BY JOHN
M. WHALEN
There is a television series that has attained something
of a cult status, even though it hasn’t been seen by anyone since it was first
broadcast on the ABC Television Network during the 1971-1972 TV season. The
show was “Longstreet,†starring James Franciscus (“Naked City,†“Mr. Novak,â€
“Valley of the Gwangiâ€) as a blind insurance investigator based in New Orleans.
The show had some interesting features that made it out of the ordinary,
including scripts by Oscar Winning screenwriter Stirling Silliphant, a great
performance week after week by Franciscus, and the participation of martial
arts legend Bruce Lee in four of the 23 episodes that were produced.
The fact that there were only 23 episodes is why a lot of
people may have heard about the show but not many have actually seen it. There
were not enough episodes to make “Longstreet†suitable for syndication, so the
show remained unaired and unseen for almost 50 years, locked away in the vaults
of Paramount Home Video. In 2017, however, CBS TV licensed the series for home
viewing to Visual Entertainment Inc., of Toronto. And now the entire series,
plus a 90-minute TV pilot film, are available in a box set of four DVDs.
Viewing the episodes now, you realize how really good the series was.
The regular characters, appearing week after week,
included an assistant named Nikki (Marlyn Mason), who taught Longstreet braille
and helped him get around town in a Jeepster Commando convertible. Mike’s boss
at the Pacific Northwestern Insurance Company was Duke Page (Peter Mark
Richman), a man constantly amazed and aggravated by Mike’s risk taking and
ability to solve cases. Mike’s other “assistant†was Pax, a white German
Shepherd guide dog. The final member of the cast was Mrs. Kingston (Ann Doran),
who cooked and took care of Mike’s home on Chartres St., making sure everything
was kept in its proper place.
Longstreet was an unusual character for TV, not the kind
you usually find on a crime show. For one thing, he was haunted, still trying
to cope with both his blindness and the loss of his wife Ingrid. The incident
that caused these tragedies was depicted in the 90- minute TV pilot film—a bomb
inside a champagne bottle left on their doorstep by criminals Mike had come up
against several years ago. Images of that incident and memories of his wife
flash through Mike’s mind constantly as he proceeds with each week’s
investigation. He’s also got a chip on his shoulder. Not satisfied with merely
coping with his handicap, he wants to prove to the world that he’s still the
same man he was before the injury. That particular trait poses some interesting
problems as the series goes on.
The show was created by Oscar and Golden
Globe winner Stirling Silliphant, who executive produced and wrote four of the
episodes. Silliphant based Longstreet very loosely on a character created by
Baynard Kendrick in a series of novels written between 1930 and 1950.
Silliphant’s character bears little relationship to Kendrick’s Duncan Maclain,
who suffered blindness from war injuries. Silliphant’s humanistic style is all
over the Longstreet character, with most of the episodes going beyond mere
crime solving, instead focusing on Longstreet’s constant battle against fear,
grief, and panic, and his need to prove himself.
Perhaps the most famous episode, the one most
people have heard about even if they haven’t seen it, is “Way of the
Intercepting Fist,†which featured martial arts legend Bruce Lee in a key role.
At the time, Silliphant had been taking instruction from Lee in Jeet Kune Do,
Lee’s special brand of Kung Fu. They became friends and he had already written
him into a part in James Garner’s “Marlowe.†The Longstreet episode begins with
Mike attacked in an alley by three goons who warn him to back off his
investigation into the theft of pharmaceuticals from a shipping company. But
suddenly a whirlwind flies into the darkened alley and the goons don’t know
what hit them as a young Chinese cat, Li Tsung (Lee) cleans their clocks. Mike,
picking himself up off the ground, asks what he did to them. Li replies: “They
did it to themselves.â€
His confidence in himself badly shaken by the
beating, Mike asks Li to teach him what he knows, but Li tells him it’s
impossible. He says it would be like someone trying to pour tea into a cup
that’s already full. “The usefulness of a cup is its emptiness.†However, Li
does help by going to the docks and identifying one of the goons he fought
with. Mike goes down to the docks that night, finds the man and issues a public
challenge, telling him he’ll be back in a week to throw him into the Gulf.
Committed to the fight he again asks Li to teach him Jeet Kune Do. It’s like
the story of a student asking a Zen master for help achieving enlightenment.
This time, he reluctantly agrees. But he cautions that his most important goal
will be to find the cause of his own ignorance. The scenes in which Li
instructs him and tells him the philosophy behind his martial art are
fascinating. Mike keeps letting his mind and ego get in the way and in
frustration Li delivers as short speech that has been quoted hundreds of times
since:
“You must empty your mind. Be formless,
shapeless, like water. Now you put water in a cup, it becomes the cup. Put
water in a tea pot, it becomes the teapot. Water can flow, creep, or drip, or
crash. Be water, my friend.â€
At the end, after Mike fights the longshoreman,
and a cop played by Lou Gossett later asks him how he learned to fight like
that. “By drinking tea from an empty cup,†Longstreet replies. Lee appeared in
three other episodes of the series before packing off to Hong Kong to create a
legend.
Scripts for the series were written by a host
of writers active during the seventies. Richard Landau, for example, wrote “The
Long Way Home.†Mike goes undercover at Harper Electronics, which has a
hire-the-handicap program and has experienced a series of robberies and a
killing. The handicapped employees live in a rooming house run by Emma Brinkley
(Rosemary Decamp) and her daughter Paula (Susan Oliver). Like most of the
stories in the series, solving the crime and punishing the criminals is
secondary to the main plot line, which in this case involves Mike’s
relationship with the handicapped residents of the rooming house. They include
a one-armed lady pool player, a blind piano player, and a parapalegic in a
wheel chair. They gather after work in the rooming house’s rec room every
evening and invite him to join them. But Mike keeps his distance, spending his
free time alone in his room. Paula tries to draw him out and says they’re
beginning to think he doesn’t like them. He tries to explain that it isn’t
that. It’s just that he’s never thought of himself as handicapped. The case
gets solved at the end, of course, but by then Mike has had a change in
viewpoint. As he leaves the rooming house, he wishes the others good luck. One
of them says, at least now, thanks to him, they don’t have to worry about being
robbed or killed at work. To which he replies, “We wouldn’t let a little thing
like that stop us would we?†There’s a pause and one of the handicapped says,
“Do you know what you just said?†“Yes,†Mike replies. “I said us.â€
In “The Shape of Nightmares,†another
Silliphant script, a man Mike sent to prison has committed suicide. The man’s
widow begs Mike to investigate, saying she knows he would never kill himself.
His life insurance pays nothing for suicide but if he was killed she could
collect $10,000, which she needs desperately for herself and her child.
Motivated by pity for the widow and some responsibility for the man’s death, he
agrees to investigate. It just so happens another prisoner there, Bobby Karp
(Paul Koslo) has a grudge against Mike. Mike must use all his skill to avoid
being murdered while trying to find out how the woman’s husband really died and
who was responsible. It’s a gritty episode that includes Dana Elcar as a prison
shrink and William Smith (Conan the
Barbarian) as a prison guard. The emotional high point of this episode
comes after the case is wrapped up and Nikki, with Pax in the back seat, drives
him out of the prison. She asks him how he feels. “It must have been a
nightmare,†she says. “Just imagine the kind of nightmares they have,†Mike
responds. Several miles out of the prison gates he tells her to stop. He asks
her what the surrounding area is like. It’s basically a grassy park area with
some trees in the distance. Mike gets out of the Jeep and takes Pax’s harness
off. “Come on, boy,†he says and the two of them start running together across
the grass. A powerful scene, with no need for dialogue.
There are many other excellent episodes in
the collection and the lineup of guest stars is a who’s who of seventies
television. Stephen McNally, Leif Erickson, John Ericson, Ed Lauter, Brad
Dillman, Louis Gossett Jr., Murray Hamilton, Victor Jory, Barry Sullivan and
Tyne Daly are just of few of the familiar faces that show up.
The series only ran for one 23-episode
season. In an interview Silliphant said he found writing for television in the
seventies too problematic. In the sixties, he had written Route 66 and Naked City with
complete creative freedom. But by the time he did Longstreet, the power had
shifted from the creators and advertisers to network executives. He said it
took too long and it was too difficult to get script ideas through committee
meetings. Whether it was low ratings or reluctance on Silliphant’s part to
continue the series, Loingstreet was canceled. He probably didn’t grieve too
much. He returned to writing feature films again. His next project was writing
the screenplay for The Poseidon Adventure, which started him on the disaster movie
cycle with producer Irwin Allen.
Visual Entertainment’s box set of four discs
has six episodes per disk with no bonus features. Although there is a notice at
the beginning of each of the discs cautioning that the transfer of the old
films to DVD may reveal certain “technical anomalies,†I found the video and
audio more than adequate. A 4K restoration would be ideal, of course, but this
is probably the best you’ll ever see the series. Very highly recommended.
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John M. Whalen is the author of "Tragon of Ramura". Click here to order from Amazon.