Robert Altman Study Part 6: Desilu

At Desilu, the production company owned by Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, Altman became one of the principal directors on two series from 1957-1959: Whirlybirds and Sheriff of Cochise/U.S. Marshal. The gig was a serious step down from the quality of Hitchcock's shows, but provided the director with more experience in working quickly and cheaply.

Whirlybirds followed the adventures of a pair of helicopter pilots who are constantly stumbling onto nefarious activities or being recruited by the local police to help with cracking crimes that require going airborne (a lot of them, it would seem). Many of the episodes are built around Chuck and P.T. (played by The Thing's Kenneth Tobey and Craig Hill) flying around (i.e., sitting in a helicopter mock-up being rocked) and looking for stuff: a stolen experimental rocket, cars carrying narcotics, escaped fugitives). There's not much more to the show, which generally end with Chuck punching out the baddie-of-the-week.

There is, however, plenty of good old-fashioned practical stunt work, including lots of copter-vs-car chases using no trickery, just stunt men flying and driving dangerously close to one another. There's a good deal of this in Altman's episodes, which don't necessarily stand out from the rest but show an increasing facility with a moving camera and with shooting brisk action sequences. The shows were cranked out at a rate of two per week, which could only have made his later independent productions seem luxuriously-paced.

I've seen a little over a third of the show's hundred-plus episodes, including eight of Altman's fourteen or so efforts. If he had any hand in choosing his episodes, they might point to a continued interest in technology and gadgetry. In one episode Chuck and P.T. help the police in trailing elusive drug dealers by tagging their cars with infra-red paint and following them from the air; in "Experiment X-74" they're enlisted to find a stolen experimental rocket; in "The Challenge" they help convince an embittered heart surgeon to attempt his innovative technique on a young girl (her anesthetist played by future TCM host Robert Osborne). His interest seems to perk up a bit when he can play with a more cynical character, as opposed to the usual dull boy scouts, almost always journalists: the wisecracking reporter stuck on a human interest story in "An Act of Fate," or the photographers assigned to cover a contest winner (who turns out to be a murder witness) in "Blind Date."

There's almost nothing to redeem Altman's other Desilu assignment. Sheriff of Cochise, renamed U.S. Marshal for its third and fourth (nearly 40-episode!) seasons when its lead character got a promotion, is about an Arizona lawman and is about as exciting as staring into the desert for half an hour a week. Star John Bromfield was a side of beef slathered in pomade; his sheriff-turned-marshal always seemed annoyed by crime, peevishly strong-arming his way to solving crimes and nearly always shooting their perpetrators while crouched behind his car. (I'm not sure if Cochise County even had a courthouse, or whether it had long since been converted into extra morgue space).

Even if he had already become the director he would turn out to be, it's doubtful if Altman could have transcended the lunk-headed scripts; at this stage of his career there was no hope. I've seen five of his shows and (thankfully) only a fraction of the show's nearly 150 episodes. All of the Altmans I've seen fall into the U.S. Marshal seasons, so he may not have come onto the show during its Sheriff of Cochise days, though biographers tend to disagree on that point. In any case, it's a pretty indistinguishable bunch of bank robberies and hold-ups, the only novelty being "The Man Who Lived Twice," in which Altman directs Mel Tormé as a conniving thief and killer. The show featured a lot of interesting guest stars - Harry Dean Stanton, Michael Landon, Timothy Carey, Lee Van Cleef - but Tormé is the only one who crossed paths with Altman in the episodes I've found.

After wrapping up his simultaneous work on The Millionaire (covered in my next post), Altman created a show for Desilu called The Troubleshooters, which starred Keenan Wynn as the head of a troubleshooting construction crew with a battalion of Caterpillar equipment. I haven't been able to track down any episodes of the show, which lasted for one season with Altman directing half of its 26 syndicated episodes. It did, however, inspire a comic book adaptation.