of the soldier (Richard Crenna) and his defense by the attorney (James Whitmore). The episode definitely bears marks of Altman's contemporaneous concerns, with complex moral concerns, a ruined Catholicism, and characters scarred by the psychological stresses of war.
"The Hunt" was developed by Altman but taken over by director William Graham after Altman quit the show in protest. It features future Countdown star James Caan as a surfer who makes the mistake of cruising into a small town lorded over by a tyrannical sheriff, played by Mickey Rooney. The Napoleonic lawman has a penchant for setting prisoners loose so that he can enjoy the bloodsport of siccing his dogs on the escapee. When Caan decides to tell the wider world about these abuses of power, he becomes Rooney's latest victim. While the all-white cast (which also includes Bruce Dern as Rooney's henchman) seems to be one of the studio dictates that Altman chafed at, the show's echoes of southern lynching and persecution of African-Americans are unavoidable.
Altman's final and most notable contribution to the series was "Once Upon a Savage Night," based on William P. McGivern's pulp novel Killer on the Turnpike. In the novel, a serial killer is pursued on a highway where it gradually becomes clear that his ultimate target is a presidential motorcade scheduled to travel the same roads. In late 1963 the subject of presidential assassination was obviously untouchable, so the McGuffin-on-wheels becomes a missile transport convoy and the killer becomes Georgie Porgie, a psychopath with a degenerative eye condition and a hang-up for cheap Hitchockian blondes. Altman makes the most of the show's Chicago location shoot, turning the city's neon-lit streets into a kaleidoscopic nightmare via a new, high-contrast Kodak film stock. The Christmastime setting contrasts with his insistence on darting into the city's seedier underbelly, strip clubs and bus depots and all-night diners.
The cast for the episode includes several Altman regulars, including Ted Knight (who regularly appeared as German soldiers in Combat!), future cinematographer John Alonzo, and actress/Vic Morrow ex/Jennifer Jason Leigh mom-to-be Barbara Turner. Much of the production crew consisted of Altman cronies who would go on to form the core of his creative team during his early filmmaking efforts. The cocktail-jazz score was provided by a young "Johnny" Williams, more than a decade before he'd first cross paths with Steven Spielberg. The episode was also expanded, via padding with excruciatingly long shots of characters taking various forms of transportation to get from one scene to the next, into a B feature called Nightmare in Chicago. In either form (TV cuts on YouTube are only available in B&W, though I've seen a less-than-optimal video version of the full feature in color), the show seems surprisingly lurid for television of the time, and finds Altman experimenting with a looser, more hectic style that would become his trademark in a few short years.
Over the ensuing years, Altman fell on lean times, taking a variety of odd jobs - a TV pilot here, a car commercial there - while trying to launch his film career. He worked closely on two projects that ultimately fell through: O Death, Where Is Thy Sting-a-Ling-a-Ling?, with a script by Roald Dahl that almost starred Cary Grant; and Petulia, penned by Barbara Turner, which wound up being made by Richard Lester. In the meantime, Altman directed a series of proto-music videos for a company called ColorSonics, which intended them for jukebox-like machines in restaurants and bars. He shot four, three of which are on YouTube: two with burlesque star Lili St. Cyr; one with crooner Bobby Troup; and The Party, another excuse for a wild fête at the director's Mandeville Canyon home:
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