An Interview With Harry Landers

“This hamburger is like leather,” Harry Landers growls.  “Leather.”  Even after the waitress removes the offending sandwich, he mutters it a few more times.  “Leather!”

Landers is best known for his five-year run on Ben Casey as Dr. Ted Hoffman, sidekick to the brooding brain surgeon of the show’s stitle.  Diminutive and eminently reasonable, Hoffman often acted as a calming influence on the towering volcano that was Dr. Casey.  Landers’s other claim to fame, as a coffee pitchman in a series of commercials for Taster’s Choice, also made good use of his mumbly bedroom voice and his air of approachable warmth.

All of that just shows what a good actor Landers could be.  In life, Landers was a bantamweight tyro, a heavy drinker who spent more than a few nights in jail.  Many of his stories revolve around his sudden flashes of anger, and the consequences of on-set outbursts.  He has mellowed somewhat with age, but even in his final year as an octogenarian, Landers seems capable of scary explosions of temper.  During the hamburger incident – and in fairness, that patty did appear scorched to excess – I was sure that we narrowly avoided one.

(And yes, Landers is 89, not 90.  All the reference books give his date of birth as April 3, 1921, but in fact it is September 3.  At some point, someone’s handwritten 9 must have resembled a 4.)

As he talked about working for Hitchcock and DeMille, Landers was expansive, but also genuinely modest.  “Why do you want to know all this crap?” he asked more than once.  A moment of honesty finally won his respect.  “Why did you decide to interview me?” he wanted to know.

There were several possible answers, but I went with the most accurate.  “Because you’re the last surviving regular cast member of Ben Casey,” I replied.

“That’s a good reason,” Harry agreed instantly.  But when I asked him to comment on some of the widely publicized conflicts among the show’s stars, he would only go so far.  “No, it’s no good,” he said after interrupting himself in the middle of an anecdote and casting a wary eye in my direction.  “You’re too smooth!”

Retired now, Landers lives with his son in the San Fernando Valley.  He misses his old house in Sherman Oaks and, even more, the vibrant street life of Manhattan.  Until recently, he visited New York City several times a year.  So many of his hangouts closed and so many of his East Coast friends passed away, though, that after a time Landers found himself seeing shows, dining alone, and going back to his hotel to watch television.  He stopped going back.  But he’s still active, and still pugnacious: his residuals are so “pathetic” that he doesn’t cash some of the checks, “just to drive the accounting offices crazy.”

As we wrapped up, he insisted on picking up the check.  “I’m a gentleman of quality,” said Landers.  “You can’t bribe me, kid.”

How did you get started as an actor?

I was working at Warner Bros. as a laborer.  There was an article in the Warner Bros. newspaper that they distributed throughout the studio, and they mentioned my name.  In World War II, I did what I think any other kid my age would have done.  I was a little heroic on a ship that was torpedoed, and I saved some lives.  It was no big deal.

How did you save them?

Well, this torpedo was hanging by the fantail.  Some kid was trying to get out through a porthole.  One kid was frozen on the ladder.  I just moved ahead with a flashlight, and had people grab hold and go towards the lifeboat.  Just a little immediate reaction.  I think if you’re a kid, you don’t realize what you do.  You just do it.

So anyway, one day I was out in the back of the studio, where the big water tower is, and I’m pounding nails, and a limousine drove up and a man got out.  His name was Snuffy Smith.  He asked for me, and somebody indicated where I was pounding nails.  He said, “Bette Davis wants to see you.”

I said, “What?”  I was scroungy, stripped to the waist, matted hair, sweaty, angry.

He said, “Yes, she wants to see you.”

So I grabbed a t-shirt and put it on, and got into the limo.  Now I was fear-ridden.  On the ship, I wasn’t.  How old was I?  I was in my early twenties, I guess.  I remembered Bette Davis as a kid, watching her movies.  To this day, I think she’s still the motion picture actress in American cinema.  She’s incredible.

So they asked me onto the stage, to Bette Davis’s dressing room.  They were shooting.  There was a camera and all the sets.  The man went up and said, “Miss Davis, I have the young man.”  So she said, “Come in, come in.”  I walked in and there she was, seated in front of the mirror.  She looked at me and shook my hand.  She asked me a few questions.  She said, “What can I do for you?”

Maybe when I was a kid in New York City, in Brooklyn, I always realized I’d wind up in Hollywood someday.  I never knew why or what, but it was a magnet.  Motion pictures is better than sex!  And she said, “What can I do for you?”

I used to watch the extras.  Beautiful little girls walking around, and they were always rather well-dressed and doing nothing, and I’m sweating and pounding nails.  And they were making more money.  I think I was making like nine or ten dollars a day.  I said, “I’d like to do what they’re doing.”

She said, “You want to be an extra?”

I said, “Yes, ma’am.”

Then she picked up the phone and she spoke to Pat Somerset at the Screen Actors Guild.  Put the phone down.  A few seconds later the phone rang.  She said, “Yes, Pat.  Bette here.  I have a young man here, and I will pay his initiation.”  That was the end of it.  She told me where to go.  She wrote it down: The Screen Actors Guild union on Hollywood and La Brea.  We talked for maybe three more sentences, said goodbye and shook hands.

The next time I ran across Bette Davis was at a party at Greer Garson’s house.  By that time many years had passed; in fact, I was in Ben Casey.  I was with Sam Jaffe and Bettye Ackerman.  They knew Greer – Miss Garson – very well.  There was Bette Davis, and she didn’t remember me.  I [reminded her and] a little thing flicked in her mind.  It was just a very brief kind of a [memory].  That was the last time I ever saw her.

That was before the strict union rules.  Now you give an [extra] special business or a line, they automatically have to become a member of the Screen Actors Guild.  Every now and then they would say, “Hey, you.  Can you say this and this?”  They’d give me one or two short lines.  So I’d be in a short, fast, little scene.  But I always knew this was going to happen.  It was just a progression.  I met a young man who was going to an acting class, Mark Daly, who’s dead, many years ago.  He always had books under his arm.  I said, “What are you reading?”

He said, “Plays.”

I never read a play in my life.  I said, “Oh.”

Then he said, “Harry, what are you doing tonight?”

I said, “Nothing.”

He said, “I’m going to an acting class.  Come on down, you might like it.”

I went down there and I met the person who ran the studio.  It was an incredible place, called the Actors Lab.

That was the left-wing theater group, many of whose members got blacklisted during the McCarthy era.

Yes.  Most of them did.  It was a residual effect out of the Group Theatre.  That’s where I met some of the people who became fast friends of mine.  The one woman I met was Mary Tarcai, who was sort of the administrator.  She wouldn’t say no to me.  She was afraid I was going to kill her.  I was interviewed to become a member.  You had to audition and all that stuff.  So it was like, okay, come to class next Thursday.  Then I met people like Lloyd Bridges, and an incredible actor and an incredible man who was an associate producer on Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Norman Lloyd.  What an amazing man.  Beautiful voice.

Stella Adler taught me, and threw me out of her class.  She called me a gangster, and she was right.

Why did she call you a gangster?

I don’t know.

Then why do you say she was right?

Well, I was rebellious.

Many of the Actors Lab members were later blacklisted because of their political views.  Were you?

No.  No, because I was not that prominent.  They were after the big names, like J. Edward Bromberg, Morris Carnovsky, who were – I’m not going to go into whether they were communists or not.  Hume Cronyn.  But it was immaterial to me.  See, I knew what they wanted.  The desire to overthrow the government was the least motive in their minds.  They were political activists who wanted a better life for the people.  No discrimination.  So I was very sympathetic to what they had to do and say.

Once there were a bunch of us picketing Warner Bros. studio, from the Lab, and we were rounded up and taken over to the Burbank jail.  They put like seven, eight of us in a holding cell.  The door was unlocked.  I walked out.  My mother lived in Van Nuys, and I got to my mom’s house in a cab or whatever, had some lunch, spoke to her, and I went back to the jail.  Opened the door and went back in.  People said, “Hi, Harry.”  They never knew I was gone.

The Actors Lab was in Los Angeles, but you went back to New York at some point.  Why?

I missed New York.  By that time I was out of New York City for quite some time, but I just wanted to go for the adventure.  I drove to New York with two guys.  One became a very famous actor, Gene Barry.  Marvelous man.  And a guy named Harry something – Harry Berman, I think.  Big, tall, huge heavy guy.

This would have been the late forties, early fifties.  Tell me about some of the young actors you got to know in New York during that time.

Ralph Meeker.  Good friend.  Very tough man.  Great fighter, wrestler.  Robert Strauss.  Harvey Lembeck.  I was in a play with Marlon Brando that I walked out of, stupidly.  Luther Adler was directing.  Adler begged me not to.  It was dumb.  There was a hotel in New York called the Park Central Hotel, on 55^th and Broadway.  There was a gym, and I used to worked out there, and Brando used to work out there.  We became friendly, and we liked each other immediately.  We knew all the same people.  Robert Condon, Wally Cox, an incredible man called Red Kullers [whom Cassavetes enthusiasts will remember as the man in Husbands who sings “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?”].  Brando and I got along very well.  We double-dated a few times, and I did a movie with him, The Wild One.

Murray Hamilton was the most talented.  He was an amazing actor.  There was never a finer southern gentleman who ever lived.  And very liberal politically.  Married one of the DeMarco sisters.  Murray got married in my old house up in Sherman Oaks.  When Murray would come in to L.A. – he hated Los Angeles – he, after working, would go back to New York.  We all had to stuff him into a plane.  Fear of flying.  He would have to be stoned before he would get on the plane.

One day he came up from downstairs and opened the door.  He used to call me Hesh, and I used to call him Hambone.  He said, “Harry – Hesh – you have to do me a favor.”

I said, “What?”

“You have to keep me off the sauce.”  Now, Murray was an alcoholic.  I was.  Strauss, Lembeck, Meeker, all very heavy drinkers.

I said, “Okay.”  He was doing The Graduate.  Remember The Graduate?  He played that beautiful girl’s father.  He said, “Now, the director [Mike Nichols], he said ‘Murray, you have to stop drinking.  We can’t see your eyes any more.’”

How did you stop drinking?

I didn’t.  I think just, as the years went on, these people went out of my life.  I just slowly but surely stopped [carousing].

Tell me about doing live television.

Some were small parts, some I was a star.  One with James Dean, I was the lead, opposite Hume Cronyn.  Cronyn was my teacher at the Actors Lab, the best teacher I ever had.  He was the star, he and Jessica Tandy.  I was in love with Jessica.

What did you learn from him?

I learned you cannot get on stage without knowing your lines.  There was a time when I was able to do an improvisation on anything, and I thought that I was a very good actor, or a great actor.  I hit my marks and people hired me all the time, so I must have been pretty good.  I never felt that I had the freedom, the confidence, to really have the opportunities to let go and do it.

What live shows do you remember?

I did so many live TV shows.  One of my best moments on live TV was a very famous show called “The Battleship Bismarck,” on Studio One.  I played a fanatical nazi on the battleship.  There’s the set, the battleship, and I was here saying everything like “Sieg heil!” and “Achtung!”  I’m on the set, talking, during a rehearsal break or something, and I looked over and said, “Oh, my god.”  I flipped.  Over there was Eleanor Roosevelt.  I didn’t ask permission, although I’m a very polite man, respectful of my peers, superiors.  I just said, “Excuse me,” and walked up to her.  I’m not very tall, and she was, and I’m in my nazi uniform.  I said, “Mrs. Roosevelt – ”  She grabbed my wrist and said, “Dear boy, what are you doing?!”  The uniform I had on.

Ernie Borgnine and I were cast in Captain Video.  We got paid $25 an episode, and we shot it in New York City.  We had to learn a whole script a day, for $25.  We did it for two weeks.  We would write the cues on our cuffs.  It was impossible.  We worked so well together.  A very sweet guy.  The last time I saw him, Ernie knew the dates, and he said, “Who cast us in the show?”  I said, “Uh….” and he said, “Elizabeth Mears!”

You were in the classic Playhouse 90, “Requiem For a Heavyweight.”

I replaced Murray Hamilton in that show; I don’t remember why.  The only thing I really remember about the show was that [Jack] Palance was not very friendly.

The famous story about that show is that Ed Wynn couldn’t remember his lines, and right up to the last minute they were going to replace him with another actor.

I never knew Ed Wynn prior to that, but his son I’d worked with quite a few times in the movies.  Keenan Wynn would beg him: “Come on, Dad, you can do it, come on, you can do it!”  And the old man did it, and it was a marvelous performance.

Do you remember any incidents where something went wrong on the air?

I remember I was supposed to be on the set of Tales of Tomorrow, and I was in jail.

What happened?  Did you make it on the air?

Yes!  Bob Condon, the brother of Richard Condon, who wrote The Manchurian Candidate, bailed me out of jail.

And why were you there in the first place?

I destroyed an apartment house.  The night before I had a date with a beautiful girl from Westchester County, the daughter of an actor and a crazy girl, just a nut.  I went down to her apartment on 37^th Street or 38^th Street, and I took Bobby Condon with me.  He and I were good friends.  I spoke to her – I think her name was Betty – and I said, “I’m bringing a friend.  Get a girl.  The four of us will go out.”

Well, we went down there and she was pissed at me.  I knocked on her apartment door, and she wouldn’t let me in.  I said, “Will you open the door?”  Blah, blah, blah, blah.  “Come on, open the door.”  And I became angry and I kicked the door in.  Dumb.  I was a kid.  I kicked the door in, and that was it.  But as I walked out of the apartment house, I wrecked the entire apartment house.  Like three, four banisters on the stairs, I kicked the spokes out, [pulled down] the chandeliers.  Went home.  About five o’clock in the morning, six in the morning, the cops grabbed me and threw me in jail, and they threw Bobby Condon in jail.  They let him out immediately, but they kept me in just because of my attitude.

So one of the cops called over and said, “Yeah, he’s in jail.”  So they had a standby actor walking [in my place] all camera rehearsal.  Meanwhile the jailers were cueing me for my lines.  They loved it!  I had grabbed my script and my glasses [when the police arrived].  But they bailed me out just in time to get me to the set.  I got there just in time.  I needed a shave.  I had scrubby clothes.  Gene Raymond was the star of that show.  He looked at me like, “Oh, wow, who are you?”

The producer never forgave me, but the show was marvelous!  One of my better performances.

Above: Landers and Gene Raymond on Tales of Tomorrow (“Plague From Space,” April 25, 1952)

You were in Rear Window.  Tell me about Alfred Hitchcock.

I was prepared to dislike him.  I don’t know why; I was a great fan of his.  When we got on the stage, he said, “All right, kiddies, show me what you’d like to do.”  That was all improvised: we’re in a club, she picks me up in a club coming out of a movie.  We get through doing it and he says, “Oh, that’s marvelous.”  He says, “Harry, come here.  Look through the camera.”  I didn’t know what the hell I was looking at.  But he was gentle, and sweet, and so nice to work with.  Which surprised me.

You were also in The Ten Commandments, Cecil B. DeMille’s last film.

I played three different parts.  I was the first guy in America in fifty years who screamed at Cecil B. DeMille on the set, in front of God and everyone.  Everybody’s dead silent.  DeMille’s blue eyes went [looking around in search of the culprit].  The assistant director goes, “Harry, get back where you belong.”  I said to myself, “I’m fired.  That’s it.”

Why did you yell at him?

By that time, I’d watched DeMille scream at actors, and he could be very, very cruel.  He did not know how to direct actors.  He directed donkeys and elephants and mass crowds.  With actors, he didn’t know.  When I got on the stage first time, one of the actors said, “With Cecil B. DeMille, raise your hands all the time.  ‘Yes!’ ‘Yes!’”  I said, “Oh, okay.”

Anyway, in the scene, I’m on a parallel.  I’m an Egyptian architect, and I’m surveying.  I look up this way, and I’ve got a flag, and I look this way, and this way.  A good-looking guy, John Derek, played Joshua, and he breaks loose from his Egyptian captors.  So I jump off the parallel – the only reason I got the job is because I was always very well-built – and I grab him, hit him, knock him on the floor, and jump on him.  Then some other people grab him.  DeMille is sitting with his binder.  Looking through his viewfinder, he says, “You!  Move three inches to your left.”  So I knew he meant me.  I moved three inches, maybe five, maybe six.

Now when DeMille spoke, he had somebody put a mike in front of him.  When he sat, somebody put a stool under his ass.  So he’d never look [at anything].

That legend is really true?

Absolutely!  I was there.  So the mike is in front of him, and he said, “I said three inches, not three feet!”

I went insane.  I picked up John Derek, I pushed him like this.  I walked up to DeMille, I got very close to him.  I cupped my hands.  I said [loudly], “Mr. DeMille!”  Now this is a huge stage of donkeys and hundreds of people.  “Mr. DeMille!  Would you like to go over there and measure me?”

He was flabbergasted.  Prime ministers would come to see this man.  He was Mister Paramount.  And, anyway, I thought I was fired.  I came back the next day.  Next day, nobody spoke to me.  Not one actor.  Two days later, I’m walking on set.  DeMille looked at me and said, “Good morning, young man.”  Turned away and walked straight ahead.  I’m saying, “Wow, what goes with this?”  Nobody knew why I was still on the set, why I was still working.

Now, every actor in Hollywood worked on The Ten Commandments, and a lot of them weren’t even given screen credit.  I got paid $200 a day, six days a week, plus we always went overtime – $250 a day.  And I worked on it for three months.  I was making more money than John Carradine, who was an old friend of mine, more than Vincent Price.  I was papering my walls with checks from Paramount.  One day, the assistant director, a great guy, says, “Harry, I gotta let you go.  The front office is screaming about it.”  He’d told me this once before, about a month before.  He said, “Harry, we’ve got to let you go.”  Because they’d never put me on a weekly [deal].  They said, “Get rid of him, or he’s going to make [a fortune off of us].”

When I was fired by the assistant director, I climbed up to tell DeMille.  He was always up on a parallel.  By this time I’d grew to love the old man.  I really did.  I realized how incompetent he was!  I walked up and he waited, and then he looked and said, “Yes . . . young man?”  He always wanted to call me by name, but he could not remember my name.

I said, “Mr. DeMille, I just wanted to say goodbye and I wanted to thank you very much for just a great time.”  And I really meant it, in my heart.  I said, “It was a great experience.  I appreciate it so much.”

The assistant director was waiting at the bottom of the parallel.  He climbs up the ladder.  DeMille said, “Where is this young man going?”  And the assistant director looked at me, and looked at DeMille, and said, “Nowhere, sir.”

I stayed on the picture for another full month, at $250 a day overtime.

Here’s the end of the story.  Months later I’m walking through Paramount, on an interview for something, and as I’m walking out, walking towards me is Cecil B. DeMille and his film editor and somebody else.  He stopped, and he went like this [beckons].  I walked towards him.  He extended his hand and said, “Hello.  How are you?”  And then he looked very deeply into my eyes and said, “Is there anything I can do for you?”

I’m not very smart when it comes to that.  I said, “No, sir, but I thank you very much for the offer.”  He said okay.

As I walked away, I realized the whole thing.  DeMille, in those days, was probably in his sixties.  I was in my thirties.  I must’ve reminded him of someone he knew as a kid, who was a very good friend of his, or a relative.  I took DeMille out of the twentieth century and took him back to when he was a child, or a youngster.  We saw each other and he would sense-memory back to somebody in another life.  That’s the only reason he tolerated me, I suppose.

What made you think that?

Every time we spoke, he turned to his left, like there was a name on the tip of his tongue.  Like he wanted to call me John or Bill or something.

I see – that’s why he was always blocked on your name.

Yeah.  He was always busy, people talking to him, and when I spoke to him, all of a sudden everything evaporated and he just zeroed in on me for a moment.  And then he was back to [what he was doing].  So that’s the only logical conclusion I could come to.  Or maybe it was because I screamed at him.  I felt so secure, I got my own dressing room, and I changed a whole huge scene in the movie by telling the assistant director the dialogue was incorrect grammatically.  I brought my little immigrant mother on the stage and introduced my mom to Cecil B. DeMille.  “Madame, it’s such a pleasure meeting you.”  I felt very confident with the old man.

How did you get the part on Ben Casey?

There was a show called Medic, with Richard Boone.  I did one of the episodes.  It was a great show.  One of my better moments.  [A few years later] I was walking down the streets of MGM to go to my barber.  I had a barber there who used to cut my hair.  As I’m walking down the studio street, my agent walked up.  He said, “Hey, Harry, what are you doing?”  I told him [nothing].  He said, “Do you know Jim Moser?”  I said, “Yes.”  He produced and wrote Medic, and he produced Ben Casey and did the pilot.

Anyway, he arranged an interview for me.  It was on a Friday.  I’ll never forget this.  I went there and read for him and Matt Rapf and I forget the studio executive’s name.  I did four or five pilots prior to that, and you could almost tell when you had something.  When I got home I called my agent and I said, “I think we have a series.”

Monday, he called me and said, “They want you back for another reading.”

So I went back to the studio.  There was Vince Edwards, who I knew in New York City.  Knew him quite well.  They handed us each a script and we started reading.  And Jim Moser got out of the chair, he grabbed the scripts, threw them up in the air, and said, “That’s it.  You guys are the parts.”  That’s how I got it.

Landers and perpetually scowling Vince Edwards (right) on Ben Casey.

What was Vince Edwards like?

Amazing man.  One of the smartest, stupidest men I’ve ever known in my life.  Complete contradiction.  It’s too long to go into.  He was abusive to many people.  He was petty in many ways.  He was far more talented than he gave people a chance to realize.

He had a photographic memory.  Every now and then we’d have time to rehearse.  We’d sit around the table and read our scenes.  Vince would read a script once and he knew every line.  Every dot, every comma.  He knew everything.  Sam Jaffe and I had difficulty, especially with the latin terms.  Vince would just glance down and he’d get every paragraph, like that.  Jaffe and I used to look at each other and go, “Wow.”

It was also his downfall, because he never bothered to study, to learn his lines.  He was a much better actor than he gave himself a chance to be.  He had charm.  He had a great voice.  He sang very well.  He had an incredible sense of humor.  He was quick as a cat.  Very witty.

I’ve heard a couple of things about Edwards during the production of Ben Casey.  One was that he spent all his time at the racetrack.

Sure.  I’m directing one of the episodes, okay?  Now, Vince is an old friend of mine.  I knew him in New York City.  When he first came out here, he stayed at my house.  When he had an appendicitis attack, I got him to a doctor.  My mother used to feed him chicken soup.

Vince, lunchtime: “I’ll be back.”  He didn’t care who [was directing].  He was ruthless.  He’d go, and [after] the hour for lunch, “Where’s Vince?”  We had to shoot around him.  He’d show up around three, four o’clock.

We haven’t gotten in Franchot Tone.  What a man, what a man.  He was brilliant.  Do you know who he is?

He replaced Sam Jaffe as the senior doctor for the last season of the show.

Yeah.  Sam Jaffe left for two reasons.  It’s a sordid story.  But Franchot Tone was amazing.  He was the son of a doctor.  Very rich.  Responsible for the Group Theatre.  When they ran out of money, when they were doing Odets plays and all that, he would [write a check].

Now, I’ll tell you a story about him.  He would talk to no one.  It took months before he would relate to anyone in the cast.  On any level.  I became his buddy.  The reason?  Right before we’re shooting, he came out and said, “Harry, I understand you have a dressing room upstairs?”  I did.  I had three dressing rooms, one upstairs – the editors had their own private dressing room there – one on the stage, and one downstairs with Vince.  He said, “Can I have the key?”  He looked over, and there was a pretty little extra in the doorway.  So I slipped him the key.

After that we became very, very good friends, and he turned out to be a marvelous source of information about all the Group Theatre actors.  Tone was a total alcoholic.  He was a marvelous, compassionate, bright guy.  But when he came to the studio, the minute he passed the guard, the phone on the set would ring: “Watch out, Franchot’s on the way over.”  Franchot had a rented Chevrolet.  The sides were bent like an accordion.  He would hit the sides of the building: boom, boom, boom.  He’d get out, staggering.  He and his companion, carrying two big paper bags loaded with ice and whatever they were drinking.  Scotch.  Clink, clink, clink, went the bags.  They’d go into the room, and that was it.

One day, when I was directing the show, he looked at me and said, “Harry, you know, you do something that the other directors don’t do.”

I said, “What’s that, Franchot?”

He said, “You always have me seated when we’re in a scene.  Why do you do that?”

Well, I didn’t want to tell him that he was swaying in and out of focus all the time.  I said, “Well, Franchot, you’re the boss of the hospital and this guy is your subordinate, so it’s just proper etiquette.”

He said, “Oh, yes, dear boy, thank you, I see.”  With a little smirk on his face.

Franchot Tone as Dr. Freeland on Ben Casey.

I want to go back to Sam Jaffe.  I heard that he left Ben Casey because of conflicts with Vince Edwards.  Is that accurate?

Partially.  Yeah, I’d say it was accurate.  If Vince was in a bad mood – if you’re the star of the show, you’re a total, total dictator.  The atmosphere on a set is dictated by the star.  Vince was the boss.  And Vince usually was in a pretty good mood, but he had an assistant who worked for him, an ex-prizefighter.  What I’m going to tell you is too sordid, it’s such a cheap kind of a . . . oh, why not?  They would do thievery.  Christmastime, they would collect money to buy gifts for everyone.  They kept half the money.

But Edwards was making a fortune as the star of the show, right?

Yes.  He blew it all.  He owned an apartment house with Carol Burnett out in Santa Monica – they were business partners together.  Vince sold out his rights to get some more money to go to the track.  I’m at Santa Anita one day with Jack Klugman, and I go to the men’s room.  I look out and I see Vince walking towards the men’s room.  I don’t want to bump into him, so I made a sharp left back into the bathroom, got into a stall, locked the stall.  I was waiting for Vince’s feet to go out so I could leave, because he invariably hit you up for money.  If you were at the track, and you saw Vince coming towards you, you immediately pulled out like two twenty dollar bills and put it on the table.  Because he’d hit you up for money.  “See, Vince, that’s it.  That’s what’s left of my stake.  I came in with three hundred dollars,” and whatever.  Some bullshit.  And he knew it.  He owed me a lot of money.  I’m a schmuck.

So he really stole the Christmas gift money from the cast and crew of Ben Casey?

Yeah.  They would give people extra business.  You know what that is, an actor gets extra business?  He gets an increase in his pay.  It makes him eligible to become a member of the Guild.  So they would create extra business for extras, and if you did extra business you would pick up an extra hundred dollars.  So Benny Goldberg, his little thuggy partner, would collect the money.  It was petty.  I remember once – I don’t know why I’m telling you all this shit.  I can’t do it.  It’s too demeaning.  You’re too smooth.  No, it’s no good.

Well, it sounds as if Edwards had a very serious addiction.

Oh, enormous.  He had a huge problem gambling.

Do you think he liked doing Ben Casey?  Did he like acting, like being a star?

I don’t know.  Did he like doing it?  Sure.  He was making a lot of money.  There was an episode where – I’ll tell you this, I don’t care – Jerry Lewis was directing one of the episodes of Ben Casey.  He and Vince got into it.  Bing Crosby got on the phone – he was the boss, you know that, he owned the show – and Vince disappeared.  All of Vince’s lines went to me and Jaffe.  And Jerry Lewis directed the show without any problems.  We were all pros.  But he was a difficult guy in many ways, yes.  In many ways, no.  Instead of focusing on his acting, his focus was get it done and go to the track.

Did your earlier friendship mean that you were on better terms with Vince than the rest of the cast was?

Yeah.  By far.  Absolutely.  I could get away with murder with Vince.  He was afraid of me.

He was bigger than you, though.

Ah, he was full of shit.  He was blown up with drugs, but he had the wrists of a fifteen year-old girl.

What kind of drugs was he on?

I don’t know.  I think, in those days, enhancement drugs.

Steroids?

Yeah, steroids.  Oh, yeah, he was a two hundred-and-ten pound phony baloney.  But it was all right.  He was very smart.  Big ideas.  But a dumbbell.  Didn’t know how to treat people.  He believed that they tolerated and hated him.

But there was only one Ben Casey, and it was him.  Nobody could take that show over.  Nobody.  He was it.

I think that surly quality of his made the character, and the show, unique.  He wasn’t a wimp like Dr. Kildare.

Yeah.  I knew actors who were up for the role.  Russell Johnson, from Gilligan’s Island, was up for it, and two or three other actors.  But Vince got it, and was marvelous in it.

Did Jim Moser have a lot of involvement in Ben Casey?

No, outside of writing.  He was the producer, but he was never on the stage.  Matt Rapf was one of the producers.  They rarely came on the stage.  I think it was part of the caste system in Hollywood.  When you reach a certain level, you don’t go back.

Tell me about Sam Jaffe and Bettye Ackerman, who played Ben Casey’s leading lady.  Were they together before the show began?

Already married.  She was his student.  After Sam died, she moved to South Carolina.  She would come out here and she would call me and I would have lunch with her, maybe once or twice a year.  She became a Tennessee Williams type of lady.  She developed a slight little Southern accent.  She reverted back to her youth.  She was a marvelous lady.  Her brother was a doctor.  She was very well-schooled.

I became Sam Jaffe’s son in some ways.  Just chemistry, mutual likes, politics.  People we knew.  He’d always call me up: “Heshel, how are you?”  When he died, the whole town came out.

If people called you Hesh or Heshel, that makes me wonder: Is Harry Landers your real name?

No.  Harry Sorokin.  Landers is my mother’s maiden name.  It’s an old Russian name.  Seven children.  We all took my mother’s maiden name but one brother and the girls, because my father walked out on seven kids.  I, and my brothers, out of outrage and heartbreak about my father deserting us, disassociated ourselves from him.  A dreadful man, really, a very bad man.  But I loved him, in retrospect.

Let me try this one more time though: You said there were two reasons why Sam Jaffe left Ben Casey.  What was the other one?

It was Vince’s gofer, who was a rated prizefighter, one of the top fifteen, twenty, I think a lightweight.  Not a very nice man.  Jaffe, I realized, had developed an intense dislike for him.  And his dislike for Vince, as the years went on, increased, because Vince would do things that were not very nice.  Scream at a makeup man, just stuff that no gentleman of quality would do.

I haven’t ask you much about your character on Ben Casey, or what you did with it.

I don’t know, what’s your question?  How did I interpret the part?  I didn’t.  Well, I was the second-in-command.  Vince was the chief resident and I was the second in command of whatever the unit was, and I was just playing footsies to Vince.  He was the big wheel.  That’s all it was.

The classic “best friend” role?

Yes.  I was just his best friend on the series, and Jaffe’s good friend, but I didn’t have any – my part was indistinguishable.  Anybody could have phoned it in.  It was not a challenge.

Were you content to be in that kind of secondary role?

Sure!  They paid me very well.  I became very well-known, and if you’re rather well-known, you’re treated with a – it’s a great lifestyle.

The show was very popular.

Huge!  For two years we were number one, number two.  I remember once in Louisiana, visiting my ex-wife in Baton Rouge, walking down the street and people screamed.  They would tear the clothes off you.  You’d walk into a restaurant here, you couldn’t pay the tab: “Please come back.”  You go to a movie, you never wait in line.  You’re ushered right in.  I was a half-assed movie star for a while.  I was halfway up the ladder.  I like that title.  I’ll write a book: Halfway Up the Ladder.

Do you remember any other Ben Casey episodes that used you prominently?

“Minus That Rusty Old Hacksaw.”  Gloria Swanson played my mother.  First time I came on the set, I probably had an eight o’clock call, and she was probably there since five in the morning, being made up.  When people introduced themselves, she would extend her hand.  People would kiss her hand.  I never kissed anybody’s hand.  So she extended her hand and I took it and said, “How do you do?”  I shook it.

Slowly but surely, and I say this without any reservations, she fell madly in love with me.  Everybody in the studio thought I was having sex with Gloria Swanson.  Totally impossible.  She was old enough to be my grandmother.  Last time I saw Gloria Swanson, she gave me a big hug and a kiss on the cheek, and she took my hand and squeezed it.  I opened it and in it was a piece of paper, and she said, “I suppose you can’t be reached?”  And I said no.  She said, “Here’s my phone number.  Call me.  Please call me, Harry.”  That was the end of Gloria Swanson.  I wasn’t very bright about those things.

In one of the episodes, I’m dying of some sort of unknown disease, and they have a big microscope and they look at my body for what was making me sick, a pinprick or whatever.  There were a couple of other episodes [in which Ted Hoffman figured prominently], where Vince was ill or he didn’t show up or whatever.  But Vince was very zealous about his position in the show and who he was.  There was a while – I don’t mind saying this – where you could not hire an actor as tall as Vince, or taller.  They once hired an actor who was taller, and when they were in a scene together, Vince sat or the other actor sat.  It was never eyeball to eyeball, because Vince would not put up with any kind of competition.

Gloria Swanson and Harry Landers on Ben Casey (“Minus That Rusty Old Hacksaw,” March 15, 1965).

You and Vince both directed episodes of Ben Casey.

He was a very good director.  He was a better director than I was.  For one reason: Vince had a photographic mind, as I told you.  He was mechanical.  All of the actors who I ever directed loved me.  I’m the best acting teacher, best acting director in the world, including Elia Kazan.  I’m brilliant at it.  But I never really mastered the camera.  I should have gotten the cameraman aside, but I did not; I winged it with the camera, and it showed.  But, you know, they hired me.  I did three shows, so they must have saw something they liked.  I was adequate.  Out of Ben Casey, I got a Death Valley Days to direct.

Did you do any more directing after that?

No.  I’m the second laziest man in America, and probably the most undisciplined person that ever lived.  If I had disciplined myself, I would have had a very large career.

Here’s a TV Guide profile of you from the Ben Casey era. I’m curious as to how much they got right.  Were you in fact an unofficial technical advisor on Action in the North Atlantic (1943)?

That’s true.

And your wife was Miss Louisiana of 1951, 1952, and 1953?

Yes.  But I’ve been divorced for years.  If I had a brain in my head I would have stayed married.  I would’ve been the governor of Louisiana years ago.

Is it true that you got the audition for Ben Casey because you saw Jim Moser stranded on the side of the road after his car broke down, and stopped to help him?

That was made up by the publicity guy.

Do you remember doing Star Trek?

Yeah.  I was a guest star, and it was a dreadful experience for me.  I had just got out of the hospital.  I’d had a lung removed, and I was not steady on my feet.  Usually I was one take, two takes, print.  I was always great with dialogue.  This time I was not good.  The producer, who produced Ben Casey, insisted I do the job.  He said, “Oh, Harry, you can do it.”

Oh, right, Fred Freiberger produced the final season of Star Trek.

Yeah.  What a guy!  He was a member of the Actors Lab.  But I was not happy with that show.  It was not one of my better [performances].

Why did you have a lung removed?

I was on location doing a movie with Elvis Presley.  Charro, I think it was.  I was working in Death Valley.  I was a gym rat, and I came back and I felt a pull in my right lung, and I had it x-rayed and I had a growth.  It was not a good moment for the doctors or Harry.  They could have treated me medicinally, but in order to play it safe, they decided to remove the upper right lung.  This involved a lot of money.  Maybe they were right, but I don’t think so.  An incredible, painful nuisance.  They cracked every rib in my body.

Landers with William Shatner (left) on Star Trek (“Turnabout Intruder,” the final episode, June 3, 1969)

Is that why you didn’t act much in the years immediately following the Star Trek episode?  You kind of disappeared for a long time.

I just didn’t want to work.  I don’t know why.  I had a lot of money.  In fact, I even turned down a lead opposite Shelley Winters in some movie she was doing.  I always felt that once you reach a certain plateau, which I did, people always want you.  What I didn’t realize was: out of sight, out of mind.  All of a sudden it was like, who? what?  So I just sort of disappeared.  It was a period of eight, ten years where I didn’t work.  I didn’t care.  I don’t think I had an agent.  I didn’t bother.

What were you doing during that period?

Collecting art, and selling art, which I do today.  I’m a huge art collector.

What kind of art?

All kinds.  I’m very good with antique art, old art.  I know the Picasso, Chagall, Miro, Calder and all that stuff, but I’m partially colorblind, so I stay away from that.  I buy antique art.

You mentioned that Jack Klugman was a friend.  Is that why you appeared several times on Quincy?

Yes.  I didn’t want to do them.  Walking by Universal, going in and out, Jack saw me and he stopped.  “Harry, get in here!”  He said, “Please do one of the shows.”  They were minor parts.  I just did them to please him, and I enjoyed every moment of it.

Finally, I guess we should talk about Taster’s Choice.

Out of the blue my agent called me: “They want you to do a commercial.”  I said, “Okay, I’ve done a few commercials.  Quite a few, in fact.  What is it?”  One of the sponsors’ wives saw me in one of the episodes of Ben Casey.  I did the video version here, on tape: “Hi, my name is Harry Landers, and I drink Taster’s Choice coffee because it gives me diarrhea.  Taster’s Choice coffee comes in small packets.  It’s instant brewed coffee.  It’s fucking delicious!”  I do a lot of improvising.  So, I did it, and then they flew me to Chicago to do the audio version.  It was on the air so often, it got to the point where the disc jockeys would say, “Who the hell is Harry Landers?”

This interview was conducted in Sherman Oaks, California, on April 30, 2010.  The image at the top is from The Untouchables (“Portrait of a Thief,” April 7, 1960). I’m not entirely clear on what this is, but it features Harry in a recent acting role.

Sidney

“Sidney Lumet was wonderful.  He does homework like no other director, and he is the warmest guy.  Everybody was ‘my love,’ and ‘you gorgeous wonderful thing,’ and rehearsals were filled with kissing and hugging and wild exclamations of joy.  Actors have never been more loved than when they were loved by Sidney Lumet.”

– Reginald Rose, in Jeff Kisseloff’s The Box: An Oral History of Television, 1929-1961

He was supposed to last forever.  His fraternal twin among the live television-era directors, Arthur Penn, was frail and mostly out of the limelight during his final decades; but Sidney Lumet kept making movies, and seemed to be everywhere.  His last movie, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, came only four years ago.  A good one to go out on, it found new wrinkles in the worn-out caper genre (was that suburban mini-mall jewel heist the cinema’s first?), and reimagined faded ingenue Marisa Tomei as a fortysomething sex symbol and a sought-after actress.

More than that, Lumet was a boon to the film historian: modest, accessible, efficient, always willing to sit for an interview.  No surprise that he turned out to be one of the subjects who sat for a video obituary for the New York Times.  When he didn’t show for a widely publicized screening of 12 Angry Men introduced by Sonia Sotomayor last fall – the new Supreme Court justice has often cited Lumet’s debut film as an inspiration – I knew we were in trouble.

I’ve already written this next part so many times, in obituaries for Penn and for others, that I don’t want to belabor it again.  But let’s lay it out before we plunge in: Lumet’s early career in television has been, and will continue to be, ignored, glossed over, or reported inaccurately in the tributes.  The Times wrote that Lumet directed the live television version of 12 Angry Men as well as the film.  But the former belonged to Franklin Schaffner, a fact that Lumet pointed out at every opportunity, and yet it took the paper of record eight days to notice and correct that.

Most of the shows themselves are locked away in the vaults or lost.  We don’t even have a good list of them.  The obits threw around a total of 200 live broadcasts (Lumet’s own estimate?) but at the moment the Internet Movie Database lists only about fifty.  The on-line catalogs of the Paley Center and the UCLA Film and Television Archive, and my own unpublished research, contribute a few more, but that still leaves the majority unidentified.

Rather than dwell on that, I want to take a close look at a few of Lumet’s live television dramas that are accounted for and extant.  Since his death on April 9, I’ve been watching some of Lumet’s segments of the dramatic hour sponsored alternately by Goodyear (The Goodyear Playhouse) and Alcoa Aluminum (The Alcoa Hour); specifically, six of the twelve segments that Lumet directed for this umbrella anthology, a linear descendant of the Philco-Goodyear Playhouse (which yielded “Marty”), between the fall of 1955 and the spring of 1956.  Lumet’s Goodyears and Alcoas were among his first hour-long dramas after a period of directing less prestigious (but no less formally challenging) half-hour genre shows.  They were also his final works for television prior to stepping onto the set of 12 Angry Men in June 1956.

“Sidney didn’t like talking to the actors on the loudspeaker, so he would tear down the spiral staircase to the stage, talk to the actor, and tear back up the staircase.  O. Tamburri, our TD [technical director], once said to me, ‘If Sidney does that a little faster, he’s gonna screw himself into the ceiling.’”

– Philip Barry, Jr., associate producer of The Alcoa Hour  / The Goodyear Playhouse, in The Box

“The Mechanical Heart” (November 6, 1955), Lumet’s Goodyear Playhouse debut, is a prototypical mid-fifties anthology drama.  It concerns a mid-level toy manufacturer, Steve Carter (Ralph Bellamy), who operates on a razor-thin margin and faces bankruptcy when a complicated three-way deal unravels.  The only way he can see to survive is to steal the sole major client of a small-time competitor (Jack Warden), who considers him a friend.  The script, by a minor writer named Alfred D. Geto, is an obvious knock-off of Rod Serling’s “Patterns”; it considers some of the same ethical dilemmas faced by corporate climbers in the postwar boom, but with little of Serling’s intensity or ambiguity.

Lumet’s chief contributions to “The Mechanical Heart” are to shape the performances, and then to avoid distracting from them with fancy cutting or camera movements.  Many key scenes (like the one pictured below) play out in long takes with a stationary camera.  Lumet’s self-effacing staging is not an absence of style, but an aesthetic choice not to foreground content over technique.  At this point in their careers, Lumet’s approach can be placed at an opposite pole as that of John Frankenheimer, another live television wunderkind who was busy exploring the technical possibilities of the medium – unusual lenses, showy camera moves, rapid cuts – without always worrying whether the material justified them.

Prominent among the supporting cast of “The Mechanical Heart” are three of the future 12 Angry Men (two more than Schaffner’s version contained), and all of them – Edward Binns, Jack Klugman, and Warden – do terrific work.  Viewers who remember Klugman from his hambone Quincy days, or even his full-throttle guest spots on The Twilight Zone and Naked City, just a few years after this piece, will be startled by his restraint in “The Mechanical Heart.”  When Carter suggests a shady maneuver to Klugman’s character, the company accountant, he replies, “But Steve . . . I don’t know.”  The obvious choice would be to inflect the line with uncertainty or unease, but Klugman offers it as a simple statement of fact: his character literally doesn’t know what his boss should do.

One can sense Lumet working with the actors to make intellectual, rather than instinctive, choices in interpreting the material.  Warden’s habit of repeatedly wiping the back of his neck with his handkerchief is such a choice.  The gesture conveys his character’s nervous, underdog status, and adds a bit of atmosphere – it’s hot and humid in those midtown offices in the summer – and of course Warden would reuse it in 12 Angry Men.  A more ambiguous touch comes in a later scene in which Klugman’s character again questions Carter’s ethics.  “What’s the matter, Greenfield?” Bellamy sneers, with an ugly emphasis on the man’s name, and Greenfield comes back with just, “Aww, Steve.”  Klugman delivers that simple line with a note of weary disappointment, then moves into an uninflected recital of some financial details.  The implication of anti-semitism probably wasn’t spelled out in the script and, indeed, Lumet is so constitutionally unsuited to beating any idea to death that one can’t be entirely certain it exists within the show, either.

Lumet’s second Goodyear show was a light comedic caper called “One Mummy Too Many” (November 20, 1956), with Tony Randall as an American air conditioner salesman in Egypt who stumbles into a mystery of stolen sarcophagi.  Lumet probably had to take whatever script fell into his slots on this series, but the change of pace undoubtedly suited him, just as he would later take pains to avoid being pigeonholed in any particular cinematic genre.  Referring to the 1968 black comedy Bye Bye Braverman (which I find hilarious, but which many, including Lumet, thought too heavy), Lumet said that he took a long time to figure out how to direct comedy, and didn’t succeed with it until Murder on the Orient Express.  But “One Mummy,” which bears some tonal similarities to Lumet’s hit 1974 film, is an agreeable trifle in which the three stars – Randall, Eva Gabor, and Henry Jones – effectively pass the fun they seem to be having along to the audience.

Lumet experiments with formal strategies for creating humor in “One Mummy,” especially in his use of depth of field to convey to the audience a punchline to which the characters remain oblivious.  In one scene, Gabor’s ingenue explains to Randall’s milquetoast hero that the theft of a crate will mean his certain demise; in the background, unseen by either of them, porters enter and remove the crate in question.  Another bit of slapstick, constructed in the same way, can be encapsulated in a single frame requiring no caption.

“The Trees” (December 4, 1955) is a lesser entry in another quintessential genre of early live television, the tenement drama.  It’s perfect for Lumet, whose films famously teemed with the eccentric street life of Manhattan.  Jerome Ross’s sentimental story concerns a neighborhood effort to raise money to plant trees along a slum sidewalk, which is threatened by the actions of, among others, a young hoodlum (Sal Mineo) and a genteel older woman (Frances Starr) angling to sell out and move to the suburbs.  Lumet again favors long takes, but this time with a more peripatetic camera, which roves back and forth between rival camps that group and regroup on opposite sides of the street.  The primary challenge of 12 Angry Men would be choreographing the movements of the twelve actors within a confined space, and “The Trees” shows Lumet experimenting with ways to fill the frame with people, grouping and regrouping his large cast in clusters that emphasize the cramped nature of the urban setting.

“Man on Fire” (March 4, 1956) fumbles a good, topical idea through miscasting and an underdeveloped script (by the West Coast team of Malvin Wald and Jack Jacobs).  It’s a proto-Kramer vs. Kramer, a study of a successful divorced man (Tom Ewell) who cracks up when he loses custody of his only son.  The role called for a sensitive, versatile actor like Warden or Klugman or George Grizzard (another Lumet favorite, the star of his final Goodyear, “The Sentry”); instead, Lumet found himself saddled with Tom Ewell, an unlikely stage and film star thanks to the recent hit The Seven-Year Itch.

The inexpressive Ewell, whom Lumet had known but not necessarily admired at the Actors Studio (he relates an encounter with Ewell there in mildly derogatory terms in his Archive of American Television interview), is a sponge for all the free-floating self-pity in Wald’s and Jacobs’s treatment; in his hands a character who should have been sympathetic turns repellent.  It’s the only wholly unsuccessful performance in any of the six Lumet shows discussed here – although, in general, Lumet seems to have responded to Alcoa/Goodyear’s habit of hiring Hollywood stars by turning his attention more to the supporting casts, comprised of actors he had used dozens of times on Danger or You Are There.  (In “Man on Fire,” the one effective scene belongs to Patricia Barry, the wife of Alcoa/Goodyear’s associate producer.  Usually a polished ingenue, Barry shows a vulnerable side that I had not seen before when as she gently fends off a sloppy pass by Ewell, who plays her boss.  Barry’s character, a career girl, explains that she has several boyfriends, none of whom she loves, and supposes she’ll marry one of them because it’s what’s done.  Lumet seems more engaged by this speech, and Barry’s wistful reading of it, than anything else in the show; as a director, he always picked his battles.)

Lumet had attended the Actors Studio briefly, but he detested Method affectations.  If there is a single unifying element among his live television work, it is the consistent naturalism in the performance styles, down to the smallest bit parts.  Any deviation from that principle tended to occur at the top.  Lumet’s results with imported stars were mixed: a failure with Tom Ewell; a split decision on Ralph Bellamy, who tears into “The Mechanical Heart” with an atypical intensity but little nuance; and a stunning success with the ingeniously reteamed ’30s Warner Bros. contract players who headlined his next segment.

“His big theory, since most people had ten or twelve-inch sets, was close-up, close-up, close-up.  I would argue with him a lot, because if everything’s going to be close-up, there’s no point of emphasis.  When you really need it . . . you’ve used it up.”

 – Sidney Lumet, referring to Alcoa/Goodyear producer Herbert Brodkin, in his Archive of American Television interview

“Doll Face” (March 18, 1956), set entirely in an Atlantic City hotel, concerns a faded beauty queen (Glenda Farrell) who returns to the current edition of the pageant that crowned her back in 1930.  In tow are her surly adult daughter (Nancy Malone) and genial husband (Frank McHugh), who conveniently is vying for a promotion at a business conference held at the same hotel.  This script, also by Jerome Ross, contains as many cliches as “The Trees,” but it offers greater emotional possibilities for Lumet to explore.  Lumet tamps down his actors, per usual, and ensures that each of the three main characters – any one of whom could turn grotesque, as Ewell’s distraught dad does in “Man on Fire” – is recognizably human and sympathetic.  In “Doll Face” Farrell is not restrained, but she also does not turn the title character into a caricature (as a more obvious casting choice, like Shirley Booth or Joan Blondell, might have).  No one overacts in any of these early Lumet shows.  In part that reflects Lumet’s skill in working with actors, but it is also a consequence of his formal choices.  Farrell benefits enormously from Lumet’s theory of the close-up; when he finally deploys them at the climax, her character’s distress as she is made to see herself as others see her is quite moving.

In “Doll Face” Lumet repeats a composition from “One Mummy Too Many” almost exactly: a person leans into the foreground from the left, directing the viewer’s eye to action in the middle distance toward the center and right of the frame.  In “One Mummy” the effect was comedic; here it is expository (the man at left pops in to shush loud revelers).

In the space of four months, Lumet’s playful use of depth of field in “One Mummy” has evolved into a powerful, coherent compositional strategy for “Doll Face.”  In a careful ballet of performers and cameras, the three principals group and regroup themselves into three-dimensional tableaux, again and again, each time with a different actor occupying the foreground, middle, and background space.  “Doll Face” is essentially a three-character family drama, and Lumet uses dimensionality to signify the shifting emotional dynamic between father, mother, and child.  It is the same kind of conceptual – a skeptic might say schematic or overly intellectual – strategy that Lumet would later apply to his filmmaking, as with (to use Lumet’s own example from the Times video obit) the selection of a red building as a location in Prince of the City to presage, almost subliminally, a coming bloodletting.

Chronologically, I have skipped over “Tragedy in a Temporary Town” (February 19, 1956), which is both the most famous of the Alcoa/Goodyear hours and the most directorially accomplished of the Lumet efforts in this survey.  Another civics lesson from Reginald Rose, “Town” is typically pedagogic in its argument but less compromised by censorship than most.  Lumet would have brought his best to the table before he even opened the script, for it was he who had produced Rose’s first teleplay on Danger in 1951.  In the five years hence, each had risen to the top ranks of his profession in the New York television world, and it would be Rose who would handpick Lumet to direct his screenplay for 12 Angry Men.

A heated study of mob violence in an itinerant, working-class community of dam builders and their families, “Tragedy in a Temporary Town” has little to say on the subject of lynching (spoiler alert: it’s bad) that wasn’t already covered in The Ox-Bow Incident.  But when you parse Rose’s narrative as an allegory for McCarthyism, its sly cynicism and political courage become more evident.  Just as American communism was an empty threat and HUAC a hysterical overcorrection, so respectively are the attack on a teenaged girl in “Town” (a man barely touches her shoulder before running off) and the hyperactive shantytown kangaroo court that forms in response.  This penny ante inquisition is ridiculous on his face.  The girl never saw her attacker’s face and heard him say only one syllable, so the doofus vigilantes require every male in camp to utter the word “Hey” and press the young woman to try to make an impossible identification.  The poor girl (Betty Lou Keim) is more thoroughly victimized by her defenders than by her putative attacker.

Rose scores his other major rhetorical point in his depiction of the ostensible and none-too-subtly named hero Alec Beggs (Lloyd Bridges), who is scarcely better than his opposites.  Beggs abstains from the mob shenanigans but also declines to stick up for the Puerto Rican family who are marked from the beginning as inevitable scapegoats.  When Beggs finally screws up his courage to confront the mob and disperses them in shame, it’s only after they have achieved their bloody catharsis by beating the shit out of the innocent Puerto Rican boy (Rafael Campos) with a thick stick of firewood.  Beggs’s ineffectual liberalism and hypocrisy point a finger at various players on different sides of the blacklist, and the provocative casting of Lloyd Bridges (a HUAC friendly witness) must have resonated with Lumet (a narrow escapee of the blacklist, compelled at one point to grovel before clearance thug Harvey Matusow).  Lumet was too professional to have tormented Bridges with his informer status, but still one would love to know just how much of the script’s subtext was articulated between star and director.

“Town” finds Lumet at his most expressive and illustrates a movement toward a somewhat bolder compositional style.  Many of his images here (above and below, for instance) are more painterly than anything attempted in “The Mechanical Heart” or “One Mummy Too Many.”  Lumet orchestrates complex crowd scenes, photographing some with a bird’s-eye camera, all of which must have given Herbert Brodkin fits.  The episode’s nighttime setting all but compelled Lumet toward dramatic extremes of light and shadow.  Lumet illuminates the lynch mob finale in part with the actual headlights of the vigilantes’ automobiles.  Earlier, amid the harsh blacks and whites, there is one moment where Lumet flouts half a dozen tenets of television lighting and achieves a backlit effect unlike anything I’ve observed in a kinescope (or even a filmed episode).

During his climactic speech (“you’re all pigs”), Bridges begins to demolish the scenery – literally – carrying his intensity beyond the level upon which he and Lumet had agreed during rehearsals.  But Lumet has built the tension so effectively to this point that “Town” can withstand such a volcanic release.  As in some of Lumet’s other Alcoa/Goodyears, the supporting cast appears to be working in a different register – more detailed, more restrained, consciously (even self-consciously) resisting obvious choices.  At first I had a hard time figuring out why Milton Selzer, usually one of Lumet’s underplaying ringers, is so atypically twitchy in as one of the nastier vigilantes.  Then it occurred to me that actor and director probably agreed that Selzer should play the character as a closeted or self-hating homosexual – something that’s not in the text at all, and only perceptible one screen if you’re looking for it.  Jack Warden, quietly upstaging Bridges, plays the lynch mob leader with a maddening calm and a visible irritation towards the more voluble hotheads.  There’s a moment where Warden’s character asserts his authority by placing a hand on Beggs’s chest; Bridges casually removes it and Warden barely reacts.  The gesture tells volumes about both characters: they will not lose their cool over unimportant things.

“Town” offers the clearest examples of Lumet’s strategy of expressing concise ideas through concrete filmmaking choices.  His control extends beyond acting and camera movement all the way down into costuming and sound design.  One of my favorite elements in “Town” is the baggy black V-necked sweater that Warden wears; a good fit for Kim Novak’s Bell Book and Candle closet, it’s the absolute opposite of what you’d expect a redneck brute to be caught dead in.  The earlier Alcoa-Goodyear segments are marred by cliched symphonic scores (by Glenn Osser, moonlighting as “Arthur Meisel”); in “Town” Lumet, weaned on Tony Mottola’s minimalist guitar scores for Danger, managed to banish Meisel and eschew almost all musical accompaniment.  For much of “Town,” the only background noise is the ambient sound of crickets.  The most powerful element of the final image, in which Beggs’s son carries off the maimed boy, is its utter silence.

Note Milton Selzer’s effeminate gesture (center), and Jack Warden’s sweater (right).

“People always think that the smaller a thing is, the simpler it is.  It is quite the reverse.”

– Sidney Lumet, in a 1965 interview with Robin Bean

Like Lumet, John Frankenheimer released his first feature film in 1957.  But The Young Stranger was a flop, and Frankenheimer retreated back to television to lick his wounds.  Meanwhile, the thirty-three year-old Lumet collected an Oscar nominationand became a hot property in multiple media.  He made three more movies before the end of the decade – but returned to television, as Frankenheimer had, whenever he wasn’t shooting one of them.  He must have loved it enough to incur the slight risk that, even with the nomination, he’d be tainted as a television guy.  Lumet got the prestige assignments, of course: back to work for Herbert Brodkin to fight over close-ups on Studio One and then Playhouse 90; literary adaptations for David Susskind on the retooled Kraft Theatre and then Play of the Week; a legendary two-part Reginald Rose teleplay about Sacco and Vanzetti.  He stopped in 1960 with an adaptation of the stage version of Rashomon, and more importantly, a four-hour “Iceman Cometh” that recorded Jason Robards, Jr.’s legendary Off-Broadway performance and earned raves.

But the movies beckoned, and live television was a dying medium anyway.  Like Frankenheimer, Lumet made his exeunt in 1960, bequeathing a final socially conscious script that he had developed with Reginald Rose, Play of the Week’s “Black Monday,” to Ralph Nelson.  (I’m not counting the autumnal return for a few episodes of 100 Centre Street, even though I’m sort of curious about them.)  The films remain underrated and many of them are overlooked – Lumet has yet to fully emerge from the ghetto of “Strained Seriousness” into which Andrew Sarris dumped him in The American Cinema back in 1968.  The tendency to ignore, or damn with faint praise, directors who were catholic in their choice of material and mise-en-scene – Huston, Kazan, Lumet – persists.  Along with, or more than, the established classics, I’m partial to That Kind of Woman, Fail-Safe, The Hill, The Deadly Affair, and Lovin’ Molly.  Some of those are no less scarce than the television episodes I’ve written about here.  Seek them out.