The View From Scranton

Gunn Clubbing

Smokey and quick, like a split lip with style. With a cool jazz soundtrack, a swing and a sway that won’t quit, can’t quit, is unquiting and unquitable. I blog of one Gunn, Peter Gunn, habitue of Mother’s, object of Edie’s desire, infamous on high and intimate of low life everywhere. And unlike Moore as The Saint, Craig Stevens does his own ass-kicking.

Brilliant, despite -- or maybe because of -- casting Gavin McLeod as a crime boss (“The Kill”). Effulgent, like lensed crime itself. Gunn is how a Hollywoodic checkered past tastes and smells and looks and feels. Now if only all the wild world’s ills could be resolved in the span of a show time.

Perhaps they can. With The Strip.

Cookie, I'm stealin' your comb.

Before I go-go, I gotta backhand it to The Saint, or at least to John Gilling, the cat who put some of the words in his mouth. Yeah, Moore’s mild-tempered Templar had bad poofy hair, never did his own stunts and was cursed with patently fake locations, but he was stylized and mannered and well-tailored and at times storyfic. More he was rendered delightfully eruditions, as when alluding to Francois Villon in “The King of the Beggars.”

Now, I’m almost embarrassed to admit that Villon was known to me only in passing, but from what I glean he was the 15th c’s version of street lit. A cat who’d been bad, done worse, and scribbled it all down, in the hyper-colored vernacular of the day.

Thanks, Simon. I owe you one.

posted by John Hood. @ 11:11 AM