Dark Room Jim

There is no reason for this post other than that I find Jim Phelps in the dark room to be highly aesthetically pleasing :-)

Also, bonus, Jim-selecting-his-team-in-school-jumper-chic. I like how when he's thinking or stressed or alone he doesn't wear a tie and has his collar unbuttoned :-)

Fury - Packy's Dream

Best Episode of Fury Ever!
[SPOILERS!!]

Well, I can’t claim to have watched every episode of Fury. It’s not the best quality sound in the world, and no subtitles, so it’s really hard to watch with raucous children around. It’s not the best show in the world – but there’s a lot of Peter Graves in it, and a lot of him riding around on horses and generally being adorable.

Not long ago I stumbled on what is, I think, the last ever episode, although it’s not the last on the DVD boxset I own. It’s called Packy’s Dream, and it’s awesome.

Peter Graves as 'Silas', the bumbling deputy

Look, he even has sideburns!

Fury centres around the surprisingly serious premise that Jim Newton, a horse rancher, adopts a young boy that he finds on the streets not long after his own wife and young son are killed by a drunk driver. This could be the basis for a heartfelt and serious tearjerker about their trials in life. Instead it becomes a premise for Jim, Joey (the boy he adopts), and Pete the ranch manager to have plenty of fun-filled 1950s type adventures, all with the help of Fury, a wild stallion that Joey manages to tame. Sometimes this series is sickeningly 50s, sometimes it’s surprisingly good. There’s a deep moral and Christian streak, and it’s often at pains to remind us that girls may like to aspire to those things that boys do, but really they’re best in dresses, preparing for motherhood. It makes for uncomfortable viewing. Almost every episode ends with a heartfelt laugh, and I believe Peter Graves said (in an interview I can’t find at the moment) that it taught him how to laugh when he really didn’t feel like laughing.

And Pete's his boss!

All that aside, recently I discovered the episode Packy’s Dream. Homer ‘Packy’ Lambert is a young boy of the obligatory type that they pull in when the boy star starts to get older. Packy spends an inordinately large amount of time at Joey’s house, eating meals and sleeping there, considering he has a perfectly good home of his own to go to. But there we are. This is how semi-soap operas work.

In this episode Joey makes an arrangement to have a fight with another boy over a girl they both like. Jim talks him out of it, telling him that it’s much more modern to settle these things over an ice cream soda than by duking it out in the street. Packy, who is greatly disappointed that he will be deprived of the chance to watch a good fight, goes to sleep that night and dreams about an older time, a more exciting time when men were men and fighting ruled the world.

Bugsy-Malone-style bar kids

Packy dreams that Jim is ‘Cyrus’, the deputy sheriff and Packy’s father. Peter Graves plays Cyrus as a wonderful, rather dumb hick character. Packy thinks that the entire town depends on his father’s rifle, which, as Cyrus says, is ‘kinda scary when you think about it.’ The reason why it’s scary is because Cyrus is about as adept with his gun as a dog would be with a fountain pen. He can’t even climb onto the wagon with it without getting tangled up.

Why do I love this episode so much? Well, apart from Peter Graves’s kick-ass sideburns, it’s so very out of the mould for Fury. It feels like the last day of term when the kids play around. Joey (Bobby Diamond) plays ‘the Kid’, an all-in-black mean cowboy just out of prison, in town to press his unwelcome attentions on the local school teacher. He chews on candy cigarettes and drinks sarsaparilla. Fury is a horse called Satan, with a mean streak a mile wide. There’s a glorious Bugsy Malone moment, well before Bugsy Malone was made, when ‘the Kid’ walks into a bar full of children in adults’ clothing, playing cards, drinking and generally acting like adults. As the bartender serves ‘the Kid’ his moustache begins to fall off.

And Silas gets his gun caught on anything he can.

Peter Graves gets to show off his straight-faced comedic skills in this one, and that’s the main reason why it’s so adorable. You get to hear him uttering phrases like, ‘Bless my bones, son,’ ‘doggone,’ ‘blame well,’ and ‘Feel plumb naked without this little feller to keep me company.’ (he’s talking about his trusty rifle there). He strolls around being dumb and a little clumsy, and at the end he’s shot down in the street by ‘the Kid’. He ends his part in the dream with the immortal line, ‘Caught my thumb in the doggone pump handle, son.’ You also get to see him as Packy wakes from his nightmare clad in a lovely cosy dressing gown. What more can I say?

He prepares for a stand-off

...and fumbles.

‘Caught my thumb in the doggone pump handle, son.’

All's well, only a dream, and Jim's dressing gown is snuggly and warm...

Episode Analysis: Mission: Impossible – The Town

(As you’d expect, this contains SPOILERS)

The Town: Season 2, Episode 21

Paralysed and confined to bed

Evil nurse, Grandpa Walton (aka the Doc) and a worried Rollin

What do you do when you have a character who is always very much in control? You put him out of control. That’s precisely what this episode does to Jim Phelps. On his way to meet Rollin at a hunting lodge, and arriving in a small town with an overheating car, he stumbles (because this is the kind of thing that happens to the IMF) across an entire community constructed for the purpose of sabotage and assassination. When Jim sees a woman stumble over her own suitcase in the pharmacy and accidentally set off her ‘prescription’ – a gun containing a gas capsule – he is apprehended by the local sheriff and turned over to the town doctor (Will Geer, of Waltons fame) who happens to be the mastermind of the entire community. Deciding it is too risky to simply kill Phelps, the doctor devises a yet more dastardly and entirely medical plan.

Poor Jim...

Paralysed by a combination of curare injected into the back and an anaesthetic to the lower cranial nerves (involving a most unpleasant injection to the back of the neck), Jim is locked in his own body, confined to bed and the ministrations of the corrupt doctor and his nurse, Liz, who is as poker-faced a nurse as you would ever love to have ministering to you in your drugged paralysis. When Rollin arrives, concerned about Jim’s non-appearance at the lodge, he is told that Jim has suffered a stroke which has led to complete aphasia. It’s possible that Jim isn’t even conscious of his presence. Wordlessly, Rollin demonstrates a wonderful display of the affection between him and Jim in his shocked and distraught reaction, and in his tender stroking of Jim’s brow and hair when he is admitted to see him. This is the first season that the characters have been in together, but it’s quite obvious that the two have built up a close friendship during that time.

Rollin shows his concern

Off-vertical camera angles and the devious nurse

It’s once Jim enters the sick room that the beauty of this episode gets underway. Directed by Michael O'Herlihy, this is a masterful episode. Visually it is a treat of the kind that you only seem to get in the sixties and earlier. The green patterned wallpaper of the sick room is a perfect decorative flourish against the clinical white of both the sick bed and the nurse’s starched white uniform, while Rollin’s predominately red, threaded with blue, plaid shirt is aesthetically perfect against the green background. The green of the wallpaper is echoed in the natural green of Rollin’s eyes while the red of his shirt is echoed by his skin tone. Visually, the effect is perfect. Jim is in a blue shirt under the white sheets, marking a kind of half-way house between the sterility of the hospital aspects and the homely feel of the wallpaper and Rollin’s presence.

Rollin's always beautiful, but he looks great in this setting

As Rollin tends to Jim, the camera is still off-kilter

To further this aesthetic display, the filming in the room and in the rest of the doctor’s house is done at unusual angles and slightly off-vertical, emphasising both Jim’s loss of control and Rollin’s anxiety. Later in the episode, when the team assemble and take over the house, the camera angles come back to normal, showing the restoration of control. These shots in the sick room are interspersed with footage of the car containing the two assassins, a man and a woman, on their way to L.A. to target their victim. These drawn-out, dialogue-free shots help to pace the episode well, and the cameraman makes use of the technique of zooming in while pulling out, long before Jaws ever used it. To put it succinctly, the camera-work in this episode is slick, and it holds together a story with less dialogue and less movement than usual, inserting the motion into the visual frame rather than the actor’s movement.

Jim realises he can communicate by blinking

The pivoting point of tension in this episode is the knowledge the Jim holds and the question of whether or not he will be able to convey it to Rollin in time to save two lives – his own, and that of Mosneyvov, the rocket-scientist defector who is the target of the assassins. It’s easy to see time ticking down for Mosneyvov through the shots of the car steadily getting closer to L.A.. For Jim, his time is marked by the slow passing of the hours, and the doctor’s determination that each night will bring a more severe ‘stroke’, until the final one kills him. We see his frustration on the few occasions that we hear his thoughts, willing Rollin to listen to him and understand, despite his inability to speak. He begins to claw back control of the situation as he realises he is able to control his eyelids and starts to blink a S.O.S. in Morse code. Rollin finally catches on and we breathe a collective sigh of relief as Jim communicates, through blinking ‘yes’ and ‘no’ to Rollin’s questions, that he is not ill, but drugged, and that the entire town is hostile.

All in all, this episode is class, and watching it will be well rewarded.

Other notable scenes and features –

Cinnamon - always chic.

• Rollin phones Cinnamon on a tapped phone. Her only clue that something is wrong is that Rollin asks for ‘Mrs Phelps’, and she catches on to the urgency of the situation, understanding that Rollin’s suggestion that she bring a driver means Barney (automatic assumption in the sixties that the driver would be black?) and that a reference to baby Willy seeing his Uncle Rollin soon is a request for Willy to come along. Cinnamon’s shock and concern about Jim is obvious, and her white-faced reaction works very well visually against the backdrop of her classic, chic apartment.

The nurse prepares the curare

• As Jim’s medication wears off, in the middle of the episode. You really get the sense, as movement comes back to him and the doctor unceremoniously rolls him over and bares his back for the first injection, that Jim is in a great deal of discomfort. He has been immobile and sweating for at least a day, and he really has the look of someone who had been confined to bed and unable to move. The degradation of his situation is heightened as the gas station man comes in mid-treatment without so much as knocking, and carries out a conversation with the Doc. Despite this, Jim takes the opportunity while he can speak to get necessary information from the Doc, discovering what he is being injected with and who is to be assassinated. Well done, Jim!

Rolling Jim for his injection. Peter Graves does a great impression of discomfort.

• Cinnamon and Rollin’s slick work in the doctor’s surgery to create Rollin’s mask and outfit so that he can impersonate the doctor. There’s no pity in them as they chloroform the doctor and cover his face in plaster of paris. It’s less than he deserves. Rollin, of course, ends up with a flawless disguise, as we would expect, and gets to practice the voice during an unexpected phone call from the male assassin.

Willy's fake arm injury, with Williams and Barney

• Willy and Barney’s exemplary performances. Willy plays a truck driver and cunningly simulates a horrendous cut to the arm in order to get into the surgery. Barney plays the driver of Cinnamon’s car and mostly hangs around outside to warn the others of unwanted visitors. Willy’s concern for Jim is mostly non-verbal, but quite evident.

Williams (Eddie Ryder)

• The man at the gas station, Williams (played by Eddie Ryder), is a great character in himself. While Doc is obviously the leader of the community, Williams is out-front, the man at the gas station that gets to greet all comers, and through the whole episode we can see him itching to have more control, and never quite getting it. You get the feeling that if he could, he’d quite happily cosh the doctor around the back of the head and take the reins himself.

Jim escapes in a coffin, with Willy cracking the lid to ask, 'You have enough air?' How fun!

• The assembled townspeople in the underground briefing room are wonderful – a great mix of young and old, venerable looking women in odd hats who are still part of this (presumably) communist plot. They demonstrate kill techniques on a dummy that looks as if it’s died quite a few times already, and all in all are a very creepy lot. If you ever wanted to know about unheimlich, it’s all here.

  

  He looks like he's had a hard few days...

  

  There's no reason for this picture apart from to say 'awww'

The rest of the screenshots I took are dumped here because they're too pretty not to upload :-)

Brothers

Further to my 1947-squee, I just found a wartime photo of Peter Graves and James Arness (i.e. Peter and James Aurness) together in uniform, so this seems a good time to post the few photos I have of them together. I'm intrigued by James Arness. I don't find him attractive, but Wikipedia makes him sound pretty interesting, especially his wartime service record. They're putting Gunsmoke on tv here pretty soon, so I might watch that and see what my brain does to me...

Anyhow, on to the photos. (please slap me if this blog starts to seem stalkery - I'm not stalkery, just mildly obsessive.) [EDIT: I just found a few more photos in James Arness's autobiography. I want to read this book. It looks interesting! Oh god, I am a stalker... (edit again - and so, I bought the Kindle edition. Damn.]

This is as early as they get, when Peter's mother was probably pregnant. Aside from anything else, this is just a beautiful photo. I love photos of this era. Her clothes, her hair, the graceful curve of her arm (reminds me a little of Modigliani paintings), and she is just so beautiful. Sigh...

This one is quite squeesome. Little Peter and his aeroplane are exceptionally cute.

Young Peter and James. I'm not so stalkery that I find teenage boys in swimming trunks attractive, but it is interesting.

Wartime photo, apparently of autumn 1944, while James is recovering from his foot injury. And now Peter is old enough that I can find him attractive. Hot damn... And that's not a phrase I've used before. I also love this because this is just how he would look playing the character of Ed in the book I've just written.

Peter directing Gunsmoke. He was about to be contracted to direct more when he was called up for the IMF. How I would love to see the episode with director's commentary!

Peter, James - and I'm assuming this is their dad. Aww :-)

This blog has some stuff on what may or may not have been their childhood home - the comments are more illuminating than the article!

1947

There is no reason for this post other than as a great digital squeal because I found this picture above of Peter Graves performing in 'The Wild Duck' as part of his degree at the University of Minnesota in 1947. That's it. I am excited by early Peter Graves. What can I say?

This photo may be earlier, from here, as it's supposed to be during his WWII service, but it's so tiny that it's impossible to tell. I suspect, actually, it's not Peter Graves at all. I can't remember what led me to suspect that, but something did.

Miscellaneous Peter Graves Picspam

Because I can, and because the children won't let me do much else...

The only law a gun, the only shelter wild bush…

So, my Whiplash box set has come (happy me). Contrary to often stated opinions, Chris Cobb (Peter Graves) does not defend himself only with his whip. He more often uses a rifle, and occasionally a pistol. The Harvard-educated American has come to Australia in the mid nineteenth century to operate a stage line, and he does pretty well, tackling outlaws, ex-convicts, and belligerent settlers and struggling to keep up good relations with the Aborigines along the way.

The Network DVD box set of this low-demand title (only available until October 2012) is an excellent production, with high standards all through. The really expensive things – subtitling and remastering – aren’t there – but that’s not unexpected. What they do provide is two sets of photographs on two of the discs, three pdfs of original production data and promotional material, and some cracking graphics on the menus, very befitting of a 1960s production. The pdfs are of particular interest, revealing fun facts about the actors. One gets the feel that the actor bios were written in a more innocent time, when there weren’t people like me around who obsessively internet-stalk people for facts, articles and photos.

The Very Sixties Menu

The series itself (I think) is excellent. My husband thinks it unoriginal. I don’t agree – but then I am lured in by Peter Graves. It’s true that a lot of the elements of the sets and story lines are lifted from traditional American West-centred television, but there is also a lot of very Australian material, up to and including some of the first (apparently) featuring of Aborigines in a television series. The series also seems far more sensitive to Aboriginal issues than American television of that era ever does to Native Americans. (Feel free to correct me. I’m coming from a position of general ignorance, typing with a baby on my lap who is contriving to stop me do much at all.)

A few of the bonus photos. Some are in colour. I may try to take some more screenshots when the baby allows it.

It’s also fun actor and talent-spotting. A lot of the actors seem to appear in this and nothing else ever again, at least according to the vast resources of imdb, but a couple pop up in British television later. Most noticeable for me is Annette Andre , who is in two episodes, Storm River and Dark Runs the Sea, but is more well known from Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), as Jeannie Hopkirk. There's also a man who is later in UFO, although I don't remember his name at the moment. Familiar names from the world of Star Trek crop up too – Gene Roddenberry writes four (very good) episodes, and John Meredyth Lucas directs thirteen.

And then, for the Peter Graves fan in me, every episode is full of wet-Peter-Graves, dashing-Peter-Graves, sexy-Victorian-dinner-wear-Peter-Graves, and a lot of Peter Graves having fist fights, whip or gun fights, leaping onto horses and riding them across the outback, and generally being dashing, handsome and very, very watchable. So, as I say. Happy me. Screenshots may come when the baby allows it.