Posted by Carl
on 10/14/2009, 9:12 am
98.210.246.215 | Message modified by user Carl 10/14/2009, 1:34 pm
The 27 episodes of the short-lived crime drama Johnny Staccato are to be cherished like one’s best cellar wines. You pull one out every once in awhile for a special occasion and savor its splendor. Doesn’t matter which one, they’re all rich with dark noir textures and ooze hip 1950s style. John Cassavetes’ series was simply too good and too cosmopolitan for TV, which is likely why it failed back in 1959. Fifty years later, though, it's a priceless treasure.
The first episode of the series, The Naked Truth, set a fabulous tone for the next 26. Directed by Joseph Pevney, we’re introduced to Johnny hanging out in his ``office’’ at Waldo’s jazz club in Greenwich Village, sitting in for a riff on piano and then turning it back to the regular pianist with the Red Norvo sextet featuring Norvo on vibes, Barney Kessel on guitar, Shelly Manne on drums and Red Mitchell on bass. Like wow, man. Johnny’s a failed jazz pianist, but can’t stay away from the groove. Hence, he operates his private-eye gig out of the club run by Waldo, played by the dutiful Eduardo Ciannelli. Johnny has a phone at a table, a corner office upstairs, and generally a gorgeous dame pawing at him wherever he’s hanging at the club.
In the opener, Staccato is called to a recording studio to aid an Elvis-type teen idol played by a baby-faced Michael Landon and his manager, a Col. Tom Parker-type named Senator Bly. Landon’s character Freddie Tate is being blackmailed by a back-alley scandal sheet called The Naked Truth for some past transgression about which we never learn. Tate has been paying $2,000 a week for the dirt not to be published, but he finally can’t handle the financial load. Staccato is hired to convince The Naked Truth’s publisher A.J. Templar (love that) blackmailing isn’t such a good idea. Templar, played by the dour-mugged Stacy Harris, hires a hitman to take out Staccato, but the assassin stabs Tate by mistake when he and Staccato are discussing strategy in a boxing gym steam room. Tate goes to the hospital, Staccato goes after Templar and his henchman, and they have it out in an abandoned parking garage. Staccato rams the hitman with a delivery truck, then pulls the old empty-chamber trick to bring Templar out in the open, where he subsequently guns him down. While riding in a taxi, he has a moment of guilt for having to kill a couple of creeps, but the show closes with Staccato scoring with Templar’s secretary, the certifiable TV honey Ruta Lee. So much for being haunted.
Basic plot – you can’t cram much story depth into 22 minutes – but the brilliance of Johnny Staccato is not so much in the nuts and bolts but the shadings of the series. It steals much from M Squad with its jazzy score (brilliant work by one of the best film composers of all time, Elmer Bernstein), its central-character voiceover and its stock shots of the urban asphalt jungle (New York this time, instead of Chicago). Such shots are used liberally in The Naked Truth – Cassavetes rides a subway train, walks through Grand Central Station and finds Templar’s office in on a squalid street with the Queensboro Bridge as a backdrop.
And of course, there’s the great Cassavetes himself, typically off-kilter and edgy throughout. He takes the model of Lee Marvin’s Frank Ballinger to a higher new extreme. For one, he needs the jazz club to bring him down, or you believe he just might go completely bonkers in the naked city. He’s a complex cat. Little wonder Middle America opted for The Real McCoys, which aired opposite Johnny Staccato on CBS.
From a noir standpoint, though, Johnny Staccato was the real McCoy of TV noir. Thankfully, it was unearthed by the Trio Network several years back where it was snapped up by collectors. It is fairly readily available now (although not commercially so) in pristine prints, unlike so many TV noir shows of the period. Like Johnny, after a hard day in the big city, I like to hang out at Waldo’s for a half-hour. It instantly makes life worth living.
--- Carl
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