On February 8th, the LA Sentinel posted an article about the History of Black Television as part of its celebration of Black History Month. The article tells a condensed chronology of important milestones in the evolution and progression of black actors and entertainers on television. Among the list of shows, of course, was I SPY.
I take issue, however, with the writer’s commentary about the show, saying, “Although I SPY was a significant breakdown of Black stereotypes it created an invisible standard for Black actors on primetime TV; Blacks are acceptable as long as they are partnered with white co-stars.”
Um, what?
I’m not sure the writer truly understands and appreciates the significance of I SPYs impact on the portrayal of black characters on television and perhaps did little to no research about the show itself, or the time period in which it came about. At the time I SPY was conceived in late ’64, blacks and whites were not supposed to be considered equals. Jim Crow and so called “separate but equal” laws existed, particularly in the south where the mere idea of a black man being shown on television as EQUAL to a white was near blasphemy.
Indeed, several NBC affiliates in the south refused to air I SPY when it first debuted in the fall of ‘65. The subtle displays of equality, things taken for granted now, were very significant at the time. Scenes showing Alexander Scott (Cosby) and Kelly Robinson (Culp) dining together, sharing hotel quarters and a wash basin together were part of the visual impact that was part of the “non-statement” statement Culp and Cosby made with the show. Color was not a factor in how the partners worked and lived together. Each had their strengths and weaknesses in physical and mental attributes that complimented each other. In fact, Scott was the Rhodes Scholar who spoke several languages and had an understanding of world history and cultures along with a mechanical aptitude that would have made MacGyver proud. Kelly, on the other hand, was the first to tell you that he was more often than not the dummy of the two. He wasn’t, necessarily, but if somebody was speaking a foreign language he always turned to Scotty for a translation.
The first episode of I SPY, “So Long Patrick Henry,” written by Robert Culp, is a story of black characters not seen on television up to that point. Subsequent Culp penned scripts such as “The Loser” and “Court of the Lion” were also black stories not seen on the television prior.
Comedian Godfrey Cambridge, who played the villain in Culp’s “Court of Lion” episode, was very clear to TV Guide in 1966: “A Negro’s always got to be the Good Guy on TV these times. I am tired of being loved. Now this king of the Zulus is the first villain I’ve been allowed to play on TV. I’m doing a black Goldfinger. Bob Culp had the guts to put me in this part. So many other people in this town would say, ‘Let’s not have an argument, let’s make the Zulu an Indian.’ But Culp says, ‘Let’s do it right.’ That’s what I like about Culp.”
In the same article, I SPY co- producer Mort Fine said, “There is a wide audience acceptance of the camaraderie between Culp and Cosby, the white man and the Negro. People want to do the right thing, white to Negro. I think it’s vicarious. They want to watch it in action.”
“Yeah,” Cambridge said sardonically, “watching I Spy on the tube provides a relationship with a Negro with no risk.”
Cambridge obviously knew different. And if there had truly been no risk, why did affiliates in the south initially refuse to air the show?
Simple. The image I SPY portrayed, the equal working relationship and friendship of Robinson and Scott, a white man and a black man, was powerful.
Very powerful.
I would hope that Ms. Buck, the writer of the article, will someday take some time to truly get to know I SPY, watch several episodes (I could offer some recommendations) and take a moment to learn more of the history of it and of the time period it was created in. Then perhaps she will understand that the standard I SPY set was NOT that “blacks are acceptable as long as they are partnered with white co-stars” it was that blacks were acceptable as strong, independent, intelligent, resourceful people regardless if they were paired with a white co-star or not.
The media seems to have turned its collective back on I SPY due to Cosby’s issues. Why doing so is an injustice.
Robert Culp’s words, spoken nine years ago during his American Television Archive interview, seem to be becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy as of late.
I SPY, the TV series Culp co-starred with Bill Cosby for three seasons, premiered on NBC 51 years ago last week, September 15th, 1965. Outside of TheConsummateCulp Facebook and Twitter feed and a Facebook page called I SPY, SPY SHOWS, you probably missed the notice in any news feeds on social media platforms. It appeared nowhere. Granted, 51 is an odd anniversary to mark, but several other shows that also premiered that same week in 1965 had plenty of mentions.
I SPY was just not one of those shows.
Then, this past Sunday night was the 68th Emmy Awards. Host Jimmy Kimmel did a cheap and cringeworthy Bill Cosby joke and the website Upworthy.com failed to mention the first African American actor to win an Emmy in their article on 15 Emmy nominees and winners who broke barriers. That actor, Bill Cosby, for I SPY, was not included in the list.
And you know, I get it. Cosby’s being punished and I’m not saying he doesn’t deserve everything he gets. But I SPY, and all those associated with it, doesn’t deserve to be punished with him. I SPY was a ground breaking culturally significant milestone in television history that still matters. You can try to ignore it and bury it in light of Cosby’s loss of honor because it seems like the right thing to do. But to do so unfairly punishes so many others. Not the least of which is Robert Culp, who so believed in all that I SPY would represent for race relations if given the chance, he threatened to quit the show before it even started when NBC wanted to replace Cosby whom they didn’t favor due to his lack of acting experience.
Or producer Sheldon Leonard, the man who originally envisioned the concept of the two man, black and white team of spies and also backed up Cosby.
Or Fouad Said, the brilliant Egyptian born cinematographer, who met the challenge of I SPY’s around the world on location filming with innovative ideas and concepts that revolutionized television and film making beyond I SPY.
Or Earle Hagen, who scored the show, writing a musical accompaniment for each episode, incorporating musical styles and flavors from the many exotic locations I SPY filmed.
Or any of the people who worked on I SPY, from top executive producers, to the guest stars, down to the line crews and everybody in between.
Bill Cosby’s transgressions makes it hard to celebrate I SPY and its place in television history. Believe me, I understand. But those transgressions don’t change history, nor does it change Robert Culp’s, or others, place in it. Because they did do it. And were it not for them, much of what came after them never would have happened.
Recently I shared on Facebook several HICKEY & BOGGS articles I had written back in 2012 for the 40th anniversary of the film. One of the articles made reference to a 2007 screening of H&B at the Aero Theatre in Los Angeles with Robert Culp on hand afterwards for a Q&A session. Video of the event existed at the time of the posting in 2012 – and then disappeared some two weeks later. The source of the video, a website known as Criminally Unknown which was dedicated to discussing lesser known films, all but fell off the face of the earth at the time. The links to vids on their Facebook page disappeared, their website disappeared, and onlyone segmentof the nearly 45 minute Q&A survived still on YouTube. It seemed the entire Q&A session was lost forever.
But lo… it was not lost! After sharing the articles I heard from a fellow Culpophile and I’m very happy to say that the vids have survived because they were saved (thanks Tatia!) and now THEY’RE BACK! And you can check them out below.
I SPY, which premiered 50 years ago this week on September 15th, 1965, ran for 83 episodes and if you think it was easy compiling a Top Ten list, you’d be mistaken. Most of those 83 could probably be easily shoved into this list. My handicap in trying to come up with a list on my own is the fact that I have not seen all of season three. So I put the question out to other fans on Facebook and over at the I SPY FORUM to try to come up with The List of the 10 best I SPY episodes. These would be the ones that just stick in your mind, the ones that if you were introducing someone new to the show you would have them watch, the ones that had the best story lines, the best performances, the best use of exotic scenery, the best score by Earle Hagen – and more often than not, all of these elements would be in the same episode!
So here we go, in order of season/air date…
So Long, Patrick Henry (Season 1, Episode 1)
I SPY’s original pilot episode, “Affair in T’Sien Cha,” was already in the can, promo photos were being used by the press but NBC wasn’t happy with it. They decided not to go with “Affair” and instead, selecting from other episodes completed, they picked this one to set the tone for the series. And they couldn’t have picked a better episode. Written by series star Robert Culp, the episode features Ivan Dixon (Hogan’s Heroes) as a disgruntled US Olympic athlete who defected to China after the ’64 Olympics. Appearing to not be happy with his decision after a year, the US government is prepared to offer him a chance to come back and Scotty and Kelly are sent to deliver the message. The episode has a great mix of drama and comedy and overwhelmingly succeeded in starting the series off on the right foot.
Tatia (Season 1, Episode 10)
Kelly falls for a freelance photographer, Tatia Loring, who Scotty suspects is an enemy agent. Nearly everyone Tatia has ever photographed has ended up dead. Kelly’s feelings are strong and he doesn’t believe his partner – to the point they have a knock down drag out fight over it. Set in Japan, the episode showcases the Japanese scenery and backdrops beautifully and has an excellent mix of romance and angst.
The Tiger (Season , Episode 15)
Prior to taking the role of Kelly Robinson in I SPY, Robert Culp had written a script for a pilot for a potential spy series called “Danny Doyle.” That script was reworked and became this episode. Kelly is sent on a dangerous mission to Vietnam to locate a philanthropist doctor who has gone into hiding. The doctor’s daughter, Sam Than McLean, a US government agent herself, is captured by the enemy in order to lure the doctor out. Scotty waits in the wings to assist in picking Kelly, Sam and her father up but they are under a desperate time table – the US Airforce is set to bomb the area whether Kelly and all make it out or not.
Bet Me a Dollar (Season 1, Episode 20)
The most dangerous thing Kelly can do is get bored. And he does in this episode which prompts him to challenge Scotty to “find” him. The game would be fun, except it takes on a serious turn when Scotty finds out that the knife wound Kelly suffered prior to the challenge has exposed him to anthrax. Meanwhile, Kelly befriends a young Mexican boy who accompanies him through the “game.” Kelly, however, gets sicker as the challenge goes on but refuses to let Scotty find him and it’s up to the young boy to be Kelly’s salvation.
Vendetta (Season 2, Episode 4)
What did I say about Kelly getting bored? This time he’s hanging out by the pool of the hotel he and Scotty are staying at when he spots an attractive Italian girl. She turns out to be bait for a set up and Kelly is held against his will by the family of a man who was killed during the Korean War under Kelly’s command. Kelly is accused of having shot the man in the back and is placed on trial by the family. If convicted, his sentence is death.
Bridge of Spies (Season 2, Episode 9)
Sheesh, you’d think Kelly would be more careful of beautiful women by now but…nope! This time it’s an Italian tourist guide (Barbara Steele) who sets him up so she and an accomplice can retrieve information on other agents and take them out of circulation. Scotty and Kelly’s set ups for contact with other agents are super secretive and the loss of the agents starts to make Scotty and Kelly suspicious of each other.
Room with a Rack (Season 2, Episode 21)
Quite possibly the most disturbing opening for television at the time, we see Kelly chained to a medieval rack, stretched. Subsequent images follow, making it clear that Kelly has been tortured. We then see him in a hospital, recovering – and that’s all before the opening title sequence. He’s given a 30 day vacation but at the same time the Department thinks he’s damaged beyond repair. While on break, Kelly is happy to meet an old friend but the enemy agents who tortured him have found him too. Culp’s performance is fantastic as the nearly broken Kelly, who flinches and cowers much too easily after his ordeal and falls to his knees in tears when he’s brought back to the torture chamber for the second time.
Mainly on the Plains (Season 2, Episode 22)
Kelly befriends Don Silvando, a scientist (Boris Karloff), in Spain and with Scotty must convince him to work for the US. (The Communists are attempting the same but when their agent fails to befriend the scientist they just try to go with force). When Kelly and Scotty offer to drive with the Don to Madrid they discover that his car is full of books – hundreds of copies of all the same book, Don Quixote, in multiple languages. The Don loves the story so much, and has been under quite a bit of strain as of late, along the way to Madrid he has moments of hallucination and thinks he is Don Quixote. The Don saves a damsel in distress, battles the windmills and inadvertently releases a truck load of prisoners.
Magic Mirror (Season 2, Episode 25)
Sam McLean (seen previously in The Tiger) whom Kelly has fallen for is shown to be having an affair with a vicious dictator currently in exile. The dictator plans to return to power with help from the Soviets in exchange for allowing missiles to be based in his country. Kelly and Scotty must find out what he’s up to, stop him and if need be, destroy Sam for her traitorous ways. But is she really a traitor?
Home to Judgment (Season 3, Episode 14)
Consistently a top choice among fans as a favorite, I think I can safely assume that if any I SPY fan were to be stuck on a desert island and could only take one episode with them, this would be it. Kelly and Scotty blow an assignment and escape from the criminals they had been in pursuit of who are now in pursuit of them. The boys seek refuge on an old farm that turns out to be Kelly’s aunt and uncle, whom he hasn’t seen in years. Not wanting to bring heat down on his family, Kelly and Scotty figure to move on as quickly as possible but are caught by Kelly’s Uncle Harry as the bad guys are closing in.
Honorable Mentions:
It’s All Done with Mirrors (Season 1, Episode 27)
Kelly is abducted by a Russian scientist (Carroll O’Connor, totally NOT Archie Bunker here) and brainwashed into believing that Scotty is a traitor and must be killed. Kelly is controlled by light reflecting off a mirror and when he fails to kill on the first attempt, the department writes him off and wants him destroyed. Scotty doesn’t believe his partner has deliberately gone rogue and manages to finagle 48 hours to bring Kelly in or otherwise dispatch him himself.
Blackout (Season 2, Episode 24)
Kelly woos a Russian ballerina in order to try to find out who in the ballet company is passing information. He wakes up in a seedy hotel in Spain, the ballerina dead and he unable to recall what’s happened. Colonel Benkovski of the KGB gives Kelly and Scotty approximately 12 hours to figure out what happened and who killed the ballerina before taking the matter to the Spanish authorities.
Laya (Season 3, Episode 3)
A Central African country, recently independent thanks to the Communists, has been receiving arms shipments from the same. Scotty is assigned to befriend an embassy clerk who has access to the information but the assignment becomes complicated when he develops genuine feelings for the woman.
The Lotus Eater (Season 3, Episode 12)
Scotty loses contact with Kelly for 10 days eventually finding him on a Greek isle, literally enjoying wine, women and song. Kelly claims he’s quit the service, has taken up light housekeeping with a pretty Greek girl and dances at the local tavern smashing plates over his head. Scotty suspects something’s up and when he’s jumped by two thugs who work for Sorgi (Sheldon Leonard, previously seen in “Three Hours on a Sunday Night”) he has no doubt. Kelly’s dependence on Ouzo isn’t by accident.
Think there’s an episode that should have been on this list? Let me know in the comments below!
When my friend casually tweeted “What should I write about,” I spent forty five minutes trying to convince him why I Spy should be remembered in its fiftieth anniversary year. The 144 character conversation ended with him apologizing that he couldn’t because of “the Cosby thing.” And therein lays the problem. We’ve known about “the Cosby thing” since 1997, but it’s social media for better that has convicted him and for worse condemned innocents who didn’t know they danced with a demon.
Though every book of faith warns against worshipping false idols, Bill Cosby was always considered safe to worship because he was one of the “good guys.” He is an educated, self-made man, with a loving wife and family. He is also funny as all get out. I switched tenses to describe him because he is still all of those things, though now we understand he is another character played by William H Cosby, Jr.
Now we understand this man may be one of the most dangerous psychopaths we have ever known.
There is no negating what he has done. Countless women were victimized daily by him: at the time of the initial “seduction” when he got them to trust him, at the moment of the violent act, and every day thereafter when these women were denied their rightful justice because no one could believe that Alexander Scott / Fat Albert / Cliff Huxtable could do this.
Because we forget that actors are not their characters.
There is no question he needs to be punished. The Statute of Limitations must be done away with when it comes to sexual crimes, so the victims can come forward when they have made a safe place for themselves to do so. Perhaps that may be his final act for us, to be the impetus for such legislation. In the meantime, the only recompense these victims have is knowing he is guilty in the court of public opinion, and maybe in civil court. Perhaps that will help them; it will not hurt him.
Psychopaths cannot be hurt because they cannot feel.
But in the void of his lack of feeling are pawns who find their collective legacy being wiped out by his.
I Spy was one of the few correct and true things NBC has ever done. The nation needed to see in a non-proselytizing manner that all men are created equal. We were given in a weekly fifty minute non-statement, two men literally equal in size and stature sharing a meal, a room, a mirror, a bathroom. Nothing mattered as long as they got the job done and had fun. The end. This steady dose of Kelly Robinson and Alexander Scott walking side by side, living life together was absorbed subliminally and obviously and hearts began to change. Self-doubt about whether it was really OK to sit next to your classmate and eat off each other’s plates, finish their drinks, go camping with them, was obliterated. Ninety episodes later Alexander Scott made it clear to young men they no longer had to fear being the nerd who had done so well scholastically because being so didn’t negate your ability to be a man. To be a good human being.
Mr. Sulu and Lt. Uhura would not have journeyed through Star Trek without Alexander Scott.
Martin Riggs and Roger Murtaugh would not have their Lethal Weapon without Alexander Scott.
Without I Spy and executive producer Sheldon Leonard’s desire to film the series in those exotic locations the script called for, there would have been no reason for Fouad Said an Egyptian American, to create many of the technical advances that made filming on the big and small screen much easier. Said gave us the Cinemobile, the wireless mike, among many other improved or completely new devices. Filming for TV and cinema didn’t just move forward, thousands of dollars were saved making overseas filming possible when costs would otherwise have been prohibitive.
This equipment also threatened to push out the antiquated cameras, lights, mikes, and men that had been Hollywood staples for years, and no one was happy about that. For most of the time I Spy was filmed Said could not join the unions you would have expected him to be a highly valued member of. That came only as the series was ending, as did other breakthroughs.
Robert Culp made Clint Eastwood and Ben Affleck possible. Culp was one of the first actors who also wrote and directed his own material, and ticked off many suits in the business for doing so. He took the first generation of anger so the second and third generations win their Emmys and Oscars. And when Alexander Scott appeared on our television screens, the words that came out of his mouth were the best Culp could make possible. When Cosby won his Emmys, Emmys Culp was nominated for, the latter didn’t mind. It was a win for him, for the show, for humanity.
Remember and celebrate the series for what it has given us. Removing it from the airwaves, trying to wipe it from our collective consciousness, does not in any way harm a predator. We are harming ourselves because we are forgetting how we got to where we are.
I Spy didn’t gently break through glass ceilings of stereotypes. It took a jackhammer to the concrete nonsense that Hollywood created to make itself pretty and in the chaos created true beauty. Its crew did this. Its writers, directors, musicians and producers did this. Its actors and actresses did this. It did this when the country wanted to bury its collective head in the sand and pretend all was well when it knew change had to come but was too painful to look at. I Spy did all of this and can do it again if we allow it to.
One truly disturbed individual cannot be permitted to undo it.
50 years after the land mark show debuted on NBC, its legacy and impact are at risk of fading away just at a time when we need to remember it and be reminded of it more than ever.
The Legacy of “I Spy.”
“There isn’t one. It’s like we never did it.” – Robert Culp, 2007, when asked about the legacy of I Spy.
The concept hardly causes a stir nowadays. A black man and a white man paired equally as partners and working together as a team is so common place now in films and television that it doesn’t get much of a second glance. Several such partnerships are now iconic and the idea even goes all the way to White House.
But it had to start somewhere and on September 15th, 1965 it did with the premiere of a new spy series on NBC called I Spy. The spy business was everywhere in the mid-60s and was the smoking hot genre of the time. With the westerns and cowboys starting to ride off into the sunset and the success of the James Bond films (starting with Dr. No in 1963) it meant television had a new bandwagon to jump on. And it did starting with shows like Man from UNCLE in 1964.
Actor turned producer Sheldon Leonard (Make Room for Daddy, The Andy Griffith Show) had a different idea in mind for a spy show. Two guys posing as international tennis star and his trainer go globetrotting over the world, defeating evil for the good ol’ US of A. Oh, and one of them is black.
It was unheard of. Putting any black actor in a lead role on television, equal to a white, playing an educated and non-subservient role was unheard of prior to I Spy. And it was born at a time when the struggle for civil rights for blacks in the US was starting to turn from a long slow simmer to a boil.
Consider: Civil Rights activist Medgar Evers was shot and killed in June of 1963 and was initially refused entry in a hospital in Jackson, MS because of his race. Martin Luther King Jr’s “I Have a Dream” speech occurred in August of ’63. President Kennedy was assassinated in November of ’63. Race riots erupted in places like Birmingham, Alabama, St. Augustine, FL, Chicago, Philadelphia and New York City, prompted in part by the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 that banned discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin. Dismantling of Jim Crow laws in efforts toward desegregation of schools, busing, and restaurants began. Controversial activist Malcolm X was gunned down in February of ’65. The march from Selma to Montgomery AL took place in March and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed in August with the Watts Riots in Los Angeles occurring just days later.
Against such a background of violence and struggle for civil rights in America, television was about to take a chance to show what equality could truly look like. The show was talked about frequently in the media for a solid year before its debut. Television observers and commentators pondered how the show would do, and how many Southern affiliates of NBC would carry it. Columnist William White proclaimed simply that “NBC has guts.”
I Spy was, to say, A Big Deal.
As the show was talked about, so was its stars. Robert Culp was already a seasoned television veteran having starred in the western series Trackdown a few years before and did notable guest spots on shows such as The Outer Limits, Rawhide, Bonanza, The Rifleman, The Virginian, The Man from UNCLE and Gunsmoke just to name a few. He had also began appearing in feature films starting in 1963 with PT 109 with Cliff Robertson and Sunday in New York with Jane Fonda.
Bill Cosby, on the other hand, had no previous acting experience at all. A stand-up comedian, Cosby began to be noticed around late 1963, after playing various clubs and venues and ending up on The Jack Paar Show and The Tonight Show in 1964. Although he was certainly not the first black entertainer to be featured on television he seemed an unlikely choice to become the first black actor to have a starring role on television.
Both performers came to the attention of Sheldon Leonard via different paths but with the same fork in the road – Carl Reiner. Culp had written a script for a pilot for a possible series, a spy themed show that he took to Reiner. Reiner was on his way out of television at the time but had passed the script along to Sheldon Leonard. Leonard liked Culp’s idea, but liked his own better and as soon as Culp heard it, he concurred. Cosby’s name was mentioned to Leonard as having some potential for a future project and then Carl Reiner, again, passed Cosby’s name to Leonard after his son, Rob Reiner, saw Cosby on the Tonight Show and mentioned it to his father.
Culp was on board to play Kelly Robinson and Leonard offered the role of Alexander Scott to Cosby. The first time Culp and Cosby met and read from the script, it went terribly. Cosby was ill at ease. But there was an immediate connection between the two men, one that would overcome Cosby’s shortcomings as an actor. Culp believed they could make it work, as did Leonard and they managed to convince NBC to carry through with the show, even after the weak “test film” episode “Affair in T’sien Cha” was screened.
Even when NBC wanted to fire Cosby because they didn’t think he was right for the show.
Even when they were afraid to lose the South in terms of viewers.
Even when they were concerned about showing a black man and a white man sharing a room and a wash basin.
It’s the nuances such as that, the scenes showing a black man and white man sharing a table in a restaurant, sharing a hotel room, sharing a bus seat, sharing a car, that we take for granted now, that formed the core of what is I Spy’s legacy. Even more than that it was true friendship and brotherhood that the two characters shared. Kelly Robinson and Alexander Scott had each other’s backs and each had their own individual strengths and weaknesses, complimentary abilities that made the working partnership work.
I Spy didn’t go out of its way to draw attention to racial issues or the turmoil going on at the time. This was not to say that racial issues were ignored. There were never racist jokes or any issues of race between the two leads. But it wasn’t unusual in some episodes for the two to cross paths with someone who would say something that was of a racist nature.
For example, in the episode “Danny Was a Million Laughs,” Martin Landeau plays Danny, a mobster and total jerk of character who at one point turns to Scotty and flips him a quarter. “Here boy,” he says, “I’ll leave my shoes outside the door, you can shine them for me.” Scotty and Kelly essentially ignore this gesture but it’s clear through the episode that they have no use for Danny. Karma gets it due from Danny later in the episode.
Sometimes plots would focus on attempts to split the two partners apart, by any means necessary to undermine their equal status. In the episode “Tonia” from the second season, Leslie Uggams plays an American born black woman who grew up in Italy and has become very leftist in her views. After meeting Scotty, she says she knows what the conditions are in the United States as far as minorities are concerned and she assumes Scotty is subservient to Kelly, at one point saying to him that he “carries the White man’s rackets.” When Scotty calls her out on defining the “conditions” in the US she speaks propaganda of the “ruthless exploitation of racial minorities.” Scotty adds in the “capitalist warmongers and their Wall Street lackeys” blah blah, having heard this drivel before.
Tonia believes in the rhetoric, until later in the episode when she learns that the party wants Scotty and Kelly both destroyed because they represent “harmony, equality, racial equality. They destroy one of our most important propaganda points!” Her assignment is to set the “black man and the white man at each other’s throats.”
Seeing they operate as equals, however, she rejects the task to destroy them and unfortunately pays for her defiance. The communist leader still attempts to split Kelly and Scott apart but fails.
Unhappy with “Affair in T’sien Cha” NBC picked from the other episodes completed the Robert Culp penned “So Long Patrick Henry,” to be the episode that premiered the series. In the episode Elroy Brown, a disenfranchised black American Olympic athlete (played by Ivan Dixon), defects to China lured by the promise of cash. Although he gets more money, he’s kept on a short leash by his Chinese handlers and after a year appears disgusted with the treatment. Kelly and Scotty must make an effort to persuade him to return to the United States. Neither of them really care if Brown comes back to the US or not, since he’s basically a jerk toward both of them. He still thinks he got the better deal until Scott throws it in Brown’s face, telling him bitterly that he more or less sold himself back into slavery.
Cicely Tyson plays a supporting role as Brown’s love interest, an educated woman from Africa whose grandfather once ruled over tribal lands. At one point in the story, Brown is seen with her during a press conference, advocating for the Afro-Asian Games. He’s asked how he liked Africa. “Yeah, it’s a beautiful country, would make a nice zoo.”
He talks about a town they had visited, the capital, and she pronounces it for him (Ouagadougou, capital of modern day Burkina Faso, in western Africa). He gives a smug snort, saying “Yeah, I wouldn’t say that even if I could.”
No television show before had ever shown storylines involving black performers on this level. Brown’s indifference toward his African heritage along with being flippant and indignant toward everything else was part of the leveling of the playing field in I Spy. Blacks were now seen as good guys, bad guys and everything in between. They could now be seen as independent, educated, hopeful or pessimistic, angry or kind, ruthless or merciful. Amos n’ Andy need not apply.
At this distance in history, however, such an approach is underappreciated and often misunderstood. In his September 2014 review of Mark Whitaker’s biography of Bill Cosby, New York Times columnist Neil Drumming generalized the series as a “globetrotting fantasy that seemed to ignore the turmoil of the civil rights movement.” This is the only nod to I Spy Mr. Drumming could afford in his review of the book, instead giving more weight and importance to the show he called “the one that forever altered television,” The Cosby Show.
If The Cosby Show forever altered television, dare it be said that it was I Spy that kicked the door down first? The real irony in Mr. Drumming’s assessment is that The Cosby Show, although revered for its positive portrayal of an African-American family, was also panned by some as not being “realistic.” I Spy is revered for its positive image of a black man and white man on equal status, yet in the case of Mr. Drumming, it’s panned for being “fantasy.”
Ok, some of the storylines may have been fanciful, after all this IS television we’re talking about. But I Spy, unlike its various counterparts at the time, didn’t rely on gimmicks, trick weaponry or a Massive Evil Conglomerate Organization Bent on Taking Over the World (Megalomaniacs R Us) as it’s one and only enemy. Kelly and Scotty matched wits and outwitted standard Cold War adversaries from the Russians and the Red Chinese, but also drug lords, mobsters and a few old friends and acquaintances. When either of them were betrayed by somebody, you felt the shock and pain. When either of them were cut, they bled. They were beaten and battered and sometimes bordered on being broken. The spy business was dirty, ruthless, lonely and unforgiving. Innocents were killed while the guilty got asylum.
That’s not fantasy. That’s real.
And the relationship between the partners, equal and unprejudiced, was real. Robert Culp summed it up best in an article in Newsweek from January 1966 when he said, “We’re two guys who don’t know the difference between a colored and White. That’s doing more than 100 marches. We’re showing what it could be like if there had been no hate.”
No hate.
Fifty years later, America is still wondering what it could be like if there was no hate. We’re so far removed now from the “separate but equal” status of the time, that the visuals of I Spy and of the two characters sharing a meal, a seat, or a mere space within the world, just seem normal and common to us today. What’s unsettling is that I Spy shows us how much further we still need to go and we’re not bothering to look at it now. Even sadder, the revelation of Cosby’s decades of misconduct has caused people to turn away from the show or for those who’ve never seen it to not give it a chance at all, risking it to be marginalized even further. And yet in light of the recent events, from Ferguson Missouri last August to the Emmanuel AME Church shooting in Charleston SC this past June, how are we ever to achieve the kind of equality so beautifully showcased in I Spy if we allow ourselves to dismiss it, remove it and forget it?
Just Under the Radar
Unfortunately, as 2015 marks the 50th anniversary of I Spy, a show deserving of a celebration, the recognition of the series has always seemed to be lacking in many respects. Robert Culp’s quote from 2007 is a brutally honest assessment of where I Spy has stood within pop culture since the series ended. Although it only ran three years, the show remains fondly remembered by fans but seems to fall just under the radar within popular nostalgia culture.
I Spy never cracked the top twenty in ratings but after the show’s end in 1968 it continued to have a decent fan base with reruns running through the 70s and into the 80s. Limited VHS releases came in the 1990s with a random selection of episodes. However, one particular release erroneously featured a photo of Culp and Cosby from their 1972 film Hickey & Boggs on the cover instead of an I Spy photo. I could say how the shortcomings of the internet back then (which just barely existed) wasn’t like the internet now and thus the people responsible for packaging couldn’t double check on the photo…but Hickey & Boggs photos have been erroneously tied to I Spy for years. Still are.
A set of DVDs was released in 2002, a somewhat odd collection that packaged various episodes together by filming location (Italy, Hong Kong, Japan, Madrid, ect). A two volume set, called “The Robert Culp Collection” was released the same year and featured all of the episodes written and/or directed by Robert Culp along with Culp providing commentaries. Complete season sets finally arrived in 2008 and included the same commentaries from Robert Culp on the episodes he penned and….that was it. No other extras. In 2014 Timeless Media, in conjunction with Shout! Factory, put out a nicely done Complete Series package but with no re-mastering of the footage and no extras or features.
By contrast the short-lived 1967-69 series “The Mothers-in-Law” has more extras and features on its complete series DVD release. What? You never heard of that show?
Prior to Bill Cosby’s rape and assault allegations snowballing in the fall of 2014, I Spy was running on various classic TV themed networks such as Retro TV, COZI TV and Magic Johnson’s network ASPIRE. Retro TV seemed to run the show consistently, while COZI TV shuffled the show around their schedule eventually dumping it in a 1am time slot. Depending on your cable provider, this prime viewing time is usually reserved for infomercials so it’s likely you’d have never seen I Spy. Even when the show ran at a more decent hour, 6pm on Friday nights, it doesn’t appear the show was ever promoted by the network. At least, I never saw a promo for it when I watched shows on COZI. ASPRIE and COZI have since dropped I Spy all together and Retro TV still has a page on their website for I Spy but do not have the show listed anywhere on their broadcast schedule. At the time of this writing, the only place you can watch I Spy either online or on television is at Hulu.com.
Most of the online DVD reviews of the box set in 2014 waxed on poetic about the chemistry between Culp and Cosby, the banter between them, the fact that much of the show as filmed on location in different parts of the world and its place in television history, but were otherwise ho hum on the content of the episodes themselves. One reviewer stated “the series is slow and plodding by today’s standards. Many of the 50-minute episodes on the DVD collection can feel excruciatingly long and sluggish.”
Considering today’s “standards” that statement is partly true. Which is a shame really. Some episodes of I Spy require the viewer to be involved with the story, something that perhaps audiences today just can’t be bothered with. They would rather have less talk and more action, explosions, gun fire, gory deaths, quick cuts, split screens, constantly moving cameras, dark and murky settings and wooden acting.
Which may explain why I Spy seems to fly under the radar as far as nostalgic pop culture. Cosby’s misdeeds certainly don’t help now either but the show doesn’t deserve to be punished further. Maybe it’s asking too much too soon but I Spy still matters. It showed us how it looks with no hate. Something we need to see more of, not less.
With the recent posts over on Facebook regarding CoziTV’s schedule for I SPY airings, I’ve learned it comes down to basically two things: The first being if your satellite or cable provider offers CoziTV, RetroTV or ASPIRE in their packages and the second being if the affiliate that broadcasts the channel follows the parent channel’s schedule (and doesn’t, say, run paid programming in place of a show, usually at the wee hours of the morning.)
In other words, you need a score card to keep track of where to find I SPY on TV these days!
So where can you watch I SPY on TV or online now? Well, as of May 8, 2014, here’s where you can find I SPY. As always, check the listings for you area to see if these channels are available and for time and schedule.
Using information mentioned or otherwise inferred in the episodes and from the 1994 I Spy Returns TV movie, Barbara K. Emanuele has compiled comprehensive character bios for Kelly Robinson and Alexander Scott. Given the fact that the show ran for three seasons and accounting for continuity issues and conflicting tidbits, Barbara has managed to pull together information that brings further depth to these characters. TheConsummateCulp.com is pleased to showcase these character bios!
“They were partners in the truest sense of the word. Ideally matched in wit, charm, looks, and strength, at no point was one far superior to the other. Mission after mission, locked room after opened room, they were equals who never let the obvious difference in race be anything more than a physical difference. Their work and their cover allowed them to function above the racial turmoil of the late sixties.”
AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center, in partnership with The National Building Museum, has been presenting the film series “Overdrive: LA Modern, 1960-2000” which looks at the legacy of Los Angeles architecture and use in film. The series began February 8th and runs through April 17th, 2014 with several films being screened as part of the series, including Robert Culp’s sole big screen directorial effort “Hickey & Boggs” from 1972.
AFI Silver accurately describes the film as a “neo-noir to end all noirs” and recognizes the films broad use of known LA locations, such as the Los Angeles Coliseum and Dodger Stadium, along with street scenes in LA’s core, topless bars, homes with freeways in the front yard and other once fine homes falling off cliffs along the ocean.
The film will be screened Sunday, March 9 at 4:00pm, Monday March 10 at 9:30pm and Tuesday March 11 at 9:15pm. General admission tickets are $12.
The March 9th screening will be introduced by National Building Museum’s assistant curator Deborah Sorensen.
On I Spy Bob Culp and I are a team. And that’s why I don’t feel anyone should split us up and give an award to just one guy – the way they gave an Emmy just to me a while back. With other comedy teams there is always only one guy who is funny – Jerry Lewis, Lou Costello – but Bob can be as funny as he wants. The two of us make it together. One plays off the other. We do comedy, but there’s no straight man.
On the Emmy Awards show I thanked Bob for helping me learn to act – thereby losing his own chance to win an Emmy for best actor in a dramatic series, for which we had both been nominated. What he had done for me was the finest thing one friend could do for another. He had taken a comedian who knew nothing about acting, and without being selfish he helped me along – eased my tension, gave me pointers, made sure certain things were right. He told me what acting really meant – “This all has to do with what’s inside of you. If you believe what you’re saying your face will show it.”
He taught me about lighting, where to stand, how to move, how to speak up. He wouldn’t let a director make me do something I couldn’t handle yet. He protected me that first year. And he still does at times, if I don’t know what’s going on. I think that’s why he lost the Emmy. He always helped me, and he might just not have had enough time to do certain things for himself.
Of course, he did it to help the whole show too – because Bob knows as well as I do that the strength of the series happens to be the relationship between the two men. If one man goes bad, it all starts to fail. As Bob said a few months ago in an article in MOTION PICTURE,” “The gold in the show is the relationship between Bill and me; and that’s what makes the show.”
Our relationship is important in our personal lives, too. We are very, very close.
Bob came up to me on the set of I Spy and gave me some old Captain Marvel comic books, which he knows I dig, and old Captain America second issue and a Captain Marvel poster. And he wrote me a little note that said, “Thanks a lot for everything.” He thanked me. We sat down and we kind of discussed the awards. And that’s when I told me him that they shouldn’t try to split up a team like us. He saw what I meant, and agreed with me, I told him it really got to me that there was a trophy for only one guy, when that’s not really the way it is – at least not with us.
But I really didn’t have to explain to Bob how I felt. We’re so close that we instinctively understand each other. We even have a certain way that we speak to each other. I don’t know if you’ve ever had a friend who was so close to you that maybe just one word could key you off into – not necessarily fits of laughter, but enjoyable moments, when you’ve both been depressed or tired. For me that particular pick-me-up happens to be Bob Culp.
I don’t think we like the same things as much as we can sit down and really communicate with each other. I can talk with him for a long time and never get bored. We’ve discussed many things, from acting to pro football to lizards – to the beauty of putting an A-bomb together for fun. Or we may talk about some choice, beautiful thing we saw on TV: good acting, good actors, good actresses, good movies. Nothing really deep. We talk occasionally about politics, but neither of us is very active in that field. I wouldn’t back any politician, because I don’t believe in them. I have very little faith in politicians. They will make noises at election time, putting down their opponents, saying, “Hey, you stink … you’re bad!” So forth and so on. Then you put the guy in office, and soon the other guy says, “Look at him! He’s messing up, too.”
I don’t think it’s surprising that Bob and I can discuss so many things so easily, or that we’ve developed our own way of communicating. When you live with somebody 12 hours a day for 5 days out of the week, you get to know him awfully well. And then, in our case, we also go to places around the world together for our show … Hong Kong, Mexico, Japan, Italy. You pick up on the lingo and start to have your own little dialogue. And pretty soon you can revert back to something that you said maybe a month ago, just by using a punch line or a little joke that you’ve got going. And believe me, we’ve shared some good jokes on trips to other countries. To an outsider, a key word or line might mean little or nothing. But to us they contain a whole adventure.
For instance, I could say El burro es grande and Bob might double up laughing. Why? Well, it dates back to our trip to Mexico. I enjoyed the Mexican people very much – beautiful, beautiful people. And they have a great sense of humor, which of course is terribly important to me. And that’s where El burro es grande comes in.
I studied Spanish in high school and came out of the class with just one sentence – the one quoted above which means, “The burro is big.”
So while we were on location in Mexico, I would sit down on the grass with the Mexican crew – about 20 guys who took care of the lights and stuff – and I’d say, El burro es grande. And they would give me other lines: El burro es muy (very) grande. Si! (Yes!) And so on.
Well, finally it was time for Bob and me to return to California, and the majority of the crew came to see us off at the airport. And most of the son-of-the-guns had tears in their eyes. Then suddenly one of them says: “One, two, three …” and they all chimed out in unison: “El burro es good-bye!” So neither Bob nor I will ever forget that sentence. It turned out you could say quite a lot with it after all.
Then there was something that happened to Bob and me in Hong Kong while we were filming the 1st show in the series. Now, when I get to a foreign land I like to eat the food of the country. I don’t care how sick it makes me feel. Well, we were sitting in this restaurant. (A Chinese restaurant, of course!) Both of us had just learned how to work out with chopsticks, and were starting to learn a little about Chinese food, I mean real Chinese food. So we sat down and looked at the menu and said, “What is this?” and so forth and so on, and “Let’s have some of this. Have you ever tried this? No, man, let’s try some. Let us venture forth and get some of these wonderful things that they have on the menu here. We don’t care what it is. Give us some of this and some of that, with flangs and floosh and zoobie … and oh, yes, we must have some duck. Give us some duck. This barbecued duck here.”
“It’s $36,” the waiter said, (That was Hong Kong dollars, but it still added up to $9 in American money.)
“Oh, so what!” we said, “We don’t care – $36 – man, give us the duck.”
So the guy’s bringing the food to us, and it’s all great – just great. Even the bean curds, which I’d never had before. Pretty soon we’re acting like high school kids – you know like fooling around with a chocolate sundae or something like that. And every time we’d taste something new, if it’s kind of weird, you look at your partner and your partner looks at you, and you break up laughing.
So we’re munching and crunching, till we’d finished a good part of the meal. (As a matter of fact all of it.) And I said to Bob, “Did we get everything – except the duck?” Bob said, “Yeah – we forgot the duck.” But we were both so full we couldn’t have cared less.
Then suddenly this guy comes up the stairs and over to our table – and he’s got a whole duck. What Bob had ordered was a whole barbecued duck! I was so startled I thought it was a joke, but it wasn’t. Now, we’re full of food – it’s up to the Adam’s apple, man. Well, we don’t want to make the guy feel bad, so we said, “Oh, this is wonderful …” Here are two guys so full of food, and now we’ve got to eat a whole duck. We’ve got to force it down.
The guy brought out the plum dressing and everything for it, and it was really delicious. I ate about two slices and Bob ate about two slices, and then I told the waiter, “Okay – put it in a bowser bag and we’ll take it home!”
And that’s what we did. We took it back to the hotel and gave it to one of the kids who worked in the lobby – they make like a penny a day. I’m sure that when he went home with a whole 36-Hong-Kong-dollars barbecued duck they all flipped.
Memories like that tie Bob and me together in a genuine friendship. It’s as genuine a friendship as any can be. There’s no pretending about anything. Although we have different tastes, we always respect that. He never demands anything of me – if I don’t want to do it, I don’t have to do it. There’s no argument, no walking off or anything like that. We don’t even have to pressure each other into saying, “Now, listen, man, if you don’t want to do it, you don’t have to do it.” That’s simply understood.
And if I ever take Bob some place that I think is special, and it fails, we both laugh – and vice versa. I went to the ballet with him one night. Went right to sleep. And we laughed and I thanked him. I said, “Listen, I probably would have stayed up til 12:30 – if I hadn’t gone to the ballet!”
Hi. It’s me again. I wrote to you previously about two years ago when I had been teased and deceived about a couple of clips of Robert Culp on Saturday Night Live from 1982, when he hosted. You had his opening monologue posted to your website but for some technical reason at the time the clip wouldn’t play and I cried. Then I wrote you an open letter.
Ok, maybe I didn’t exactly cry, but I did write you an open letter. As Culpkarma would have it, after posting said letter I was alerted to another Culp clip from the same SNL episode, this time of him and Eddie Murphy with the “cold opening” sketch that spoofed a little I Spy and a little on Bill Cosby and his many product endorsements. I was so happy to see this clip, and that it played, I wrote you another lovely note.
Still, the monologue wasn’t working. However, not long after these two gracious letters appeared on this blog the monologue clip was restored and viewable. Not only could the clips be viewed at your own site, NBC, but also on Hulu.com. Ok, probably nobody at NBC ever saw my lamenting pleas, but I liked the idea of thinking it had some kind of effect.
Which is why I’m writing again. I was very sad this past weekend (on Saturday, no less) to take a look at the “cold opening” sketch again only to find that the clip on both your site and at Hulu have been removed. The monologue is gone as well.
This makes me very unhappy, NBC. I know, life’s full of disappointments, but it is not full of multiple hosting gigs by Robert Culp of Saturday Night Live. He only did the show once and although it could be argued that the episode is not one of SNLs more stellar offerings, it is nonetheless, ROBERT CULP. Both the “cold opening” sketch and the opening monologue, for what it’s worth, are entertaining and, well, I would love it if they could be restored so that others can view them. Culp’s “Kelly Robinson” open warm-up jacket look is worth the price of admission for Culp fans!
Heck, Joe Piscopo wrecking a tennis racket in front of Culp in the opening sketch is worth the price of admission too. And the opening monologue? Culp worked with a guy who’s a comedian, you think he didn’t pick up something from Cosby over the years?!
Anyway, I sincerely hope you can find it within your heart to bring these clips back either on your site or via Hulu (no, not HuluPlus) or wherever so they can be viewed again and enjoyed by all. That is the only motive for my note this time. Well, ok I do have a somewhat selfish motive with this too. I now have postings in this blog that reference video clips that are no longer there.
Robert Culp’s character is revealed by his behavior on ‘I Spy’ and off.
BY DICK HOBSON
“Some of these white cats they say, ‘Hey, man, dig this, dig that, dig the other thing.’ When they talk like that they think they’re saying: ‘See? I’m with you. I’m sympathetic to the Negro cause.’ But I just say, ‘Man, you talk that way at home?’ I’d rather have a cat that shuts up and does it than a cat with the words. That’s what I like about Bob Culp. He’s a cat that does it. I got confidence in the man.”
The speaker is Negro comedian Godfrey Cambridge, all got up in white flannels and navy-blue double –breasted yachting jacket, as he paces the deck of a luxurious yacht on Stage 6 at Desilu-Cahuenga Studio in Hollywood. He awaits the nod of Robert Culp, who is directing his first I Spy episode, “Court of the Lion.”
“A Negro’s always got to be the Good Guy on TV these times,” Cambridge says. “I am tired of being loved. Now this king of the Zulus is the first villain I’ve been allowed to play on TV. I’m doing a black Goldfinger. Bob Culp had the guts to put me in this part. So many other people in this town would say, ‘Let’s not have an argument, let’s make the Zulu an Indian.’ But Culp says, ‘Let’s do it right.’ That’s what I like about Culp.”
Sagebrush Victorian would describe the style of Robert Culp’s dressing room: leather upholstery, bar with a foot rail, roll-top desk—a hark back to his days as Texas Ranger Hoby Gilman on Trackdown. Prominently hung in an oval gilt frame is a photo of Sammy Davis Jr. gripping Culp in a vigorous bear hug. The door is flung open and the minor whirlwind that is Bob Culp whips across the room, deflating into a chair, sandals flying. “First question,” he says, in the manger of a director saying, “Action.” The man is lean, athletic, brown of hair, hazel of eye, and looks rather professorial behind his horn-rim glasses.
It’s true, he had to shell out $2000 to get into the Directors Guild in order to direct this episode, for which his director’s pay is $3500. He concedes he laid out $2500 for an artist to story-board the entire script. “Rarely can a man successfully act and direct at the same time. One has to suffer and it will always be the acting.” That conviction is what motivated Culp to hire acting coach Jeff Corey to stand by and observe his performance.
“At first I found only nitwits in this business,” Culp is saying. “I became childishly hostile. I got the image ‘troublesome.’ But I got wiser. I set about to rectify my ways.”
One of those to whom he was “childishly hostile” was Vincent Fennelly, producer of Trackdown, the series Culp starred in back in 1957. Fennelly claimed Culp walked more like a Method actor than a Texas Ranger, and for a year they didn’t speak to each other. “Yeah, he thought I walked funny,” Culp says, “I invented my own kind of slouch-stroll. Fennelly’s an accountant. He wanted the same old Western hero. But he was right; I was wrong. In Omaha they couldn’t care a rat’s nose.”
*****
A thick blue pall clouds the dressing of Bill Cosby, first Negro to co-star in a network dramatic series. Cosby is stretched over an easy chair, puffing on a 9-inch cigar, sprawled under a framed photo of the co-stars dressed in tennis garb.
“I could be just a nothing. I could be crumpled and crushed if Bobby had turned out to be the kind of guy who wants everything for himself,” Cosby says. “But we made contact. We tuned each other in. Now Bobby knows me better than anybody. We’re closer than brothers.” Godfrey Cambridge sidles into the room and pours himself some coffee, picking up the drift of the conversation. Cosby continues: “We don’t have any race jokes in the scripts. Even in real life, race jokes would be embarrassing to Bobby and embarrassing to me.”
But what about Sammy Davis Jr. and the Clan? They’re integrated and they make ethnic-type jokes. “The old-timers like Sinatra do it. But the Clan has guilts and complexes. They’ve always got to talk about race. It’s very corny, unhip. We’re beyond that.
“You know how the Clan has to have a Leader and all that? No King of the Road with us. Bobby and I are equal. Another thing, we’re closer to the people. The Clan could play golf on Forest Lawn, they’ve got so much money.”
*****
Out in Woodland Hills in San Fernando Valley waits Culp’s wife, the former Nancy Wilner (or former Nancy Asch, actress-theatrically speaking), described by a close friend as “nutty, droll, and bright.” “I hate being called a ‘former’ somebody. Just say I’m the current Mrs. Culp. There was a previous Mrs. Culp, you know—Bob’s college drama coach. She was 24; he was 19. I think she was another mother to him. Shall we tour the homestead?” It’s a big, old frame house with an oversize cupola, a decidedly eccentric house among all those new-moderns in suburbia.
“This is the playroom. This is Jason’s room. This is Joshua’s room. This is Joseph’s room. This is Rachel’s room.” All but one of the offspring are pre-schoolers. One room has a jungle tree-house in one corner and bunks suspended from the ceiling on chains. “Bob did it.” Another is fitted like a ship’s cabin with bunks, ladder, and real portholes. “Bob built it. This is our kitchen. Bob laid the floor.
“We first met at an off-Broadway theater. Off-stage he was very shy, insecure, ill-at-ease. But on-stage he could do the most fantastic things. We did the Greenwhich Village scene together, the Brando thing, the motorcycles, the whole bit.”
On a peg hangs a black cowboy hat. “Gary Cooper’s. Bob wore it in a Gunsmoke.” The oversize cupola on the third floor turns out to be Culp’s study. “We call it the Lion’s Den.” Up here Culp has a 360-degree view of his two-acre wooded domain. Here is his typewriter.
“Bob’s first script was a Trackdown. He thought all the stories were adolescent drivel. So he just wanted to do one that would be his own way. But Trackdown was an unhappy period for us. It was agony for Bob to go to the studio each day. He was hanging on for dear life. I didn’t know from one day to the next whether he would come home or not. Sometimes he didn’t.”
*****
After Trackdown, Culp loudly let it be known he wanted no more of series. “Bob had a reputation as being quite tumultuous,” agent Jimmy McHugh says of him. “He’s one of those actors who has a deeply rooted desire to say something in his work. But Hollywood is not that kind of town.” Culp says: “Jimmy helped me change. He set out to make a comedy image for me and he did a beautiful job.” In two years Culp made four feature pictures, including “Sunday in New York.”
Any discussion of I Spy invariably returns to the Culp-Cosby relationship. Mark Rydell, who has directed three I Spy episodes this season, says: “Bob could easily overpower Cos simply by exercising his talent. But Bob is always helping Cos and guiding him in a way that I find quite moving.”
“Half of my energy is spent trying to translate their private communications,” says Paul Wendkos, director of eight of this year’s I Spys. “Culp and Cosby have put-ons on top of put-ons. They’re ‘hippies,’ to use one of Bob’s favorite words. They always take the off-beat way. But underneath their hip, existentialist veneer is the sense of irony just this side of bitterness- the irony of the artist in show business, the irony of racial inequality.”
“Bob is incensed by prejudice,” says Culp’s friend, director Sam Peckinpah. “He doesn’t recognize it; he doesn’t understand it. Yet he’s not trying to carry any particular banner.” Wendkos adds: “Bob’s attitude is, ‘I don’t have to crusade. I’m it.’”
According to I Spy co-producer Mort Fine: “There is a wide audience acceptance of the camaraderie between Culp and Cosby, the white man and the Negro. People want to do the right thing, white to Negro. I think it’s vicarious. They want to watch it in action.”
“Yeah,” says Godfrey Cambridge sardonically, “watching I Spy on the tube provides a relationship with a Negro with no risk.”
As for Bob Culp, he says only, “If Cos and I have any kind of mission on this show, it’s something we’ve never had to discuss.”
During my Hickey & Boggs retrospective a couple of weeks ago I included a post that featured a three part video, originally done by the folks at Criminally Unknown, from a Q&A session with Culp after a screening of the film at the Aero Theatre in LA in 2007. It appears the video is no longer available and the Criminally Unknown FB page is gone. Their Twitter account has been dormant for more than a year and their website is gone too. I know the internet is a fickle place and nothing last forever but…dammit all, did it have to go away not two weeks after I added it here?!
Their YouTube account appears to still remain, but also with no updates for more than a year, and the only piece of the nearly 40 minute Q&A session that was posted was a segment regarding Bill Hickman and the connection the Rolls Royce used in Hickey & Boggs had with The French Connection. I’m going to include the clip here but… don’t dilly dally watching it for it may be gone tomorrow.
If, by any remote, insane, million-to-one shot chance that somebody out there, either from Criminally Unknown or who knows them or something, sees this, could you contact me? I would be more than happy to give that 40 minute Q&A video a home with all proper credit and attribution and whathaveya to Criminally Unknown. The video is a rare, fantastic gem full of stories and tidbits on Culp’s only directorial feature. Oh please, don’t let it be lost forever…
For the longest time it seems this movie languished in obscurity. I had heard of it almost as soon as I started delving into All Things Culp, but finding the thing proved a task. Up until 2011, there had not been an official DVD release and apparently whatever copy was out there floating around, was not of the greatest quality. One grainy clip of Culp and Cosby going into the hotel to try to find Mary Jane was about all I’d ever seen of the film. And that wasn’t even posted on YouTube.
Then sometime in 2009, I found the movie available through iTunes (and still is). Naturally I purchased and downloaded it, although I lamented going this route. I pined for a DVD, something tangible that ensured, for the most part, that I would always have the movie, even if I burned through the computer that I downloaded it to (which, eventually, I did.)
Thankfully, 20th Century Fox on behalf of MGM released the film in a manufacture on demand format – along with several other MGM titles that Fox now has the rights to – in 2011.
What saddens me is that Culp did not live to see the film finally get a proper DVD release. The demise of MGM in the 70’s, the breakup of the studio’s film catalogue between other studios (Fox, Warner and Sony/Paramount) pretty much shoved everything into a vault for years while legal issues were hammered out before any of these titles could see the light of day again. Also, before the advent of the manufacture on demand, studios were hesitant to make the investment into a DVD release for a movie that they felt probably wouldn’t get much of a return.
Very unfortunate, as it would have been fitting to have Culp put together a “director’s cut” or at least a good amount of extras and commentary on the movie.
What we do have though, is various tidbits and commentary about the movie via other sources that I wish to bring together here. Bonus material, if you will, that didn’t make the DVD…
The re-teaming of Culp and Cosby was certainly noted by the media at the time the film was being shot in September/October of 1971. I Spy had ended 3 years earlier but was still fairly fresh on people’s minds. (At the time I Spy was cancelled, it was still pulling good ratings. So why was it cancelled? That’s another story).
Culp was very clear, however, when speaking about Hickey & Boggs to the public. “The story has nothing to do with ‘I Spy,’” he was quoted in the press at the time. “The fellows we played were winners, obviously. These two guys – Hickey & Boggs – are losers.”
Most entertainment writers noted the same thing but their stories played up the I Spy angle more than anything. Michel Poiccard of the Los Angeles Times noted in October of ’71, “’Hickey & Boggs’ will obviously generate much of its interest because it stars a team of actors who are both well known and loved by American audiences.”
Critically, it did garner interest. The film got a mix of good and “meh” reviews, some who praised the acting of Cosby and Culp, appreciated Culp’s directing skills, the use of locations, establishing a mood, ect. ect. The Pittsburgh Press (now Pittsburgh Post) called the film a “fine thriller about human private detectives.” Although the reviewer noted that it was sometimes confusing, they compared it to The Big Sleep noting that Hickey & Boggs’ “momentum comes more from characters and isolated situations than from the coherent flow of a story.”
Jamie Portman of The Calgary Herald also lamented that the plot “suffers from severe confusion if not dislocation.” But even he seemed to forgive this, extolling more about the characters and characterization of Al Hickey and Frank Boggs. “You can talk all you want about the gut realism of Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe or Lew Archer stories; but they are also invested with a rueful romanticism. The romanticism has gone sour in Hickey and Boggs.” Portman concluded that Hickey & Boggs “is a metaphysical detective thriller – fragmented, maddening and extraordinarily watchable.”
Frank DeGuida of The Milwaukee Sentinel applauded the film, the Culp and Cosby reunion and appreciated Culp’s direction, in particular the action sequences and Culp’s “fine sense of composition, with many shots presenting interesting visual effects.” DeGuida concluded, “all in all, if Culp has a sequel in mind when he has his heroes walk away into the sunset after the final shootout, I, for one, am looking forward to seeing it.”
Not all critics were as generous. Some couldn’t figure out who was who and what was what. Some blamed the script, some the directing. Others just didn’t get it, such as Variety which complained that the script ”suffers through audience never being entirely certain as to the identity of some of the characters.” (While some critics appreciated that the film didn’t insult the viewer’s intelligence by having to explain everything, Variety reviewers apparently liked their movies simple and spoon fed.)
I did not find any reviews from any Florida newspapers, which, so far in my searches, typically were less than kind of any Culp film or tv show (leading me to believe that it simply must have been depressing to live in Florida in the ’70s.) However, I did find a review from the Ocala Star-Banner for when the movie premiered on television on NBC’s “Saturday Night at the Movies” in March of 1976. The reviewer noted the following about the plot: “During their travels through the less glamorous sections of Los Angeles, Hickey and Boggs stumble up on a major case that places them in the midst of a major hold up at Dodger Stadium.” Um…what?
But overall, the critical response was positive. Unfortunately, that didn’t translate into much success at the box office. Although critics seemed positive about the film being well done and such, they also noted, heavily, that the film really was a downer. However, in looking at the promotional materials for the film at the time – the trailer and movie poster – the movie seems to suffer a little of an identity crisis. The trailer at least is fairly clear; two down and out PIs who are in over their heads but the funkified music and Dragnet-esque voice over ruins it.
Then there’s the poster. It has a great photo of Culp and Cosby on it with the shot up Rolls Royce and the very blunt tag line: “They’re not cool, slick heroes, they’re worn tough men and that’s what makes them so dangerous. They hold their .44 magnums with both hands and keep shooting until they hit something. Anything.”
I understand the first line, a bit of a poke at the fact that this is not I Spy. But the rest of it, about shooting their guns until they hit something…. The poster doesn’t so much as even hint at any thing else about these two men (ie, that they’re PIs) and I can’t help but wonder if they’re a couple of guys who just go berserk (ala Michael Douglas in Falling Down) and start shooting people. And ya know, I wouldn’t wanna see Culp n’ Cosby in a movie like that.
Perhaps, that may have been what kept others from seeing the film too. The whole “this isn’t I Spy” angle may have been driven home too much.
It may have just been, perhaps, that the average movie goer didn’t want to see Culp and Cosby as “losers.” The point was certainly driven home enough, in both reviews and in the promotion of the film that these two characters were down trodden, seedy, bottom of the barrel type guys. Cosby’s expression on the movie poster is pretty hang dog for a guy whose bread and butter is comedy. And Culp, after being handsome and dashing as Kelly Robinson, looks…well, he looks like shit in this movie. He’s pale, drawn and has what has to be the worst hair cut I’ve ever seen on him.
But friends, that’s what makes it all work.
When I first saw this movie I was struck by both Culp and Cosby’s performances in this. I grew up knowing Bill Cosby as he was on The Cosby Show and also remember a children’s show he did called Picture Pages. This is the guy who wore those wild sweaters during The Cosby Show run in the 80s, pitched Jello products and is a hilarious comedian. Of course, I was familiar with I Spy before seeing the movie, but nothing he did there was nearly as dark as what he did in Hickey & Boggs. I was genuinely impressed.
I don’t believe Bill Cosby would have done this kind of movie if Robert Culp had not directed it. This is not Cosby’s typical vehicle but Culp knew the kind of performance he could get from Cosby and got it.
As for Robert Culp…damn, I thought. He is so damn good at what he does, he really looks like a downtrodden, bottom of the barrel, crawling into the bottle kinda guy. He can’t run worth a damn in this thing. Brilliant!
Ah, well I might have been giving Culp a little too much credit. Not that he’s not that damn good at what he did (because he was) but come to find out he had something happen to him two weeks before filming started that contributed to his somewhat less than stellar physical appearance here.
He had double hernia surgery. That’s right. Double. Ouch.
Which explains his tripping down stairs, limping running style and being bent at the waist whenever he could get away with it. This is especially noticeable at the end of the shootout scene at the Coliseum, when Boggs is at the top of the bleachers looking down at Hickey and the dead bag man on the ground, leaning on the fence, bent double and looking like he’s making sure his innards are still where they’re supposed to be.
Culp told nobody about having surgery, except Cosby who would have known something was wrong. Culp swore Cosby to secrecy because if the insurance company knew about it, the production would have been shut down immediately, something Culp couldn’t afford to have happen.
There are a lot more interesting stories and tidbits about the movie, more than I can possibly do justice by cramming into this post, so instead I invite you to check out the following three part video. Back in 2007, there was a screening of Hickey & Boggs at the Aero Theatre in Los Angeles and Robert Culp was on hand for a Q&A session afterward. He talks about everything, from getting the script, the financial backing, directing it, the clothes he and Cosby wore (Cosby hated them), the “laughing garbage man” and the hernia surgery, amongst other things. All three parts together total about 40 minutes or so. The video is originally from the folks at Criminally Unknown. A great “featurette” for this Hickey & Boggs 40th anniversary salute! (Links originally lost in 2012, restored in 2015).
My capapalooza post for “Hickey & Boggs” can be found here.
And finally, Hickey & Boggs is available on DVD and Blu-ray through Amazon.com. Do yourself a favor, get this movie!
Originally released, September 20 (limited)/October 4 (nationwide), 1972
**Contains spoilers – for the love of Culp, if you haven’t seen this movie STOP READING and go watch it first!**
Robert Culp plays Frank Boggs who, along with Bill Cosby’s Al Hickey, is a down trodden gotta-reach-up-just-to-touch-the bottom of the barrel private investigator. Hickey and Boggs work out of an old office building somewhere in downtown Los Angeles, where the bright California sun does little to make their world any more cheerful. They’re old school PIs who are trying to hang on in a business that’s been pretty much legislated out of existence by the State of California.
These guys have hardly anything. They don’t have enough money to pay all their bills (but do manage to scrounge enough for drinks at the local bar), they drive junk cars, wear old suits and both have marriages/relationships that have busted apart.
Yet, they keep moving, not exactly forward but moving. And this is where the movie opens. They’re at the bar, having a few drinks, watching the boxing match on the tv. During the commercial break they talk finances. They don’t have enough money to pay both their phone service and the answering service, so Hickey only paid for the answering service. Boggs offers to borrower against his house, which I take based on Hickey’s reaction there’s not a lot of equity left in the place.
In order to check their messages and return phone calls, they’re reduced to using the payphones outside of the bar. One of the messages is for an appointment the next morning which Hickey has to make because Boggs decides he’s going into the tank. (Can you get any lower than this?)
The next morning, Hickey meets with a Mr. Rice (Lester Fletcher) on the beach. Mr. Rice made it a point to be sunbathing for this meeting – first thing in the morning. He wants the PIs to find a girl, Mary Jane Bower, whom he hasn’t seen in some time. Rice never really says why he wants to find her, it’s assumed to be romantic connection. Hickey doesn’t really care since Rice is willing to pay $500 as a retainer.
Rice, by the way, spends part of the meeting looking over at the young kids playing on the swings with “bad intent.”
Hickey returns to the office to tell Boggs they’re working. Boggs hardly looks up from his newspaper until he hears how much they got for a retainer. “You think money turns my head?” Boggs asks…as he slooowly turns his head toward Hickey (obviously it must). With a couple of leads to follow, the two PIs head out to try to find Mary Jane.
While this is happening, the local mob is discovering that the money they were originally to get from a bank robbery in Pittsburg about a year earlier, is now floating around LA, looking for a buyer. They know “Quamando’s woman” has the money but they’ll have to do some homework to track her down. Mr. Brill (Robert Mandan) makes some phone calls to get some soldiers to track it down, the soldiers being Tommy Signorelli as the gunman, Nick, Matt Bennett as the muscle, Fatboy, and Bill Hickman as, appropriately, the wheel man, Monte.
The leads from Rice turn up two things, a fresh dead man (who Hickey discovers) and a tidbit that Mary Jane dated a guy by the name of Quamando at one time who went to prison for armed robbery. Prisoner Quamando has a brother who runs a flower shop and when the two PIs meet again at the bar to compare notes, they plan to visit him the next day.
We learn that Al Hickey was once a police officer, having worked out of the Hallenbeck division. (Bogg’s background is never specified). Hickey goes to see Nyona (Rosalind Cash) who he may or may not have been married to, but they were living together – until she threw him out. Nyona has a young daughter who is about the only bright thing in Hickey’s life at the moment. He leaves some coins under the child’s pillow and then has a very short visit with Nyona, whom he hasn’t seen in three weeks. Whatever it was that made her throw him out, she’s still mad at him about.
Mr. Rice, meanwhile, is giving the same information he gave to Hickey to Mr. Brill. I’m not sure if he went to Mr. Brill of his own accord or was asked to be seen or what, but there’s one tidbit he doesn’t give the mob: He claims to not know of Mary Jane Bower.
Boggs, meanwhile, finds comfort and solace in a twenty dollar hooker. At the office. When he leaves the money on her coat, we never actually see her take it. With the dawn breaking over LA, Boggs sits in his chair with a drink and a dry toothbrush. He then brushes his teeth…and so begins a new day.
Fresh as a daisy, Boggs goes to Clifton Farrow’s apartment, the man Hickey found dead. The apartment is still an active crime scene with the LAPD but he fanagles a key to the place from either a neighbor or the landlady (making it sound like he was a cop) and goes in to poke around.
As he pokes around the place, he sees a note about a Rams/Falcons football game in a date book. Boggs helps himself to the day old bacon that’s been sitting on the stove since the man was killed and while in the kitchen, he hears the snap of a mouse trap from under the sink. He opens the cupboard and finds the mouse, releasing it. He then finds a small jewelry box taped to the drain pipe under the sink. Inside the box are two $1000 bills.
Large denomination bills, by the way, were last printed in the 1940s and discontinued by the Federal Reserve in 1969. Although the Fed began removing the bills from circulation, criminals would have still had an interest in them for various illegal transactions, such as the drug or arms trade. As the viewer, we know Mary Jane is trying to unload the cash and she obviously couldn’t spend it on new clothes, not without getting somebody’s attention.
When he’s done snooping through the apartment, Boggs returns the key to a patrolman, claiming he ended up with it by mistake. Mr. Brill’s soldiers, on orders to check out the same leads Hickey and Boggs are following, drive by in their GTO and see the cops hanging around the place which pretty much tells them all they need to know.
Later, Boggs meets up with Hickey at a hot dog stand. Hickey was to check with the florist Quamando brother, but the flower shop was closed. Boggs shows him what he found in Farrow’s apartment. He then says that he tried to call Rice but Rice’s answering service had been shut off with no forwarding number. They each order up a couple of really horrendous looking chili dogs.
They turn what they found over to the police. As is typical, there is no love lost between these two PIs and the police department. Sergent Papadakis (Vincent Gardenia) and Detective Shaw (Jack Colvin) are naturally annoyed that Boggs walked into an active crime scene.
Still, Boggs made a note of what he had found in Farrow’s apartment even though it didn’t seem like it had anything to do with Mary Jane. Along with the two $1000 bills was a note with some names on it and he copied down the names.
From here they go to check with the florist. He says he hasn’t seen Mary Jane in five years or more.
Shut out, Hickey and Boggs regroup outside the florist shop looking at the names Farrow had written down with the two $1000 bills. There was also an address noted which they decide to check on. They drive off just as the torpedoes show up to beat the same information out of the florist.
The address they check is for a hotel, where the room is rented to a Mary Florida. She hasn’t been seen for a few days. For $50 Boggs gets a key to the room and a promise from the receptionist that she would phone them if any heat shows up.
The room is sparse but Boggs finds an envelope in a drawer with the same Rams/Falcons seat numbers written on it as was found in Farrow’s apartment. The mob torpedoes then show up and the two PIs go out the window to the fire escape before the thugs arrive, with Hickey hanging on a drain pipe and Boggs trying to bust in to another room from the fire escape. The torpedoes, meanwhile, are tearing the hotel room apart. Fatboy can’t find anything productive to do so he finds a doll and proceeds to tear that apart. (Makes you wonder what he’d do to a woman. Eeeeyah…)
Hickey keeps hanging on to the drain pipe despite Boggs telling him to come on and sees Fatboy rip apart the doll. When Fatboy goes to look out the window and puts his hand on the windowsill, Hickey pushes the window down with his foot and crushes Fatboy’s hand.
The two PIs crash through another room’s window and run like hell (for the most part. Culp can’t run worth a damn here and even goes tumbling down the bottom of the stairs. But there’s a reason for that. Stay tuned). When they get outside, Boggs grabs his “out of order” paper bag off the parking meter and runs to the back of the torpedoes GTO. He stuffs the bag in the gas cap and lights it. He and Hickey take off as the torpedoes come out of the building and start shooting at them….and the GTO blows sky high.
The next morning, Hickey comes into the office with the mail. They get a letter from Rice, taking them off the case. Boggs assumes Rice found Mary Jane, but Hickey doesn’t think so (and the letter doesn’t specify). Considering the heat they had on them at the hotel, Hickey figures Rice was scared off. Hickey’s not about to be scared off and he pulls out his gun and starts loading. Boggs joins him, after reinforcing himself with a shot of booze first. But he asks Hickey if he really wants to go to this point. It may be better for them to just run.
Nope. Hickey isn’t running. And as such, neither is Boggs. “Yes, sir, I like your style…” he says after Hickey leaves to go see the florist again.
The thing about this part that I don’t get is why Boggs discouraged Hickey from wearing the shoulder holster. It’s gotta be a pain in the rear to have to lug around a .44 wrapped up in a towel or a newspaper under your arm. The only thing I can think of is it was too “cop like” to wear the holster.
When Hickey gets to the florist shop, he finds Quamando is dead.
The police, meantime, have run a trace on the two $1000 bills found in Farrow’s apartment. Turns out they were part of a bank robbery in Pittsburg the previous winter. Over $400,000 was stolen. Three guards were killed along with three of the robbers. The driver got away but then he was found dead later, the money and his girlfriend missing.
The girlfriend was never identified.
The police have Hickey and Boggs brought in because the recent deaths keep tying back to this money. Come to find out there’s a reward out for the recovery of the money: $25,000. This gets the boys attention.
Back at the bar, Hickey is running over everything again figuring Mary Jane was the girlfriend and is trying to unload the money. Boggs tells him not to worry about that now and that they were going to the football game the next day. Hickey doesn’t care about going to any football game. “We’re looking for Mary Jane Bower, not Roman Gabriel. Twenty-five thousand dollars…” Undeterred, Boggs asks what kind of odds Hickey wants. “On the Rams?” Hickey asks.
“On Mary Jane being at the ball game.”
They go to the game (and somehow got in as ushers) but Mary Jane doesn’t show. The wait around until the stadium clears out. The note Boggs found in Mary Jane’s hotel room matched what Farrow had on his date book: Rams – Falcons + 1. And three seats specified. After some thought, they figure that the plus 1 might be plus one day.
The next day, they go back to the Coliseum (with guns wrapped in towels and newspapers – seriously fellas, holsters woulda been more practical!). Boggs has scratched a new name on the copy of the note from Farrow’s apartment – Edith – with a phone number. His ex-wife who’s been dumped by some boyfriend in Westwood with a bigger house and has crawled back to Frank wanting help. Hickey’s raised eyebrow is commentary enough.
Inside the Coliseum, they wait in the tunnels for Mary Jane to show up. They’re not the only ones lying in wait, the torpedoes are waiting too. Mary Jane shows up, as does the bag man she was going to deal with, but she spots not only Boggs at the entrance to one of the tunnels, she sees one of the torpedoes. She stays in the shadows of another tunnel, while the bag man waits in the seat in the stands for about five minutes. When Mary Jane doesn’t show, he gets up to leave.
Hickey and Boggs chase after him…well, Hickey chases after him as Boggs drops back because he can’t run worth a damn…only for the bagman to get blown away by Nick. Our fearless PIs end up in a shootout with Nick, Fatboy gets the bag man’s brief case of cash and the torpedoes make their getaway, but not before Boggs puts a bullet in the back window of their car. (Best shot of Culp in the whole movie.)
Meantime, Prisoner Quamando is released on parole. Mary Jane isn’t just his girlfriend, she’s his wife and they have two children (one of whom is played by Jason Culp).
The police are less than enthused about the shootout at the Coliseum. Papadakis blows his stack and Lt. Wyatt (James Woods) warns the two PIs that he’ll basically put them out of business if this escalates further.
The two PIs press on though, as Bogg’s eloquently puts it, “We gotta find that bitch before they do.” They go over the names Farrow had on the note that was with the money Boggs found originally. The addresses for these people Farrow did not write down, so the phone book provides the answer and another hot dog break.
When he goes to see Eleana Cole, Boggs doesn’t know it but he ends up face to face with Rice, the guy who had hired him and Hickey to begin with. He asks to see Mrs. Cole to talk about Clifton Farrow and Mary Jane Bower. He’s brought in to see what turns out to be Mr. Leroy (another name on Farrow’s note), a black revolutionary.
They meet on the back patio of the house that faces the ocean. Yes, it is really hanging precariously off a cliff!
While Boggs is doing that, Hickey is back at the office where he gets a phone call from Mary Jane. Mary Jane also phones Mr. Brill and contacts Rice to make a deal. Boggs finds out about the phone call when he gets back to the office, where he loads up on booze and a cigarette. Culp is not at his prettiest here (nor is he supposed to be.)
The meeting with Mary Jane is to take place in Parking Lot 32 of Dodger Stadium. Hickey and Boggs are waiting, as are the torpedoes. A man in drag shows up (this is the guy Rice sent – in drag on purpose). Hickey and Boggs think they have Mary Jane. So do the torpedoes who come barreling out of the dark and start shooting. The man in drag goes down. Bogg’s car ends up getting blown up (“500 cars in the lot and the bastards blow up mine!”). Hickey, however, nails Nick and the torpedoes get away.
The man in drag turns out to be one of the leads they couldn’t find, a guy named Bledsoe. Hickey then realizes that they were set up.
The police are at their limit now. Lt. Wyatt is ready to pull their ticket and put them out of business. They’re facing charges now (witholding evidence, abetting felonious conduct) and their lawyer can’t offer much help. As they walk out of the PIs office and down the hall, Hickey stops at one point and says “I dunno…” and as if on cue there’s the sound of a toilet flushing in the background. Appropriate, since that’s about where these two are at.
Hickey figures it’s time to get out of the PI business. “It’s not about anything,” he tells Boggs.
“Yeah it is. It’s about four hundred grand…” More than that, it was about $25,000 – money both of them needed pretty badly.
While things are looking pretty dire on the professional level, with either the cops or the mob going to bury them, Hickey seems to be improving his relationship with Nyona on a personal level. It would be the last bright spot for him, however. The only bright spot Frank has is to see his ex-wife Edith (who he still pines for) back at her old job – as a stripper. She was previously barred from this particular club but the guy owed Frank a favor, so Edith was hired back. This allows Frank to basically be tortured by watching her dance.
Hickey lets it go for about a minute and then yanks Frank out of the place by the arm. Edith expresses her insincere thanks. “Kill yourself.”
Out on the street, Hickey and Boggs have to pick up the pieces. Boggs decides to check up on the Prisoner Quamando. Hickey says he’ll go back to the house at the beach (Mrs. Cole) and see what more he can find out. Frank also has to get himself another set of wheels.
Not only does Frank find another set of wheels, he finds another damn blue T-bird. And no, I don’t know what the point was of pulling the door latch was all about. He doesn’t kick the tires. He doesn’t even test drive the thing. He takes it, as is. Even the car dealer is surprised (and no, it’s not Cal Worthington – whose commercials can be heard on the tv in the bar scenes).
Hickey, meanwhile, goes back to Mrs. Cole’s house only to find it literally has fallen off the cliff!
Frank returns home with his new T-bird (which he looks back at as he walks to his front door – don’t we all do that with a new car?) only to find his house has been broken in to. He calls Hickey to warn him that the torpedoes might be on their way to his place (note the interstate running through Bogg’s front yard as he’s talking on the phone.) But the torpedoes have already been at Hickey’s place. Nyona, who was finally starting to thaw to Hickey and had been at his place, was in the wrong place at the wrong time…
This is where Culp’s directing style is unique. We don’t see what happened to Nyona. We don’t even see all of her on the screen. We don’t have to. Earlier in the film we saw Fatboy tear apart a doll. Here we see the blood splatters on her legs, the electrical cord and the two by four wrapped around one leg… Only a moron would stop and whisper to the person next to them in the theatre and asks “what happened to her?”
Hickey is devastated by what happened. One of the most powerful scenes in the whole movie is Hickey sitting on the front steps of Nyona’s house, while her little girl mindlessly goes back and forth on the small patch of lawn with a push mower. They don’t say a word to each other but there’s some kind of consolation going on. The child means a lot to Hickey and we’re pretty sure that Hickey had come to fill a void in the little girl’s life for a father. But then Nyona’s mother (played by Isabelle Sanford) spots him sitting there and comes out of the house and rips into him, basically blaming him for Nyona’s death. As she’s yelling at Hickey, calling him a no good rotten son of a bitch, the little girl stops pushing the mower and just crumbles to the ground.
As the grandmother consoles the little girl, Hickey can only watch heartbroken. Behind him, traffic on the freeway whizzes by, oblivious.
Hickey is pretty much stone faced when Boggs meets up with him at the bar again. Boggs found out that the Prisoner Quamando was paroled a couple of days before and that his wife’s name is Mary Florida Quamando. Bingo. He got their address too and is ready to go. He figures Hickey wants to get the torpedoes, if they find the woman, the torpedoes wouldn’t be far behind. But Hickey just sits there.
Boggs runs the gamut, first trying to get Hickey to move, then admonishing him for quitting, then joining him for a drink, then getting really pissed reminding Hickey of his speechify earlier about how Frank couldn’t go bad now because of some woman he couldn’t get over. Boggs is a little callous here as his ex-wife hadn’t been killed but…
Frank then declares he’s going to go after that $25,000 reward and he up and leaves the bar, but he doesn’t go far. After a moment, he comes back and he tells Hickey that he can’t bring Nyona back and he can’t make up for what he missed. The only thing he could do was to even things up. Make things right.
On that note, Boggs starts to leave again but he pauses. He’s really not going to go without his friend and partner and when he looks back to see where Hickey is at, Hickey is following after him.
They go see Quamando and manage to get into the middle of things just as Quamando is about to go through with a deal with Rice and Mr. Leroy. By this point the pieces have all come together. Quamando worked for the LA mob and Mary Jane had got the money in Pittsburgh and brought it back to LA. But he went to prison and instead of delivering the money to the mob in LA, Mary Jane sat on it for a while before looking for a buyer – with a better deal than the mob. She originally had a deal with Farrow but he wanted a bigger cut which was why he was taken out of the equation completely. But as soon as she started putting the money out on the street, the mob got tipped off and the pressure was on. Quamando goes to the mob looking “to come home” but they want him to collect another bonus. So they tell him to go through with the deal with Rice and Mr. Leroy.
The mob, however, have one more trick up their sleeve.
Quamando brings the two PIs with him when he meets with Rice and Mr. Leroy. They drive on to the beach where they’ll meet up with Mary Jane, who will have the money with her.
Mary Jane arrives by plane (earlier in the film, when Hickey and Boggs are looking in her hotel room, there are pictures of small aircraft on her wall) and lands on the beach. She hands the suitcase of money to Quamando who turns and throws it into the sand at Rice and Mr. Leroy. He doesn’t even take their bag of money in return. He takes Mary Jane by the hand and starts to walk her back to the plane.
Over the cliff along the beach, however, comes a helicopter with Mr. Brill’s soldiers in it.
A shootout ensues. Rice goes down, Mr. Leroy had a couple of his boys riding in the trunk of the Rolls and he pulls them out but they’re no match for the mobsters in the chopper. They’re cut down in the sand. Mr. Leroy tries hiding in the trunk of the Rolls himself, but the bullets from the mobster automatic rifle cuts holes into the car and the trunk.
While this is happening, Mary Jane and Quamando are turning the plane around on the beach. The chopper hovers back over to them and the gunman hesitates for a moment. Just when you think they might be spared, they’re not. In a cloud of dust kicked up by the chopper we hear the gun fire and when the dust clears, Mary Jane and Quamando are dead.
This is another part where Culp’s directing is unique. I actually felt sorry for these two when I shouldn’t have. I mean, Mary Jane blew a guy away earlier in the film. Yet the death of these two characters wasn’t at all satisfying in terms of any justice served.
When the mob soldiers think they’ve got everybody taken care of, they drop Fatboy down to the beach to pick up the both the $400,000 suitcase and the paper bag of money from the deal, the “bonus.” Fatboy no more than picks up the suitcase when suddenly there’s thunder from Bogg’s .44.
An intense shootout takes place between the heavies and the PIs. Mr. Leroy’s Rolls Royce and Quamando’s Firebird get shot full of holes but essentially protect Hickey and Boggs against the automatic rifle of the mob gunman. They get a break when the rifle jams and Boggs, who earlier in the movie complained that he needed a bigger gun because he couldn’t hit nothing, nails the gunman in the chopper. The force of the hit sends the gunman into the lap of Monte who is piloting the chopper and Monte can’t keep the bird in the air. The chopper crashes down to the beach.
Monte is still alive but he can’t get the dead weight of the gunman off of him to climb out of the wreckage of the now burning chopper. Fatboy tries to move in closer to help but the flames consume the remains of the bird and it blows up.
Fatboy is the last man standing against the PIs. He pulls on a piece of the chopper literally fighting with it before it comes loose. Hickey and Boggs just watch him and when he has it loose he turns to them. Neither PI feels particular threatened by Fatboy. (I think Fatboy knows he’s a goner anyway). Hickey’s gun is empty so Bogg’s hands over his .44. With what turns out to be Bogg’s last bullet, Hickey takes Fatboy down.
And the movie ends with so much death and carnage…and nobody showed up. The beach was empty and even when we see a shot of the other end of the beach (where there are some people!) apparently nobody dared even pay attention to what was going on. How could they not? There were about as many bullets flying on this beach as there was at Normandy. And with the plane and the helicopter…nobody noticed?!?!
Anyway, Hickey and Boggs got to the end of it with their lives and this time they got the bag money. The stolen $400,000 in the suitcase is left on the beach and the two PIs walk off into the sunset…they’re own futures perhaps not to be much longer.
My additional commentary will be in a separate post, but I did want to note the various cast members of this film, all of whom were excellent.
Robert Mandan (Mr. Brill) – Played Chester Tate on Soap and showed up a several times on Cannon, Maude, The Love Boat, Barnaby Jones and Santa Barbara. Also had a recurring role on Three’s Company (and Three’s a Crowd) and the short-lived Private Benjamin.
Michael Moriarty (Ballard – Brill’s right hand man) – Known for his role as Executive A.D.A Ben Stone on Law & Order and also appeared Bang the Drum Slowly and in Clint Eastwood’s 1985 western Pale Rider. One of Moriarty’s earliest film roles is Hickey & Boggs.
Tommy Signorelli (Nick) – Had minor roles in films such as Kelly’s Heroes, Theif, Dick Tracy and Bang the Drum Slowly (with Michael Morairty and Vincent Gardenia).
Matt Bennett (Fatboy) – Had minor roles in only a handful of films and tv appearances in the ’70s, including the off beat film Dinah East, an episode of Starsky & Hutch, and the 1978 tv mini-series How the West Was Won.
Bill Hickman (Monte) – Actor/stunt driver best known for being the wheelman that drives the black Dodge Charger in Steve McQueen’s Bullitt, and did the driving stunts for The French Connection and The Seven-Ups. Hickman would appear with Culp again (uncredited) in “The Enforcers,” the first episode for the short lived Shaft tv series in 1973.
Lou Frizzell (lawyer). Character actor with several credits, including the 1971 film Duel, Bonanza, Hawaii Five-O, The Streets of San Francisco and Barnaby Jones. Some descriptions of Hickey & Boggs credit him as the man that hires the two detectives. This is incorrect. He’s their lawyer, who tells them that he’s “a lawyer, not a magician” when it comes to trying to get them out from under the charges they face after the Dodger Stadium incident.
Lester Fletcher (Mr. Rice) – This is the guy that hires the PIs. Character actor often cast as a fashion designer, he had various credits, including the 1961 film Operation Eichmann (with future Hogan’s Heroes stars Werner Klemperer and John Banner), and appearances on such shows as The Doris Day Show, The Rockford Files and The Streets of San Francisco.
Ed Lauter (in a bit part here as Ted, the patrolman that Boggs gives the key to) – Veteran actor easily recognizable as he’s had a plethora of roles in film and television throughout his career. Also known as Captain Knauer in the original The Longest Yard and had a recurring role as Captain/Sheriff John Sebastian on The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo and BJ and the Bear. He and Culp would cross paths again in the 1996 Olivier Gruner action flick Mercenary.
Vincent Gardenia (Sgt. Papadakis) – Previously appeared with Culp and Cosby on an I Spy episode “Get Thee to a Nunnery” and work with Culp again on the 1980 miniseries The Dream Merchants. He had a recurring role in All in the Family as Frank Lorenzo and also known for his role as Detective Frank Ochoa in Charles Bronson’s Death Wish II and as Cher’s dad in 1987’s Moonstruck.
Jack Colvin (Detective Shaw) – Best remembered as investigative reporter Jack McGee who chased after The Incredible Hulk for five seasons on CBS, Colvin also had roles on The Six Million Dollar Man, Kojak and The Rockford Files.
James Woods (Lt Wyatt) – Hugely successful actor whose career has spanned the past 40 years, one of Wood’s earliest film roles was here.
Isabel Sanford (Nyona’s mother) – Best remembered as Louise Jefferson on the The Jeffersons, Isabel made her film debut in 1967’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?
Rosalind Cash (Nyona) – Prolific actress with many film and television roles including The Omega Man, Uptown Saturday Night and television appearances on Kojak, Starsky & Hutch, The Cosby Show and A Different World.
Prisoner Quamando and Mary Jane Bower – were played by real life husband and wife Louis and Carmenchristina Moreno.
Two final cast notes, Roger E. Mosley (T.C. on Magnum PI, Coach Ricketts on Hangin’ With Mr. Cooper) has an uncredited role as one of the black revolutionaries and Robert Culp’s son, Jason, is seen as Quamando’s son.
Magazine clipping that, unfortunately, I don’t know what magazine it comes from. However, I do know it’s from England. This was part of a small collection of foreign clippings related to Robert Culp I found on eBay a couple of years back.
Part of my 40th Anniversary look at Hickey & Boggs, here’s an original trailer, this being a 55 second television spot that ran back in 1972 that I found on YouTube sometime back in 2011.
I’ll be honest in that I wasn’t really bowled over by this trailer – and I had already seen the movie multiple times. The disadvantage, of course, is I’m looking at this from a perspective forty years after the fact and I’ve been spoiled over the years by the likes of voice over folks like Don LaFontaine. (Can you imagine if Don LaFontaine had done the trailer for this one?). The voice over here sounds like Jack Webb and it has almost a Dragnet feel to it. The music –although definitely early 70’s flavor – is totally wrong for the film (infact, it’s not even music used in the film). The clips used are great and certainly show the down and out feel of the characters and the good action scenes in the film, but the music and voiceover just don’t cut it. And the line about “they’ll knock you out of your seat” …um, eeeyeah.
Having been kind of disappointed in the original trailer (I think the movie deserved better), I was inspired to try to edit together one of my own. Now, mine’s probably no better than the original and I’ll admit my editing skills are pedestrian. Plus, I don’t have Don LaFontaine to do the voice over (in fact, I have no voice over with this). But, ever have an idea grab at you and not let you go until you do whatever it is it asks?
It was 40 years ago this September/October of 1972 that Robert Culp’s only feature length directing effort, Hickey & Boggs was released. The film starred Bill Cosby along with Culp and although it was not a big commercial success at the time of its release, the film has obtained something of a cult status and is now considered a lost gem of early 70’s noir.
I’m biased, of course, but this movie really is a lost gem. As such, and since Hickey & Boggs truly was a significant milestone in Robert Culp’s career, it seemed natural that my next “capapalooza” post would be for the film and I would have it ready by the time of the 40th anniversary. I actually started working on the post way back in January since I knew it would probably run a little long between the number of screens caps I had and doing the overview of the film.
A little long? The whole thing literally got away from me. I have hundreds of screen caps, the overview ran waaay too long plus I had tons of commentary. The whole thing ended up a monster.
So instead of one great big LONG overkill of a post, I decided to break things up into smaller parts. There will still be the usual big capapalooza post (with some restraint on the overview) but I will separate out most of my commentary and other tidbits and gems about the film into other posts. So stay tuned over the next few weeks for more on Hickey & Boggs.
“Perhaps the most touching incident of this sort was the arrival of Bill Cosby and Robert Culp, the television stars. They did not even ask to see me, but spent most of the afternoon at the house playing with my boys, because they felt that this was the best contribution they could make.” – Coretta Scott King, talking about the many visitors she had in Atlanta in the days following the death of her husband, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Dr. King was assassinated in Memphis, TN on April 4, 1968. (From LIFE magazine, September 19, 1969)
Robert Culp and Bill Cosby stayed around Atlanta and even helped to serve up eggs and grits for the many who visited Mrs. King and paid their respects. The two actors then went along to Memphis on the 8th of April, to take part in the striking sanitation workers march that MLK was originally in Memphis for at the time he was killed. Many other celebrities and actors also joined the march, including Harry Belafonte and Ossie Davis (indeed, they marched at the front with Mrs. King, her children, Andrew Young and others). Culp and Cosby purposely maintained a low profile, making no big deal about themselves as celebrities or tv stars and marched toward the back simply showing their solidarity for the workers who were striking.
After watching So Long Patrick Henry and A Cup of Kindness on YouTube, I purchased all three seasons of I Spy off the bat. Indeed, the season DVD sets were released just weeks after I “discovered” Robert Culp and I Spy. Previous DVD sets were “theme” sets based on location or whathaveyou. My timing couldn’t have been better.
So, once I got the sets I began to watch from the beginning, meaning I watched “Patrick Henry” and “Kindness” again, since the episodes were kinda chopped on YouTube. From there I carried on with “Carry Me Back to Tsing-Tao.”
The episode opens with Kelly charming a lovely lady at a Hong Kong bar until he’s rudely interrupted by a drunken sailor. The interruption turns into an offense and the two men have to take their differences to the back alley to be settled. Turns out, the sailor is a spy like Kelly and he has information for an assignment for him.
It seems Charlie Huan aka “Papa Charlie” (Philip Ahn) wants to meet with Kelly and Scotty the following day (which is gonna put a crimp on Kelly’s plans with the lovely lady he’s been trying to woo for about a week). Kelly’s familiar with the name, as Mr. Huan ran a lot of not-necessarily-legal stuff on the West Coast of the US. Mr. Huan also knows that Kelly and Scotty are undercover agents.
After getting the information, and being told that the sailor can’t do the meeting because he’s not “one of you cute, glamour boys” the two men realize that one of them has to come out of the alley looking like a loser.
It’s not the glamour boy. Heh…
The next day, Kelly and Scott go to see Papa Charlie, who’s in the middle of his birthday celebration with his daughters and sons-in-law. The sons-in-law, Turkey (David Sheiner), Harold (Bernard Fox) and Morton (Michael Conrad) express an abundance of love and appreciation for Papa Charlie and it’s only for one reason; Papa Charlie is very rich and the three men want his money.
Papa Charlie excuses himself from the festivities to see to Kelly and Scotty (and let me say that Culp looks very dapper in the wine colored jacket and ascot tie). He takes them out of the big house to his quarters, a smaller more modest building on the grounds. Just before getting there he asks for them to follow him single file through the grass and to be careful of “poison ivy.”
In his quarters, he tells them his situation. He wishes to return to his native village in Formosa (AKA Taiwan) to live out the last few years of his life. However, he owes quite a bit in back taxes to the US government and as such, Formosa, by request of the US, will not grant Charlie a visa. He has discussed the issue with the US government and has agreed to pay $1 million to settle his debt. Once paid, he will be granted his visa.
Before Charlie can give them the money, Kelly and Scotty tell him they need to check with the government first and get instructions. Charlie tells them to do it quickly and warns them about his three sons-in-law how they’re after his money and if they found out what he was up to, they would be very dangerous.
Kelly and Scotty receive a cable back from the US government indicating the offer is acceptable and warns that the three men in question have criminal records. They should use “extreme caution.” Scotty’s not so bothered by extreme caution. He’s wondering where Charlie has all that money hidden!
When Kelly and Scott get back to their hotel room they’re jumped by Turkey, Harold and Mort. (I still can’t get over the fact that one of these guys is named Turkey!). The boys are roughed up a bit and when Kelly wakes up he’s staring straight into the barrel of Harold’s gun. The three men want to know why the two went to see Papa Charlie.
They don’t like Kelly’s first answer about a shark fin and a recipe for soup. Turkey slaps Kelly for that. Scotty tells them he only came along to listen to some old Fats Waller records. He gets a punch from Turkey for that.
Finally they come out and say they were talking a deal for something and were “dickering over a price.” Kelly tosses the explanation to Scotty who, not missing a beat, starts in about that they were con men and had found a piece of land to use in a deal and had asked Charlie if he would finance it for them. (I love the change in Culp’s expression as Scotty’s spinning his yarn. Heh!) Scotty and Kelly also say that Charlie agreed and that they saw his bank book.
Harold tells them that Charlie doesn’t have a bank account in any Hong Kong bank (they’d checked). Before Scotty and Kelly can get roughed up any further, one of Charlie’s daughters – Catherine – suddenly comes into the room and slaps Turkey. Scotty tells her to do it again. She does. She then tosses the three men out of the room.
Kelly and Scott are more than grateful. Kelly even tries to charm Catherine but doesn’t get far. When he tells her that he hurts pretty much all over, she has just the remedy for him: Chicken soup. (Not what he had in mind!)
When Catherine takes them to see Charlie, they find out why they have to walk single file through the grass. The whole area has been mined with anti-personnel mines.
They tell Charlie that the government accepts the deal. He then reveals to them his $1 million…a solid gold stove. They load the stove into an old truck and off they go to deliver it to the IRS.
I love the conversation Kelly and Scott have as they drive, talking about a few pounds of the stove for themselves (gold going for about $60 an ounce, black market. Gold prices at the time of this post is around $1600 per ounce. “A couple of one way tickets to Tahiti would hardly put a dent in it!”). Of course, they don’t do this knowing that if they did, they would lose their jobs and probably any sense of self-respect. (And medical benefits – who doesn’t love plaster of paris?)
It’s not long before Turkey, Harold and Mort catch up to Kelly and Scott and run them off the road. Both are thrown from the truck and a little worse for wear. While out cold, Turkey, Harold and Morton load up the stove into their car. (Okay, Turkey drags the stove, Harold gives commands and Mort stands over unconcious Kelly and Scotty with a gun.) The boys come to just before the three take off and try to fight them to no avail. Kelly ends up with his already cut face planted in the dirt.
I loved Kellys line to Scotty as Scotty’s picking him up off the ground. “You look terrible.” To which Scotty replies with a bit of chuckle, “Sorry about that.”
Turkey, Harold and Mort take the stove into town to have it looked at and determine a value for the gold. Only to find out that the stove isn’t gold at all. It’s cast iron with gold leaf paint… (and if you think they weren’t happy…)
Papa Charlie, meantime, with his visa to Formosa, packs up his meager belongings for his trip. Catherine, however, has discovered that the stove was a farce too. He tells her that there is no gold, that he did not have the money all along.
Back at the hotel, Scotty helps tape up Kelly’s ribs. (Yes, folks we’re on the 3rd episode of the series and 30 minutes into it and Culp has his shirt off!). He notices a scar on Kelly’s shoulder and Kelly tells about how he got it (the short version, he was bit by a dog). They then get a message that a stove can be bought at a shop in town.
They figure it’s a trap but they go to check it out anyway. At the shop, they speak to the proprietor about the stove and they find out about it not being gold at all. They realize they’ve been had by Papa Charlie. They figure the note came from Turkey, Harold and Mort and they go to the back alley of the store to find “The Rover Boys” waiting for them. Kelly and Scott get their just deserts and clean the alley with all three men.
Back at their hotel room, they try to track down Papa Charlie, only to find out he has already passed through immigration and into Formosa.
“Into each life, some goofs must fall,” Scotty philosophies.
“Yeah, but so many in ours?” Kelly replies.
They ponder how they can find Charlie on Formosa and then realize they could probably get their answer from Catherine.
They tell her that they realize they were used in order for Charlie to get his sons-in-law off his back. But they warn her that once the three men figure out where Charlie went, they would go looking for him and they would kill him for his money. She tells Kelly and Scott that there is no money, no gold, nothing. They would believe her, if she’ll tell them where in Formosa Charlie is.
They promise that if she tells them, they can have the three men sent back to the US and denied any passports or visas, which would prevent them from leaving the US and finding Charlie. Catherine, however, wants a different kind of assurance and gurantee. She suddenly runs out of her father’s quarters, yelling for Turkey, Harold and Mort, who come running and set off one of the land mines. The explosion kills Turkey. Kelly yells for Harold and Mort to stay put, otherwise, they’d be killed too. And he knows that once she was through with them, she’d find something for Kelly and Scott too.
So Kelly counters with a threat of his own. He’d turn Catherine over to Harold and Mort. Catherine chooses her sides more carefully.
Kelly, Scott and Catherine fly to Formosa and ask around for where to find Charlie. What they learn is very surprising. Papa Charlie is conducting business as usual. The meager housewares Catherine had helped him pack up, were actually made out of platinum and he is trading these pieces for diamonds and jewels and other mediums of exchange. Kelly quietly interrupts Charlie’s business day, tells him to send everyone home and then asks him to count out $1 million in the platinum pieces.
Charlie does so but says he will be left penniless now. Kelly doesn’t buy it. Kelly also doesn’t have very good luck charming any of the Asian women in this episode. Catherine pretty much ignored him as does one of Charlie’s assistants, who simply walks away from Kelly when he says hello.
Later an IRS agent shows up at the boys hotel room because the payment was short. Four ounces short as a matter of fact. (Interesting to note that platinum in 1965 was $140 an ounce. At the time of this post, it’s around $1400 an ounce.). Kelly and Scott knew the man would be coming and as he’s telling them about the shortage, Kelly is polishing off a platinum fork. They then show him the fork, along with a matching fork, and the box that they were going to ship the forks back to the IRS with. The agent doesn’t understand until Kelly explains that they have a friend who boasted once about eating fettuccine with a golden spoon. Now they can say they ate Chinese with platinum forks.
The IRS agent thinks about this for a moment and then asks to pass the moo goo gai pan.
When I first saw this episode, I thought “Huh…this looks familiar…”
I know the rib wrap would show up in another TGAH ep later (“Lilacs, Mr. Maxwell”) and subsequent I Spy eps, but the bandaid on the face, on the same side no less, was a hoot.
And even this felt familiar!
That’s what I get for watching these shows back and forth.
Anyway, “Carry Me Back…” was a fun episode. Where “Patrick Henry” was fairly serious, “Kindness” mixed serious with humor, “Carry Me Back…” also had a good mix of serious and humor but was pretty much an adventure in mishaps. I thought the plot stretched things just a tad (how would Charlie have ever, ever, known that Kelly was a undercover agent??) and was constructed purposely so that Kelly and Scotty’s mishaps would take place (seriously, wouldn ‘t the US government have waited for the back tax money to be delivered in hand to the IRS before issuing the visa? We’re talking a million bucks here!). Nonetheless, the episode offered some great banter and some classic lines.
Kelly and Scotty’s adversaries included…
– Bernard Fox, who was seen several times on the sitcom Bewitched as Dr. Bombay, played it straight here but would show up later on Hogan’s Heroes as the memorable, hapless and bombastic Colonel Crittenden.
– Michael Conrad, a frequent face seen on television through the 60s and 70s and best known as Sgt Phil Esterhaus on Hill Street Blues in the early 80s.
– David Sheiner, another frequent face on television during the 60s and through the 80s, doing multiple guest spots on shows such as The Man from UNCLE, Mission Impossible, and The Fugitive. He also was one of Oscar’s poker buddies in the 1968 movie The Odd Couple. He may have been hard to recognize here as he either shaved his head or wore a skull cap for the role.
– Philip Ahn, sly old fox “Papa Charlie,” was born in the US of Korean descent. A veteran character actor playing various Asian characters in film and television he had a long career spanning from the 1930s until his death in 1978. He is probably most known for his role as Master Kan in the David Carradine tv series Kung Fu.
Conrad, Sheiner and Ahn would each return for a second time on other I Spy episodes.
Also of note is George Murdock, the drunken sailor at the beginning of the episode who gives Kelly the assignment. Another veteran character actor who made a career out of playing judges, cops and bad guys, he appeared on numerous television shows and in films, incuding frequent guest appearances on shows such as Banacek, Ironside, Barney Miller, and Battlestar Gallatica.
Kelly and Scotty’s discussion about the gold stove and taking a piece or two for themselves is listed in the Memorable Quotes section for I Spy on the IMDB.
And one final programming note…it’s a good thing this episode of I Spy didn’t air on Monday, October 4th, 1965 because it never would have been seen. NBC dropped all of it’s regular daytime and nighttime programming to allow wall-to-wall coverage of Pope Paul VI’s visit to the US (the first such visit to the US by a Pope). ABC and CBS also provided wall-to-wall coverage but with a few exceptions here and there. ABC was in the particularly sticky situation of having to choose between coverage of the papal visit and airing the National League baseball pennant game between the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Francisco Giants (if it was so needed…and good Lord man, life does have it’s priorities!). Fortunately, the Dodgers saved them from such a decision by clinching the pennant over the weekend.
The first season of I Spy, of course, is available at Amazon.com.
Finally, finally, finally!! Hickey & Boggs is being release on DVD August 23rd under the MGM Classics Collection (manufacture on demand) and will be available through Screen Archives. You can pre-order now (I already have!). Granted, I downloaded the movie from iTunes and have watched it several times already but having it on DVD ensures two things: 1. My future cap n’ yap on this movie will be easier to do. 2. When I’ve burned through five computers (I’m on #3) I won’t have to worry about losing any “permissions” to continue to watch the movie on any future computers.
I set up a Google alert recently for “robert culp” and have gotten back alerts the past few days for blog posts talking about the movie Hickey & Boggs. It’s great to see the film discussed because it’s a good film and one worthy of discussion but too often in these posts I’m seeing the character names be mixed up. Either the wrong character is attributed to the wrong actor or the characters first names are swapped.
For the record: Al Hickey was played by Bill Cosby. Frank Boggs was played by Robert Culp.
Tatia (Season 1, Episode 10)
The Tiger (Season , Episode 15)
Bet Me a Dollar (Season 1, Episode 20)
Vendetta (Season 2, Episode 4)
Bridge of Spies (Season 2, Episode 9)
Room with a Rack (Season 2, Episode 21)
Mainly on the Plains (Season 2, Episode 22)
Magic Mirror (Season 2, Episode 25)
Home to Judgment (Season 3, Episode 14)
It’s All Done with Mirrors (Season 1, Episode 27)
Blackout (Season 2, Episode 24)
Laya (Season 3, Episode 3)
The Lotus Eater (Season 3, Episode 12)
When my friend casually tweeted “What should I write about,” I spent forty five minutes trying to convince him why I Spy should be remembered in its fiftieth anniversary year. The 144 character conversation ended with him apologizing that he couldn’t because of “the Cosby thing.” And therein lays the problem. We’ve known about “the Cosby thing” since 1997, but it’s social media for better that has convicted him and for worse condemned innocents who didn’t know they danced with a demon.
I Spy was one of the few correct and true things NBC has ever done. The nation needed to see in a non-proselytizing manner that all men are created equal. We were given in a weekly fifty minute non-statement, two men literally equal in size and stature sharing a meal, a room, a mirror, a bathroom. Nothing mattered as long as they got the job done and had fun. The end. This steady dose of Kelly Robinson and Alexander Scott walking side by side, living life together was absorbed subliminally and obviously and hearts began to change. Self-doubt about whether it was really OK to sit next to your classmate and eat off each other’s plates, finish their drinks, go camping with them, was obliterated. Ninety episodes later Alexander Scott made it clear to young men they no longer had to fear being the nerd who had done so well scholastically because being so didn’t negate your ability to be a man. To be a good human being.
This equipment also threatened to push out the antiquated cameras, lights, mikes, and men that had been Hollywood staples for years, and no one was happy about that. For most of the time I Spy was filmed Said could not join the unions you would have expected him to be a highly valued member of. That came only as the series was ending, as did other breakthroughs.
Both performers came to the attention of Sheldon Leonard via different paths but with the same fork in the road – Carl Reiner. Culp had written a script for a pilot for a possible series, a spy themed show that he took to Reiner. Reiner was on his way out of television at the time but had passed the script along to Sheldon Leonard. Leonard liked Culp’s idea, but liked his own better and as soon as Culp heard it, he concurred. Cosby’s name was mentioned to Leonard as having some potential for a future project and then Carl Reiner, again, passed Cosby’s name to Leonard after his son, Rob Reiner, saw Cosby on the Tonight Show and mentioned it to his father.
Unhappy with “Affair in T’sien Cha” NBC picked from the other episodes completed the Robert Culp penned “So Long Patrick Henry,” to be the episode that premiered the series. In the episode Elroy Brown, a disenfranchised black American Olympic athlete (played by Ivan Dixon), defects to China lured by the promise of cash. Although he gets more money, he’s kept on a short leash by his Chinese handlers and after a year appears disgusted with the treatment. Kelly and Scotty must make an effort to persuade him to return to the United States. Neither of them really care if Brown comes back to the US or not, since he’s basically a jerk toward both of them. He still thinks he got the better deal until Scott throws it in Brown’s face, telling him bitterly that he more or less sold himself back into slavery.
Ok, some of the storylines may have been fanciful, after all this IS television we’re talking about. But I Spy, unlike its various counterparts at the time, didn’t rely on gimmicks, trick weaponry or a Massive Evil Conglomerate Organization Bent on Taking Over the World (Megalomaniacs R Us) as it’s one and only enemy. Kelly and Scotty matched wits and outwitted standard Cold War adversaries from the Russians and the Red Chinese, but also drug lords, mobsters and a few old friends and acquaintances. When either of them were betrayed by somebody, you felt the shock and pain. When either of them were cut, they bled. They were beaten and battered and sometimes bordered on being broken. The spy business was dirty, ruthless, lonely and unforgiving. Innocents were killed while the guilty got asylum.
I Spy never cracked the top twenty in ratings but after the show’s end in 1968 it continued to have a decent fan base with reruns running through the 70s and into the 80s. Limited VHS releases came in the 1990s with a random selection of episodes. However, one particular release erroneously featured a photo of Culp and Cosby from their 1972 film Hickey & Boggs on the cover instead of an I Spy photo. I could say how the shortcomings of the internet back then (which just barely existed) wasn’t like the internet now and thus the people responsible for packaging couldn’t double check on the photo…but Hickey & Boggs photos have been erroneously tied to I Spy for years. Still are.
Which may explain why I Spy seems to fly under the radar as far as nostalgic pop culture. Cosby’s misdeeds certainly don’t help now either but the show doesn’t deserve to be punished further. Maybe it’s asking too much too soon but I Spy still matters. It showed us how it looks with no hate. Something we need to see more of, not less.
With the recent posts over on 
But I really didn’t have to explain to Bob how I felt. We’re so close that we instinctively understand each other. We even have a certain way that we speak to each other. I don’t know if you’ve ever had a friend who was so close to you that maybe just one word could key you off into – not necessarily fits of laughter, but enjoyable moments, when you’ve both been depressed or tired. For me that particular pick-me-up happens to be Bob Culp.
Then there was something that happened to Bob and me in Hong Kong while we were filming the 1st show in the series. Now, when I get to a foreign land I like to eat the food of the country. I don’t care how sick it makes me feel. Well, we were sitting in this restaurant. (A Chinese restaurant, of course!) Both of us had just learned how to work out with chopsticks, and were starting to learn a little about Chinese food, I mean real Chinese food. So we sat down and looked at the menu and said, “What is this?” and so forth and so on, and “Let’s have some of this. Have you ever tried this? No, man, let’s try some. Let us venture forth and get some of these wonderful things that they have on the menu here. We don’t care what it is. Give us some of this and some of that, with flangs and floosh and zoobie … and oh, yes, we must have some duck. Give us some duck. This barbecued duck here.”
It’s true, he had to shell out $2000 to get into the Directors Guild in order to direct this episode, for which his director’s pay is $3500. He concedes he laid out $2500 for an artist to story-board the entire script. “Rarely can a man successfully act and direct at the same time. One has to suffer and it will always be the acting.” That conviction is what motivated Culp to hire acting coach Jeff Corey to stand by and observe his performance.
For the longest time it seems this movie languished in obscurity. I had heard of it almost as soon as I started delving into All Things Culp, but finding the thing proved a task. Up until 2011, there had not been an official DVD release and apparently whatever copy was out there floating around, was not of the greatest quality. One grainy clip of Culp and Cosby going into the hotel to try to find Mary Jane was about all I’d ever seen of the film. And that wasn’t even posted on YouTube.
Boggs, meanwhile, finds comfort and solace in a twenty dollar hooker. At the office. When he leaves the money on her coat, we never actually see her take it. With the dawn breaking over LA, Boggs sits in his chair with a drink and a dry toothbrush. He then brushes his teeth…and so begins a new day.
The two PIs crash through another room’s window and run like hell (for the most part. Culp can’t run worth a damn here and even goes tumbling down the bottom of the stairs. But there’s a reason for that. Stay tuned). When they get outside, Boggs grabs his “out of order” paper bag off the parking meter and runs to the back of the torpedoes GTO. He stuffs the bag in the gas cap and lights it. He and Hickey take off as the torpedoes come out of the building and start shooting at them….and the GTO blows sky high.
When he goes to see Eleana Cole, Boggs doesn’t know it but he ends up face to face with Rice, the guy who had hired him and Hickey to begin with. He asks to see Mrs. Cole to talk about Clifton Farrow and Mary Jane Bower. He’s brought in to see what turns out to be Mr. Leroy (another name on Farrow’s note), a black revolutionary.
I set up a Google alert recently for “robert culp” and have gotten back alerts the past few days for blog posts talking about the movie Hickey & Boggs. It’s great to see the film discussed because it’s a good film and one worthy of discussion but too often in these posts I’m seeing the character names be mixed up. Either the wrong character is attributed to the wrong actor or the characters first names are swapped.