Psycho and Peter Gunn -- Redux

Now I think it was back in 2007 that I last posted on the connections between Psycho the the 1958-1961 TV series Peter Gunn. At that time, I only had the first season of Peter Gunn as a DVD rental. 12 years later, its available for streaming on Hulu and I've been watching the entire three seasons of catchy 30 minute episodes like other people eat peanuts. So this take is "the same but a little different" on whatever I wrote all those years ago.

Truffaut once said that the reason he felt Hitchcock was unappreciated for his genius in his now-native America was that American TV in the fifties and sixties was filled with violent crime programming every night -- wall to wall murders, shootings, stabbings -- and Hitchcock's films got lost in the shuffle.

Of that, I'm not so sure. All those TV detective shows on the 50's/60's cusp were in black and white, and couldn't compete with something in high budget and Technicolor/VistaVision like North by Northwest. And Vertigo has levels of visual beauty and art film profundity that, again, 50's/60's TV wasn't going to match.

Nope...about the only Hitchcock movie that "tracks" with American mystery TV of the 50s/60s is...Psycho. And its not just because it is in black and white. The Wrong Man has both a documentary "you are there" feeling to it, AND the sense of a high budget film. Backing up to I Confess and Strangers on a Train gets one black and white works, but of no real connection to the mystery shows that came later. (Radio shows...maybe.)

Now, Psycho is seen as connected mostly to HITCHCOCK's b/w TV show of the time, but many of those episodes had to do with married couples out to kill each other in suburbia, or were set in London(however faked at Revue studios.) I'd be hard pressed to recall too many Hitchcock half hours that had private eyes or hip ambiance. He was rather twee and formal in those days. (The private eyes and hip ambiance would come with the HOUR show, after Psycho hit big and the 60's kicked in.)

A few critics who don't like all of Psycho don't like it after Marion's car sinks into the swamp. Simply put(to them) : all of the stuff with Arbogast, all of the stuff with Sheriff Chambers, even the psychiatrist scene at the end was,..."the stuff of a regular Hitchcock TV episode."

Well, yes...and no. Yes, this was the stuff of many a TV detective show, but Psycho famously pitted that "normality" against the horrors OF Psycho. Arbogast may be yet another cool cat detective who questions the suspects and solves the crime -- but he walks right into a horror movie and gory death, unheard of on TV.

I've noted before that Arbogast was actually a bit of anomaly AS a private eye. One writer calls him "dumpy and unglamorous." Well, he's not Peter Gunn. Or those cool cats on 77 Sunset Strip(one in his 30's, one in his 20's, one near a teenager.) Arbogast is a "supporting actor private eye" -- John Gavin has the cool stud role here. (Yes, John Gavin). Martin Balsam is the kind of detective who might have been played by Ed Binns or Simon Oakland or Walter Matthau if cast differently. But NOT a 77 Sunset Strip guy.

Of course, in the book, Arbogast was a middle-aged, tall, tan, cigarette-smoking, stubble faced Texas private eye who wore a Stetson. A whole other kind of supporting player(Malcolm Attebury -- farmer in NXNW; cop in The Birds -- was recommended here for the part by Telegonus) that Hitchcock and Stefano elected to eschew. They decided on an "urban Arbogast," who I always figured migrated from New York to Phoenix.

HAD Arbogast been cast with a younger, thinner, more traditionally handsome man(c'mon let's insert Peter Gunn himself, Craig Stevens into the role, though he may have been Balsam's age at the time), the whole tone of Psycho would have shifted. Sam would be jealous of him, Norman would be intimidated by his looks(and less willing perhaps, to talk), the murder would be trickier to justify(an old lady killing short Balsam seemed more right.)

So Hitchcock went with Martin Balsam, and Craig Stevens continued on as the sexy kind of guy a TV private eye is meant to be.

Which allows me to shift to Peter Gunn AS Peter Gunn.

As a personal matter, just as I was too young to know of the release of Psycho in 1960, I have bupkus memory of Peter Gunn as a TV show in '58, '59, etc. Probably my first "solid" memory of a TV detective, and he was a police captain, was Gene Barry as Amos Burke on "Burke's Law" which started in 1963 and which I watched regularly. No Lassie for me -- I dug on the murder, the guest stars, the sexy ladies, the reveal of the killer and the great stunt man fistfight if the killer was a man.