Friday, March 03, 2006

Medium Coolery

More Gunn Clubbing. Specifically, Set 2, Volume 3 of Blake Edwards' increasingly enjoyable Peter Gunn. And these times our impeccably-groomed hero gets a humoured going over. I blog about Let’s Kill Timothy, which includes a jewel heist, a double-cross, some fisticuffs, and - get this - a seal. Really. On a leash, in Gunn’s convertible, and at the center of some simple-minded diabolics. Gives Craig Stevens a chance to stretch himself into a wide smile.

Further stretching the Gunn play is The Missing Night Watchman, which would be notable for having Mayberry’s Floyd as a protagonist but goes three steps further, with image and angle and shadow that evoke nothing if not The Magnificent Andersons. One expects a little Welles-like flourish in our big screen Noir, but to see it on the ’58 model boob tube is a surprise, and a delight.

And the edits! Lieutenant Jacobi’s door closing to a coroner pulling back a sheet off a corpse, an upper crusty creeps to a window and tears open the curtains to reveal not the expected intruder, but himself.

Brilliant.

And Herschel Bernadi's Lt. Jacobi, a man of infinitely even keel. He’s got a voice that reveals unsaid - and unsayable - great depths. And now that we see he keeps on hand an acoustic guitar, that reveal’s taken another fathom. Imagine the stoic Good Lt. sitting alone in his office, strumming to solve the hard crime on his mind.

While I’m celebrating medium coolery, I gotta give a way-belated RIP to Don Knotts, Dennis Weaver and Darren McGavin. Barney, McCloud and The Night Stalker, natch. You were three of a one of a kind, gentlemen. Inimitable and immortal. And the whole wild world was better off when you were around. Thanks for the stories.

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