After wrapping up his stints with Desilu and The Millionaire, Altman moved on to the slightly more exalted Warner Bros. television department, where he had better production values and scripts to work with. He made the rounds of the studio's shows, including episodes of Lawman, Hawaiian Eye, and Surfside Six (none of which I've seen). Altman's Warner stint started out with two episodes of the "frontier lawyer" series Sugarfoot, starring Will Hutchins. The first, "Apollo With a Gun," is an odd comedic story in which Hutchins' Tom Brewster gets involved in a love triangle with the real-life couple of actress Adah Isaacs Menken and bare-knuckle boxer John "Benicia Boy" Heenan. The episode finds the star dragged behind an escaped, lovestruck stallion; getting on the wrong side of a local hothead; and shanghaied into performing Shakespeare (badly).
The director called on some of his noir experience for his much darker second episode, "The Highbinder," highlighted by a guest appearance from young James Hong as a scar-faced, hatchet-throwing assassin. Hong's partner has a penchant for Juggernaut-style headbutts to the gut and spiked brass knucks, giving Hutchins two comic book-style villains to contend with. For its time, the show boasts an admirably anti-racist message, though it's not above peppering the soundtrack with gongs and "Oriental" melodies.
The Sugarfoot character reappears in Altman's sole episode of Maverick, a post-James Garner fourth season entry starring Roger Moore as cousin Beau Maverick. (In another glaring bit of cross-promotion, the show's hanging judge has a habit of singing "The Hanging Tree," the title song from the Delmer Daves movie Warners released the same year.) "Bolt From the Blue" is one of the highlights of Altman's TV career, a raucously satirical episode dealing with mistaken identity and a casually bloodthirsty if genially incompetent posse. The show guest stars Owen Bush, a long-faced character actor with a midwestern plain-spokenness who was a staple of Altman's early work, appearing uncredited in The Delinquents as well as in a few Calvin shorts, episodes of The Pulse of the City, U.S. Marshal, several Warners shows, and Altman's turn on Peter Gunn [see below].
Altman reportedly planned to call the actual horse thief in the Maverick episode "Nixon," but was stopped by the censors. That may or may not be true - Altman had a tendency in later years (when the actual shows were harder to find and re-examine) to exaggerate his anti-authoritarian bent during the early part of his career. He regularly claimed to have slipped surrealist touches into Whirlybirds and touted a subliminally erotic episode of The Millionaire, none of which is supported by the shows themselves. He did have a tendency to rewrite episodes on set, and his behavior off camera was as wild as his claims for what he put on camera, all of which failed to endear him to television producers. But this Maverick episode, a rare example for which Altman was credited as writer as well as director, does feature a hint of the likably amoral rogues' galleries to come.
The bulk of Altman's time at Warners was spent on The Roaring 20's, a flapper- and Tommy gun-centric show loosely based on the Cagney/Bogart film of the same name. He directed ten episodes of the show, though the only one that pops up online is a dance marathon show "inspired" by Horace McCoy's novel They Shoot Horses, Don't They? dubbed into Spanish for Argentinean television.
Around the same time, Altman helmed a number of one-off contributions to several series, including Route 66 ("Some of the People, Some of the Time," filmed in Carlisle, PA, the opening scene of which is below) and Peter Gunn, a series with even smarter writing and higher production values than the Warners' shows. "The Murder Bond" is a grim, stylish episode about a gangster who fakes his own death, changing his face with plastic surgery. One scene plays out in a flophouse, where an argument between two drunks runs under Gunn's dialogue, an early experiment with the sort of overlapping dialogue that would become the director's trademark.
No comments:
Post a Comment