Above: Can't you just hear that Nelson Riddle theme song for Route 66 when you see these guys and their snazzy car? You can really hear it if you click on this image.
Just as encountering an old flame again can remind you of the spark that once struck your heart, seeing something again reminds you that storytelling of long ago still has its charm. Since Route 66 (1960-1964) has been broadcast on the syndicated channel, Me-tv late on Sunday night/Monday morning recently, I've occasionally seen some episodes of this anthology series celebrating the ability of two disparate youths to search for the meaning of life, a bit of adventure and a touch of romance, all seen through the windshield of a luxury sports car. Originally conceived as a kind Naked City of the road, it did not pursue the cops vs. robbers route, but, as shaped by Stirling Silliphant (who wrote the majority of the scripts), the series had a more ambling sensibility, borrowing a bit of earnestness from current events. a little of the sense of the absurd and some poignancy from Sullivan's Travels and even more from Jack Kerouac's "On the Road."
I am going to write a bit about what impressed me about the show. I hope others will also.
Though the program did visit large cities such as LA, Boston and New York, most episodes appear to have been filmed away from urban areas (and reputedly not very often in settings close to the actual Route 66, the highway that connected the continent for a time). The show follows a pair of young men--one a Yale-educated son of privilege and another a street kid from New York--as they wandered around a black-and-white American landscape. Their rambles led to them discovering some disconcerting stories, a few shafts of sunshine and mirth. No major financial worries seem to haunt the pair, though Tod spouts off once in awhile about his recently deceased father, and Buz pops his cork and delivers a fevered beatnik-style soliloquy once a show--all the while riding along in the coolest wheels around, a Chevrolet Corvette that was soon even more popular than the television show. Btw, after 2 years on the show, the Emmy-winning George Maharis reportedly suffered a bout of hepatitis, left the show after angry confrontations with the producers, and was eventually replaced by Glenn Corbett as a Vietnam veteran. [From what I've gleaned on the internet, the world is divided between those who adhere to Maharis and those who cleave to Corbett. I prefer Maharis' hot-headed hep cat to Corbett's limpid, slightly brooding figure, even if he had the most beautiful blue eyes ever].
Some of the show is just absurd, of course. I am always amused by the ease with which the leads find jobs just about everywhere, and they are always encountering at least one or two people just waiting to display all their problems for the pair as they glide up in their snazzy car. By the time they leave, problems are usually resolved, though happiness is not always a given. Btw, interestingly, this show and the brilliant The Fugitive that came later in the decade may be two of the best series to show the many daily details of work in this country, especially if you happen to be a person who works with her or his hands. Blue collar workers are not always depicted as morose, hilariously ignorant, bigoted or laughing like jackals in either of these shows, which is always refreshing. Some of the themes of the show tapped into the underlying rivulets of discontent beneath the American surface in what now looks like the golden era to those who weren't there. Poverty, fear of nuclear destruction, incest, the power of the mob, democracy's limitations, racism, environmentalism, everyday cruelties toward the unloved, the vapidity of domestic life, discontented youth, and the loneliness of decent people who spend their lives trying to make life better are just a few of the themes that were explored in the stories.
A few episodes have seemed awfully dated to me. For cringe worthy laughs see the one called "Three Sides" with pouty Joey freakin' Heatherton as a 16 year old nympho daughter of E.G. Marshall, who is a widowed hops grower and processor in Orgeon trying to keep his strumpet kid from seducing Johnny Seven, who, it is implied, is not a nice man. Except for Joey's narcissism and having her self-esteem grounded in her ability to whip guys into a lather, the girl is just "misunderstood," apparently. [What do you think Joey's Mom looked like if E.G. is the Dad who sired this gal.] Any time Actor's Studio escapeee Scott Marlowe shows up in an episode, you probably should find something else to do, and if you have ever wondered how Jack Lord might have played a character like jazz icon and major mess Chet Baker, you may want to watch the episode "Play It Glisssando" sometime--especially since Anne Francis is excellent as the numb, abused wife of this guy.
Overall, the show offered fairly complex characters in open-ended hour long shows that still cling to memory, in part because of the quality of the the writers (Silliphant, Herbert B. Leonard, Sam Peckinpah, Shimon Wincelberg, among others), directors (Arthur Hiller, Walter Grauman, Elliot Silverstein, and more), and the actors who participated in the show. Remarkably, some shows feature legendary figures such as Boris Karloff, Ethel Waters, Buster Keaton, Peter Lorre, and Joan Crawford. Several others offered second tier actors with less fame but considerable skill a chance to get a good role and a paycheck once again. These include Betty Field, Lew Ayres, Thomas Gomez, David Wayne, Sylvia Sidney, Charles McGraw, Conrad Nagel and even a young Tammy Grimes. Up and comers who went on to considerable fame included an unrecognizable Martin Sheen, Robert Redford playing a Greek immigrant's unlikely son (!), Robert Duvall as a junkie in Boston, and Barbara Eden.
Some entries in the series have reminded me that occasionally, the show was elevated by the sharp quality of the acting of some excellent character leads, such as Lee Marvin, Frank Overton, Edward Andrews, Everett Sloane and Dan Duryea--but the programs with some of the now nearly forgotten women of that period gave several good actresses their brief moments in the spotlight. Any episodes featuring Suzanne Pleshette, Inger Stevens, Anne Francis, Dorothy Malone, and even Lois Nettleton are probably worth a look, especially since the girls, according to Pleshette in interviews were able to play a range of characters on series in those days several times, paying their rent, getting exposure and experience, and playing roles that often highlighted the narrowness of female roles in society at the time. The freshness of real places in pockets of America seldom seen in the media (even today) in Arizona, Oregon, Louisiana, Oklahoma, or Washington, whether bleak or beautiful, informed the program's location work filmed around an America just before it became so homogenized by suburban sprawl and chain stores.
One entry in this series that captivated me because of its painful timeliness and the level of the acting aired last weekend.
The knowledge that "To Walk with the Serpent" was broadcast on Route 66 just a little over a year before the Kennedy assassination is chilling. The story by Will Lorin centers on the lead regulars being "adopted" by a right winger who takes a fancy to them--at least until their breeding is investigated. Quite well written and played with understandable bewilderment Tod (Martin Milner, who always seemed a bit like Mickey Rooney's taller, much more mellow brother and a likable square) and Buz (the smoldering George Maharis), the program belongs to the lead character played by Dan O'Herlihy playing an eccentrically brilliant fascist sort whose blue blood roots make him a pretty unlikely demagogue beyond Commonwealth Ave in Boston, where much of this episode was filmed. Tod and Buz are approached by several personable, if fairly amateurish FBI types played by Joseph Campanella and Simon Oakland. It seems that O'Herlihy, the son of a famed historian (I immediately thought of Samuel Eliot Morison, the naval historian whose statue graces the center of the tree-lined mall in the Back Bay of Boston), has displayed strange tendencies all his life. Currently, Oakland's G-man explains to the boys, he leads an organization called "Awake, America" trying to arouse the blood and thunder in "pure Americans" before it is too late and "the mongrols" we have allowed to emigrate here pollute the country. O'Herlihy's minions worship him, following him around like puppies with a vicious streak, looking for opportunities to prove their loyalty and waiting for him to slip their psychological leashes to spill blood in order to gain attention to their cause. Interestingly, the irksome O'Herlihy is disdainful of his most loyal lackeys, finding them boring and unimaginative, and sometimes inefficient. Perhaps that is one reason the two youthful wanderers interest him.
The Feds ask the lads to play along with O'Herlihy pack of malcontents, who also include Frank Sutton (yes, the Sarge from Gomer Pyle, when he still had hope of a serious career), Logan Ramsey (the sweaty, wonderfully slimy character actor) and DeAnn Mears as an adoring Eva Braun type (that is, if Eva had a Vassar education). These characters all seem to be so esoteric and borderline crackpots who would be hard to take seriously, until you remember that Lee Harvey Oswald was also difficult to believe as an effective assassin. Despite some now-hokey elements, the final scene in the show, effectively filmed by veteran television director, James Sheldon (he was a veteran of many Twilight Zone episodes) is very suspenseful, especially as tension builds and most of us with longer memories realize how eerily prescient the circumstances of this show were at the time and how little, since violence has hardly abated, things have changed.
BTW, many people who see this are too young to know that the character played by Dan O'Herlihy was clearly a fictionalized blend of Robert W. Welch, Jr., the founder of the John Birch Society and George Lincoln Rockwell, the founder of the American Nazi Party. Both figures were very well known to audiences then. O'Herilhy was particularly adept at portraying cold, tense intellectuals.
If you are interested, you can see this program here:
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This show has several episodes on youtube and is available on DVD via the Shout! Factory. There was a good article at The New York Times about the program recently, if anyone is interested:
A Half-Century Road to Today
