The Better Half-Hour

In a society where speed is worshiped and deliberation is devalued, it is ironic that some shorter forms of artistic expression have been gradually marginalized in our culture. The half-hour drama is a forgotten television art form whose heyday was more than fifty years ago. Between the mid Fifties and early Sixties, the half-hour format was seen as a viable way to bring dramatic stories to the masses. This was an era when short stories were regularly published in popular magazines such as Playboy, Colliers and Esquire. These shorter forms of expression were not seen as truncated works, but compactly written stories that could, particularly in the case of television, effectively communicate a social or moral philosophy in an entertaining 24 minutes of screen time. Being a young visual medium, television was keen to exploit this brief format in order to provide a variety of dramatic choices. The anthology shows, mysteries and westerns described below are the best examples on DVD, of the lost art of half-hour drama.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Season One (1955) This was the first influential anthology show on U.S. television. Its clever use of the rotund auteur as master of ceremonies and the high quality of scripts adapted from popular short stories made it an icon of the new format. With the Hitchcock imprimatur and generous helpings of his trademark macabre humour, the show was an immediate success and other programs would soon copy this winning formula including: One Step Beyond and Thriller. The first season has all of the ingredients in place for the long seven-year run of the show, boasting top Hollywood stars and big-screen quality craftsmanship. Two of the most memorable episodes from this auspicious debut season are both directed by the master himself: Revenge, a harrowing tale of rape and retribution starring Vera Miles and Ralph Meeker, and Breakdown, a stylistic tour-de-force starring a nearly mute and immobile Joseph Cotten.

Have Gun Will Travel: Season One (1957) The most off-beat and literate of half-hour westerns featured an erudite hired gunslinger embodied by the threatening black-clad person of Richard Boone a.k.a Paladin. Brimming with action, each episode was also a moral tale that presented its enigmatic lead character with a problem to solve while avoiding the easy solution of violence. Perhaps the only western ever to contain a hero who quoted Shakespeare and the Greek philosophers, this landmark series paved the way for subsequent half-hour westerns like Wanted Dead or Alive, Bat Masterson, and The Rifleman. Favourite early episodes include The Outlaw, with Charles Bronson, and The Bride, with Mike Connors.

Peter Gunn: Set One (1958) The ultimate style-over-substance detective show starring ultra cool Craig Stevens as the jazz club-haunting sleuth. Keeping dialogue to a minimum and noir style to a maximum, this series set the mood for an entire generation of gumshoes on television.Richard Diamond, Private Detective, may have premiered earlier, but Gunn creator Blake Edwards captured the laid-back hip of a new Playboy culture, where swinging tunes, snappy threads, and a mean right hook got you the sexiest doll in town. Later series such as Johnny Staccato, and T.H.E. Cat attempted to replicate the formula with middling popular response. Due to the lack of original masters some early episodes suffer from print damage on DVD and the entire first season has yet to be released in North America. Episodes to watch for include Pecos Pete, where Gunn goes western, and Edie Finds a Corpse, when Gunn's jazz singer girlfriend is drawn into his shadowy world of danger. Edwards later revived the character for a one-shot feature film version tersely entitled Gunn (1967).

The Twilight Zone: Season One (1959) Without a doubt the most famous dramatic half-hour of all-time, and a tribute to the talents of one man, series creator Rod Serling. Although it featured scripts by other famous writers such as Charles Beaumont and Richard Matheson, the majority of the scripts were written by Serling himself, in his uniquely poetic narrative style. Thematically unforgettable, these highly literate fantasy stories took the anthology format into a whole new realm of pop culture entertainment. So indelible is its ongoing power to enthrall, that even today, many actors and directors are besieged by legions of adoring fans as a result of their brief association with the show. Well remembered episodes from the first season include: And When The Sky Opened starring Rod Taylor, and Walking Distance, Serling's own poignant autobiographical elegy of his youth starring Gig Young.

Danger Man: The Complete First Season (1959) Briefly shown on U.S. television, this British produced spy series was the most influential import of its time. Preceding James Bond, John Steed, and Napoleon Solo, hero John Drake was a trouble shooter for NATO at the height of the Cold War. Leading man Patrick McGoohan was made an instant star portraying the ever-resourceful Drake, always eschewing guns when fisticuffs would suffice. Later the show would expand to an hour format and take on a more overtly British tone as opposed to the more mid-Atlantic atmosphere of the half-hour episodes. With superb production values, tight story-lines, and strong performances from producer Lew Grade's usual repertory of memorable British Faces, this was the first in what was to be a veritable explosion of Sixties spy television. Stand-out shows include A Time To Kill, with Darren Nesbitt, and Position of Trust, with Donald Pleasence, and a pre-"Moneypenny" Lois Maxwell.

Spy In Your Eye

It is a sad fact that we now live in a more paranoid world where traffic surveillance, and identity theft are common place. During times such as these it is no surprise that the spy film is alive and well. These films adapted from the fiction of Ian Fleming and Robert Ludlum, are a reminder of the once monolithic popularity that the espionage genre had in print and on the silver screen. The first modern spy novel Erskine Childers' The Riddle of the Sands (1903), was not made into a feature film until seventy-five years after it was written, but from the early sound era, spies have played an important role in the development of the literary and cinematic thriller. The following films are quintessential examples of the symbiotic relationship that this literary genre has had with its big screen counterpart.

Journey into Fear (1942) Based on Eric Ambler's popular tale of Turkish intrigue, this early Mercury production boasts Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten years before their definitive thriller The Third Man (1949). Ambler, one of the most famous of the pre-Cold War spy fiction authors, was an acknowledged influence on Fleming as well as being an accomplished filmmaker and screenwriter. This inevitably led to his novels Background to Danger (1943) and Mask of Dimitrios (1944), being adapted for the screen following the success of the Welles film. Although he possessed none of the literary flair of fellow spy novelist Graham Greene, Ambler helped establish a fan base for espionage entertainment, that ultimately exploded with the arrival of one James Bond.

From Russia With Love (1963) The second Bond film and the only one which classifies as true espionage, it is also one of Fleming's best novels balancing character and intrigue with liberal sprinklings of sex and sadism. Sean Connery embodied the ideal of the spy for generations, but his winking style and conspicuous public image soon made a cartoon of the character's clandestine origins. The series was to take a giant leap forward with the next film, embracing the thrill-ride formula that has served it very well for the last four decades.

The Ipcress File (1965) Fellow countryman Len Deighton was perhaps Ian Fleming's most significant rival during the heyday of the Sixties spy craze. His working class hero, unnamed in the four novels in which he appeared, was an important counterweight to the suave agent 007 who reflected Fleming's own snobbish materialism. Deighton instead focused on his protagonist's rebellious nature and cynicism for authority, caring most about his gourmet cooking, an obsession which the author also shared. The film, produced by Bond co-producer Harry Saltzman and starring a young, myopically cool Michael Caine was the kitchen-sink alternative to Connery, and the public, hungry for spies in all sizes eagerly embraced this vulnerable hero.

The Deadly Affair (1967) Aside from Fleming, John LeCarre is the most famous real-life spy to use his own experience in the intelligence service as fodder for a series of novels that depict this secret world with an uncompromising reality. This film, based on LeCarre's Call for the Dead, the first book to feature his methodical agent George Smiley, is a superbly realized adaptation by director Sidney Lumet and screenwriter Paul Dehn (Goldfinger). Here is the dirtier business of spying, with all of the duplicity, callousness and emotional pain that is inherent in LeCarre's dark bureaucratic universe. Starring Lumet favourite James Mason, in another of his definitive portrayals of middle-aged weariness, this was to be one of the last feature films to embrace the ordinary agent, one whose fallible intellect was more effective than the most sophisticated weaponry.