BEEN CATCHING Peter Gunn on the tube lately, shows I haven’t seen in nearly 60 years.
The last time I saw these yarns I was 6 or 7, working on figuring out the world from North 64th Street, West Philadelphia. I’m sure it was the music that lured me, that unforgettable tune composed by Henry Mancini.
I’d crank the selector dial to Channel 6 and sit cross-legged on the living room floor, see what Peter Gunn was up to in that black-and-white tube world.
I was too young to appreciate what an improbable setup he had going for him. How is it the bar where Gunn hangs out—Mother’s—is a hole in the wall with a lousy five or six tables, but a swinging 7-piece jazz band and a torch singer to boot?
Hip customers sit around all night snapping their fingers. The singer, Edie Hart, even as a kid I knew her middle name had to be Wow, and that she’d be my type. What’s this babe doing in a dump like Mother’s? Total receipts for the night must be under three bucks, somehow the place makes payroll, Edie never moves on.
Edie lives to see Peter Gunn walk through the door. Her eyes light up and flash out the Morse code for gorgeous squared.
She sings while Gunn chats up Mother about the case he’s working on. Mother’s a tough, beamy old broad with a heart of gold, and a mug that makes you think you’ve wandered into a drag show starring James Arness, Marshall Matt Dillon from Gunsmoke.
Gunn goes up onto the roof to smoke a cigarette. Edie finishes her set and meets him up there. Gunn chats up Edie about the case he’s working on. She’s his match and then some, often taking the lead in an effortlessly clever repartee steaming with sexual tension. Edie’s breathless voice and lips hover a few inches from Gunn’s, she doesn’t seem to mind his bad cigarette breath.
A little smooching and he’s off to the other side of the river. That’s where the baddest thugs and bosses operate, always the other side of this unnamed river. I wondered if The Naked City might be over there, a crime show that ran on the same network.
After touching base with Edie—first base—Gunn’s off to snoop around a bit more. He punches a few thugs who make the mistake of pointing their prize-fighter noses at him, those dented, off-center beaks so common to the genre.
Gunn fights his way through the hired muscle, stuns a crime boss with a revolver chop to the back of the neck, next thing you know he drops by Edie’s place after midnight, she makes him scrambled eggs while holding him fast in the female gaze. What guy doesn’t want this life?
Peter Gunn was a great success, despite that Gunn was too conventionally good-looking to be a private eye. His good grooming never suited the role, either. Just look at him. He’s that guy with a desk job at the Better Business Bureau. The only thing in that pocket he’s pointing at you is the homeowner’s policy he wants to sell you.
Unless Edie’s around, in which case I’ll give you another guess.
Tony DePaul, February 10, 2019, Cranston, Rhode Island, USA
Peter Gunn was magic. The guys in Niagara U. were all trying to imitate Gunn’s look. The haircut was copied, narrow suit pants showed up in classes. At parties, Shelly Manne was playing Mancini’s incredibly cool number.
Everyone wished for a Mother’s, in the then-sleazy downtown Niagara Falls. Peter Gunn started cool, without knowing it. I can catch the show sometimes at 2am on Decades. It has one leg now, but it brings back great memories.
Well said, Alix. I’ve been watching Gunn on Amazon Prime. They’ve got Route 66, too!
Route 66! Great wring, acing, Great American drama! Don’t know if it stands up to modern sensibilities, but I loved it as a kid and it seemed important.
One of the few shows I’m aware of where David Janssen played a bad guy. A real bad guy, as opposed to the falsely accused “bad guy” of The Fugitive.
Tony, oh the memories! My Dads favotite actor! Thx for the memories!
Gunn was cool, all right. But he needed a rougher-looking mug, what the bride calls the ugly-handsome man thing.
Otherwise, Gunn isn’t convincing as a guy who came up hard on the other side of the river. Or Mother’s side, for that matter.
There’s a whiff of Minnesota on Gunn… I fear his birth name might have been Gunnarsson.
Seems like that’s your dream life in a nutshell Tony. You even got the dream girl! 😉
Ha! I said the same thing to her yesterday, Teresa. In the Peter Gunn post I wanted to publish a photo of her in her 20’s, she said, no, too racy.
Same shape face as Edie, that’s, ahem… what I thought was worth showing.
Tony, I love your description of Peter Gunn. When I was a kid, back in the Stone Age, that was one of my favorite shows, along with the George Reeves Superman. I saw a couple of episodes of each again about five years ago, and they seemed so cheesy–except for Mancini’s wonderful music! You were evidently a more perceptive kid than I was, because none of your very excellent questions popped into my young head. I suppose Hollywood could do a remake of it, but I don’t think it would have worked without the studied nonchalance of Craig Stevens.
Ed, the thing I love about that whole era in TV is that everything was low-budget, not terribly well done, but so much fun nonetheless. In a way, the audience was a part of the production. Nothing worked without audience buy-in.
Superman flying through the air looked like what it was: a doughy guy on wires with a fan blowing on him, but it was the coolest thing we ever saw! The opening to The Twilight Zone is so cheesy it’s charming. Most of the Peter Gunn plots were preposterous, but with consent from the audience they really worked as 25 minutes of entertainment.
Sorry, had to youtube it to cement the memory…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oysMt8iL9UE
Oh yeah, great show for the impressionable ten year old. We knew the wild west was gone, but we could all be private investigators, catch the wise guys, make a fortune and get the sexy broads.
Peter Gunn, Edie, the perfect them song. Things that shaped my young fantasy fires. Still work, too.
Somewhere around here I think I still have the album.
Vinyl’s coming back, maybe I’ll try to dig it out.
Henry Mancini’s score for “Peter Gunn” is still classic. I wanted to play guitar just to be able to play the Peter Gunn theme. Hard driving, racy, no prisoners taken. Classy. Brash. Smooth. Rough. How the heck did Mancini compose such a tune?! Two minutes, forty-nine seconds, starting with the sticks, lead guitar charging into the beat, drum kit discharging fully, the brass section joining in like a smooth shot of the finest Scotch you could ever quaff down, and the whole theme is gliding down the road under a hot sun like a finely tuned 1958 MERCURY MONTCLAIR SUPER MARAUDER COUPE.
Designed by Bill Stroppe with a high-performance, triple carburetor & intake manifold set up, it enabled the optional 430 CI V-8 engine to produce 400 HP.
Yeah: I can see Edie very comfortably riding shot-gunn in it. Shades are mandatory.
Great image! Yeah, what a work of genius. That’s why he’s a legend.