One of the devastating side effects of the satellite austerity program that’s been put in place here at Rancho Yesteryear is that I lost access to getTV, the digital OTA (off the air) network that started out as home for movies (mostly from the Sony library) but has since made more and more room for television reruns from series old and new. I wrote about getTV’s revamped schedule here, and even though they run these little gems alongside beaucoups and beaucoups of commercials for catheters and reverse mortgages, they’re conscientious enough to allow for the extra ad time (for example, a half-hour program like The Tall Man is run in a forty-minute time slot). They also appear to be rotating the inventory a bit; new (old) additions include Ensign O’Toole and Tombstone Territory.
A month or two before mi padre rung down the curtain on
getTV, they added a Saturday morning “crime” block that spotlighted rarely-seen
classics like Johnny Staccato and The Felony Squad. (Missing out on getting a better set of Felony
Squad episodes—the prints they’ve airing are first-rate—is really the
unkindest cut of all.) The channel has
also thrown The Lieutenant into the mix, after previewing the show on
Wednesday nights in April. (I’m not
entirely certain how Lieutenant qualifies as a “crime”
series…but then again, I don’t work in TV programming.) Star Trek fans are well versed in
the trivia that after toiling for many years as a small screen scribe on shows
like Highway
Patrol and Have Gun – Will Travel, ST auteur Gene Roddenberry saw the
first series he created (that would be Lieutenant, not Trek) earn a berth on
NBC’s schedule for the 1963-64 season.
Rice is the
CO and training instructor of a rifle platoon…but the only war currently being
conducted is the Cold War, so most of the battle action on The Lieutenant is in the
form of war games. Instead, the series
focused on personal conflicts with the Corps: maintaining discipline within the
platoon, establishing positive P.R. with civilians, and romantic difficulties involving
Rice and other soldiers (I should stress that none of this involves DADT). (My fellow classic television connoisseur Rick Brooks has joked that this last issue
shows up a bit too much in the show’s
plots; we opined that perhaps a better title for the series would be The
Marriage Counselor.)
The most interesting aspect of The Lieutenant to me was
that its main character often struggled with the difficulties involving proper
military procedure; as a green, idealistic officer, he’s untested and
frequently plagued with doubt as to whether or not he’s making the right
decision. Captain Raymond Rambridge
(Robert Vaughn), Rice’s company commander, functions as his mentor in many of
the episodes (Vaughn’s character isn’t in every installment)—as an officer who
obtained his bars “through the ranks,” Rambridge is able to use his
considerable knowledge to set Rice straight.
I’m not trying to take anything away from the future The
Man from U.N.C.L.E., but Bob’s gig on this series seems to have been an
effortless one (he averages 2-3 scenes per show)—even though he was pulling
down the same money as the star. That
having been said, I kind of wish they had leaned on him a little more because
he’s damn good as Rambridge. One of my
favorite sequences between Vaughn and Lockwood in The Lieutenant is in “Alert!”;
the two men are preparing the platoon for an exercise and Rambridge, in an
unguarded moment, calls Rice by his first name.
Lockwood’s Rice smiles at that, suggesting that despite Rambridge’s
tendency to ride him there is a solid bond of respect between the two of them.
I’ve read a few reviews of this series (the show was
released in two half-season sets by the Warner Archive in August 2012), and a
lot of them aren’t particularly kind to star Gary Lockwood. I’ll admit the guy is no acting powerhouse,
but as Rice he’s endearing—I think the fact that he was only twenty-six at the
time he did the series works to his advantage because it emphasizes his
inexperience and youthful idealism. A
protégé of stage/film director Joshua Logan (who came up with the former John
Gary Yurosek’s new professional name), Lockwood had impressive turns in films
like Splendor in the Grass (1961)
and Wild in the Country (also 1961);
in addition, he was a cast member on the short-lived ABC-TV series Follow
the Sun (1961-62). (Roddenberry
must have been a fan, since he cast Gary as star in the second pilot
installment for Star Trek, “Where No Man Has Gone Before.”)
Other recurring actors on Lieutenant include Don
Penny as Rice’s loyal pal Lt. Stanley Harris; Carmen Phillips as Lily, proprietress
of the local watering hole; and John Milford as Sgt. Ben Kagey. I’ve seen stalwarts like Richard Anderson,
Henry Beckman, Larry Thor, Harold Gould, and Christopher Connelly (pre-Peyton
Place) turn up in many installments and Steve Franken appears in a
couple as well (still channeling his inner Chatsworth by referring to Lockwood
as “Rice baby” and “Bill baby”). The
show also brought out some big guns in terms of high-wattage celebrity guest
stars: Rip Torn, Robert Duvall, Paul Burke, Eddie Albert, Charles McGraw, and
Dennis Hopper—just to start the tip of the iceberg.
It’s not that I
dislike military-themed shows—I’ve watched a few in my lengthy couch potato
career, like Combat! and 12 O’Clock High. But if I tell you that my favorite series
about “the service” is The Phil Silvers Show, that might
give you an indication of what my personal preferences are like. However, a few folks on Facebook (chiefly Martin Grams, Jr.) gave the program
glowing recommendations so I was curious to have a go.
Some of my favorites include “The Proud and the Angry”—the episode
featuring Rip Torn. Torn plays a D.I.
who’s been accused of brutality by a soldier in the platoon, prompting Rice to
go undercover as a private to investigate.
“The Two Star Giant” spotlights a nice performance by TDOY fave Neville Brand as a formidable
general who takes Rice on as his temporary aide. “In the Highest Tradition” has Rice serving
as a technical advisor on a motion picture that will be a biographical sketch
on an ex-WW2 lieutenant (Andrew Duggan) whose heroics will come into question
(this one also features future Star Trek players Leonard Nimoy as a
demanding producer and Majel Barrett as his sarcastic assistant), and “Lament
for a Dead Goldbrick” spotlights a dandy acting turn from Robert Duvall (with
hair, even) as a reporter with a penetrating interest in an investigation
involving the death of a soldier who accidentally drowned during a training
exercise.
I’m also impressed with “To Set It Right”—the most
controversial episode of The Lieutenant, so much so that it never
aired in the series’ original run (though it eventually turned up in its
syndicated reruns). It focuses on the
conflict between a black soldier (Don Marshall) and a white soldier (Dennis
Hopper), who are “reunited” in the platoon (Hopper gave Marshall quite a bit of
grief when the two men attended the same high school). Nichelle Nichols plays Marshall’s fiancée,
and Woody Strode is the D.I. who calmly explains to Marshall that he is simply
not prepared to take any sh*t from any
soldier, black or white. The racial
issues in this one caused NBC to approach it with all of the enthusiasm of
picking up someone’s used Kleenex, and to add insult to injury the network
never compensated MGM Television for the episode—MGM wound up swallowing the
costs. (Purportedly, this episode
convinced creator Roddenberry that such topics would be better tackled in
allegory form—like in outer space, for example.)
Last night, I finished up watching the remaining Lieutenant
episodes I had been able to capture with the DVR: “Mother Enemy” is a real Cold
War curio, focusing on a sergeant (Walter “Chekhov” Koenig) whose promotion to
OCS is jeopardized by his mother (Neva Patterson), an avowed Communist. While I admire how The Lieutenant didn’t
always take the easy out when it came to its stories the denouement on this one
was a bit unsatisfying; Koenig’s character is turned down for promotion but
both Rice and Rambridge swear it’s not a “guilt by association” thing. (I’m convinced it was…but then again, I was
never in the military so my opinion might not count for much.) The series wraps up its run with “To Kill a
Man,” in which Rice is on a top secret mission to an Asian country when his
helicopter is shot down and he’s forced to find safe shelter with an aide
(James Shigeta).
While The Lieutenant was never a
blockbuster performer in the Nielsens, it was holding its own against its
formidable competition in CBS’ Jackie Gleason and His American Screen
Magazine. Poor ratings didn’t do
in The
Lieutenant; it was the prospect of having to address the rapidly
expanding war in Vietnam that made the show persona
au gratin at NBC. (I guess
television networks prefer their Marines to be comic ones, if the success of Gomer
Pyle, USMC the following season is any indication.)
The nice thing about my experiences watching The
Lieutenant is that I still have less than half of the show’s run to gander since
I only saw a total of sixteen episodes (there are twenty-nine in all). I might have to get my hands on the Warner
Archive releases…but if you receive getTV in your viewing area, you can check
it out on Saturday mornings at 10:45 EDT.
2 comments:
Really enjoyed your review, Ivan! I purchased the vol. 1 set from Warner Archive but haven't really dug into it yet. As silly as it sounds, I was a bit put off by tat extraordinarily goofy opening, with Lockwood gurning into the camera. It does look an interesting and intelligent series, though.
Jeff has a motion on the floor:
As silly as it sounds, I was a bit put off by tat extraordinarily goofy opening, with Lockwood gurning into the camera.
I agree with you completely -- you kind have to wonder what they were thinking. But based on what I've seen so far, I'm really impressed with the show; if things had been slightly different back then I think it could have stuck around a bit longer.
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