The 'Tube' Columns, City magazine 1974–1975: Viva Muerte

April 30, 1975

Great controversy has been raised of late as to whether television violence is good for you. What do you think? What’s more important, shielding our children from murder and mayhem, or teaching them that justice always triumphs in the end? Not an easy question.

Something to ponder in the weeks ahead, as we follow the recently announced plan to shift all the killing out of prime-time. This change is based on two questionable assumptions: (1) The Hope of Our Nation goes to bed at 9:00, and (2) American grown-ups are beyond saving anyway and might as well be permitted to watch whatever the networks can convince them they like.

Ah, Liberalism! David Susskind lives! Remember the people who were positive comic books rotted the mind and poisoned the soul? Your mind may be rotted and your soul poisoned, but you’re not really about to blame it on Sgt. Fury, are you? If you or your kid grows up to be like Lt. Calley, you’re not going to be able to blame it on Hawaii Five-O.

All of which leads me to consideration of a show I am definitely beginning to like: Caribe (Mondays, 10 PM, Ch. 7). Stacy Keach and partner Carl Franklin make up the Caribe force, Miami-based cops who operate freely throughout the Caribbean chasing terrorists, syndicate men, and various other miscreants. The direction is indifferent, the dialogue weak, the acting pure throwaway, and yet the show works as few TV crime shows do.

The reason is that Caribe’s violence, hokey and jerry-built as one might expect it to be, derives not from the street but from the corridors of power. This is a post-Watergate crime show: It’s set where Watergate was hatched, in the land of Rebozo, Alpanalp, Duvalier, E. Howard “Eduardo” Hunt, Frank Sturgis. That may be all the show has going for it, but, as the last months have proved, that is enough.

Caribe follows a basic plot. Keach and Franklin stumble on what appears to be an ordinary murder. Before they can get beyond an identification of the body they are ordered off the case, usually by a top government agent—a congressman, his assistant, a bureaucrat, or an agent of Military Intelligence. Keach and his buddy follow the trail anyway, of course, and by the end of the show Mr. Big Shot from Washington is exposed as Mr. Big.

One segment ended with a scene guaranteed to warm the hearts of all those afflicted with Watergate Withdrawal: a dozen reporters slavishly take down every word of a congressional committee, until Keach breaks in, “Uh, sir, do you have any comment on the fact that the chief counsel for your committee was just indicted for treason, murder, conspiracy, and smuggling?” “That’s all, boys,” yells the congressman, running for his life.

Murders on Caribe are hard, nasty, brutal, and quick, often snuffing characters you’ve come to like. Keach, fine actor that he is, never fails to register convincing disgust, even horror, at the discovery of a favored corpse. Who knows, as the show gets tougher, he may even be allowed to throw up once or twice.

For tougher is exactly what the program is getting these days; it’s moved from small-time heroin plots to truly grand conspiracies. A recent episode—“One Minute to Doom”—began with the discovery in Miami of a British scientist known to have defected to Russia five years before. It escalated to an attempt on the part of a Nazi-styled Navy intelligence chief to seize the government of the United States (but how?) with, it turned out, the help of the duped scientist—who had not really defected, but thought he was working for Peace and the US. The plotters also include a millionaire with a private island (obviously modeled on Alpanalp), half the Cabinet, and a good part of the US Congress. Together they had built a nuclear missile set to land on Washington, D.C., just as the President delivered his State of the Union Address to Congress and the Supreme Court (that’s how). The guts of the show took place as the conspirators were winging their way to Denver, where they planned to establish the New Order. Keach and Franklin invade the private island where the missile is primed, foil the plan in a riff copped from the ending of Goldfinger, and wipe out all the bad guys within reach.

The Epilogue, in its way, was nice: The writers respect our intelligence enough to know that we knew that no way had been established for legal links to be drawn to the remaining conspirators on the plane to Denver—so they had the plane commit hara kiri. That put this episode of Caribe over the 20 mark in deaths per night, sure to bring down the wrath of all the TV body-counters roaming the land these days.

Very neat ending, but that’s the rub. What Caribe is missing, for all its wild-eyed suggestive plotting, is a Nemesis—a figure comparable to the Moriarty who bedeviled Sherlock Holmes. The remaining conspirators, loose in the land perhaps under new identities, perhaps retaining their seats of power and fighting exposure by Caribe with every means possible, would make great episode-to-episode villains. What TV crime writers do not understand is that the way to keep an audience interested is to let the biggest fish get away, time and again, to build him up until he is a phantom behind (or, perhaps, not behind) every random murder, kidnapping, plot, and counter-plot. A weekly TV series, of course, is the perfect medium for such a device—the oldest trick in the book, and still the best.

So I ask Caribe—the next time you come up with a plot worthy of our interest and a villain worthy of the plot, keep him going. Keep him hid, show only one side of his face. Lyndon Johnson once described the CIA’s activities in the West Indies as “a Caribbean Murder, Inc.”—play out that string, pile the bodies up, tie your man into the slaughter in ways that can’t quite be pinned down. Is he Howard Hughes? Meyer Lansky? Someone even bigger?

Catch him on July 4, 1976, and everyone will go to bed happy. Except that by then they’ll probably have to catch the show at 3 AM.

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SPECIALS

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Thursday, May 1
1 AM, Ch. 4: Tomorrow. Tom Snyder interviews Orson Welles on all the usual stuff, plus some Big Topics: Death & Magic. In the movies?

Monday, May 5
8 PM, Ch. 5: The Great Migration. Richard Widmark narrates this documentary about the trek of the wildebeests (or gnu) across the African plains in search of food and water. Looks fine.

Tuesday, May 6
9:30 PM, Ch. 9: Hugh Hefner at 49. The once-powerful suzerain of soft-core surveys his crumbling empire: Profits are down; Penthouse has cut into his circulation figures; death haunts his every turn; the Supreme Court didn’t buy the Playboy Philosophy, and the Feds are after his ass.

Saturday, May 10
9 PM, Ch. 5: The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Anchorman Ted Baxter lets on he’s having an affair with Mary, who’s taking bets she’s not. Question is, would she know?

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Friday, May 2
11:30 PM, Ch. 5: Citizen Kane (’41, Dir. Orson Welles). He’s rich, he’s handsome, he’s got a wife, he’s got a mistress, he’s a friend of presidents and kings, thousands grovel at his feet, but is he happy? No, because he’s never forgiven his mother for selling him to a bank. The Great American Nightmare, The Godfather of its time.

1 AM, Ch. 5: Crossfire (’47, Dir. Edward Dmytryk). Two of the American cinema’s most underrated actors, Robert Mitchum and Robert Ryan, in a fine, messagey thriller about—deep breath—a crazed anti-Semitic ex-GI killer on the loose.

Saturday, May 3
11:30 PM, Ch. 2: Godzilla and the Smog Monster. Strange creature is spontaneously generated in industrial waste, disproving all modern theories of creation, and threatening life as we know it. Thing leaves native habitat in Los Angeles and advances on San Francisco, where it is eaten by Godzilla, who is promptly invited by Joe Alioto to join the City government as commissioner of civil defense. Godzilla eats Joe. Feinstein, Moscone, Ertola, Nelder, and Kopp announce for Mayor. On the other hand, Mike Goodwin reports that this is a psychedelic peace-and-love movie in which Godzilla joins the counterculture and sets up the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic. Take your choice.

Monday, May 5
10 AM, Ch. 2: Forever and a Day (’43). Highly entertaining, episodic tale of a big house and several generations worth of inhabitants. A ’40s Yellow Rolls-Royce, though more people can fit into a house than a car, to wit: Brian Aherne, Robert Cummings, Ida Lupino, Charles Laughton, Herbert Marshall, Ray Milland, Merle Oberon, Claude Rains, Victor McLaglen, Edward Everett Horton Hears a Who, Elsa Lanchester, and around 70 other refugees from the English stage, screen, and street.

8 PM, Ch. 2: It Happened One Night (’34, Dir. Frank Capra). Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert in the famous flick about an heiress’ romance with a newsman she meets on a cross-country bus. A classic of Depression realism.

Tuesday, May 6
10 AM, Ch. 2: The Scarface Mob (’62, Dir. Phil Karlson). Phil Karlson was a dynamite director; his combination of two early Untouchables segments spotlights the efforts of Ness and his boys to break the back of the Capone Mob. With Neville Brand as Big Al, Barbara Nichols as his moll. True sleeper, a cult classic of years to come.

Wednesday, May 7
10 PM, Ch. 44: They Drive by Night (’40, Dir. Raoul Walsh). Indescribably exciting thriller about two truckers mixed up in murder, with Humphrey Bogart, George Raft, and Ann Sheridan. Top critic Manny Farber’s favorite movie, and likely Raoul Walsh’s best.

Thursday, May 8
1 PM, Ch. 2: The Stranger (’46, Dir. Orson Welles). Welles and Edward G. Robinson in a pretty fair pseudo-mystery about a Nazi war criminal hiding from the forces of justice, disguised as mild-mannered college prof in small American town. They ending’s a real bell-ringer.

10 PM, Ch. 44: All About Eve (’50, Dir. Joseph Mankiewicz). Famous meller about Grande Dame Bette Davis sabotaged by conniving Anne Baxter, who Pretends to Be Her Friend whilst in truth Stabbing Her in the Back. Baxter is aided in her nefarious plans by George Sanders; Davis in her honorable ones by Gary Merrill. Wildly overrated on release, but just right for late-night TV.

Friday, May 9
11:30 PM, Ch. 5: Billy Budd (’62, Dir. Peter Ustinov). Underrated version of Herman Melville’s last work, wherein America’s greatest author shook hands with Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor and decided that not only would man kill Christ if He came back to earth, man would only be protecting himself. Robert Ryan is superb as the ambiguous “villain” Claggart.

Saturday, May 10
2:30 PM, Ch. 2: The Man Who Reclaimed His Head (’34). Struggling proletarian writer (Claude Rains) sells his brain to evil capitalist publisher (Lionel Atwill), then tries to get it back—no mean trick. A story all writers can identify with. Supposed to be good, too.

9:30 PM, Ch. 2: The Night of the Living Dead (’68, Dir. George Romero). Famous midnight thriller, and unquestionably the most horrifying movie ever made. Creature Features-host Bob Wilkins has been forced to cut this slightly for TV (the flesh-eating sequences), but even so it may have you running from the room. Very funny in its portrayal of TV newsmen attempting to cope with a Final Disaster; perhaps the first movie to use a black lead without once referring, even obliquely, to his race. Not that it does him any good in the end.

Sunday, May 12
3 PM, Ch. 5: Flying Down to Rio (’33). The first of the great Fred Astaire–Ginger Rogers movies; rarely seen on local TV.

11 PM, Ch. 44: Wuthering Heights (’39, Dir. William Wyler). Laurence Olivier, Merle Oberon, David Niven. The wonderful screen adaptation of Emily Brontë’s magnificent tragedy of romance and obsession. Not even an all-time stupid Hollywood ending interferes with the steady build towards disaster. Don’t miss the first few minutes, which are, in their way, almost as scary as Night of the Living Dead.

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Originally published in City magazine, April 30, 1975