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88 | Sight&Sound | April 2020PETER GUNN
Blake Edwards; US 1958-61; Amazon Prime.
Painstaking craftsmanship, long years
labouring in the garret to produce a work of
unprecedented genius, are all very well, but
more and more I find I lean toward the quick ’n’
dirty – to the pulp writers and B directors, the
Georges Simenons and Joseph H. Lewises, who
ignore the dictates of art in favour of budget,
deadline and audience appeal, and once in a
while happen to knock off a masterpiece.
Peter Gunn – which is now on Amazon Prime- ran for 114 episodes over three seasons. Even
at a tight 26 minutes or so an episode, that’s a
lot of plot and dialogue to be churning out, but
for the most part it feels remarkably slick and
unhurried. Blake Edwards – who’s credited as
creator and producer: in effect, the showrunner - seems to have worked on the assumption
that the important thing is to establish style
and mood, and not worry too much about
minor details like plot and emotion. (It’s the
same logic that has convinced generations
of impressionable youth that there might be
anything in the characters of Edwards’s 1962
Breakfast at Tiffany’s to like or emulate.)
Peter Gunn is a private eye in a city that’s
presumably Los Angeles, though I don’t think
it’s ever named. Edwards actually said out loud
that he modelled Gunn on Cary Grant, and Grant
was gracious enough, or incentivised enough, to
show up for publicity shots. The man given the
unenviable task of trying to live up to this hype
was Craig Stevens, a minor but maybe rising
film star – he’d had a small but crucial role in
Otto Preminger’s noir Where the Sidewalk Ends
(1950), as the grifter Dana Andrews’s brutal cop
accidentally kills, and just before Gunn he’d been
second-billed in Buchanan Rides Alone (1958),
the last of the Randolph Scott-Budd Boetticher
westerns. Of course, Stevens is no Cary Grant – of
course! – but there is a superficial, stunt-double
resemblance, underlined by some sharply cut
suits (references to Gunn’s dress-sense crop
up fairly regularly), and at times he seems
to be doing a passable impression of Grant’s
accent. In another setting, perhaps Stevens
would have seemed merely stolid, but here you
can read him as imperturbable, even cool.
The context is, above all, jazz. Henry Mancini
contributed the driving, bass- and brass-heavy
theme tune and some cool, atmospheric
background music; there always seems to be a
band or a jukebox playing. Gunn works mostly
out of a bar called Mother’s, run in the first season
by Hope Emerson, the ex-strongwoman who was
a terrifying female heavy in Cry of the City (1948)
and lifted Spencer Tracy over her head in Adam’s
Rib (1949). Mother’s has a resident band with a
blonde chantooze called Edie (Lola Albright),
who’s Pete’s girl; she does a song most episodes,
in between backchat with Pete about whether
he’s actually her boyfriend and whether he
wants to come over to her place tonight. A lot of
Gunn’s cases take him into a world of music and
general hepness, and aficionados will recognise
some of the players who crop up – the trumpeter
Shorty Rogers and Larry Bunker, who drummed
for Bill Evans in the 60s. An LP of music from
the show topped the US jazz charts for a while.
Apart from Edie, Pete’s main relationship is
with Lieutenant Jacoby (Herschel Bernardi),
a harassed police detective in what appears
to be a criminally undermanned local police
department; he complains a lot about Pete
bothering him for favours and stretching the
law, but given how often Pete cracks big cases
or pulls him out of jams that seems ungracious.
Most of Gunn’s cases are in the city, but he
does venture out into scrubby California
countryside (Jacoby’s jurisdiction turns out to
be usefully elastic), and as the series progresses
we see a bit less of Edie and the club, a little
more travelogue (though the ‘locations’– Italy,
Spain, in one episode Manchester – are so clearly
studio-bound that it hardly seems worth it).
The storylines can get samey – Pete runs up
against enough mob bosses to get you wondering
how one city’s economy manages to support this
many mobs – and sometimes contrived. Quite
often, the plots seem oddly familiar. In the season
one episode ‘The Chinese Hangman’, Gunn is
sent abroad to find a woman who has made off
with a lot of money, and then finds himself falling
for his quarry: it’s basically a retread of Out of the
Past (1949). ‘Death House Testament’ has Pete
kidnapped and doped up in a phoney nut-house
just like Philip Marlowe in Farewell, My Lovely.‘Edge of the Knife’, in season two, features Hope
Summers as an elderly pickpocket called Leather
who has supposedly gone straight but can’t help
rhapsodising to Gunn about the joy of the snatch- inspiration clearly the dip played by Thelma
Ritter in Sam Fuller’s Pickup on South Street (1953).
But the traffic isn’t all one way. The opening of the
first ever episode, in which traffic cops pull a car
over and then open fire on the gangster inside,
was ripped off wholesale in John Milius’s script
for the Dirty Harry sequel Magnum Force (1973).
Peter Gunn is nearly always slick and fun,
and once in a while the elements gel to create
something that feels surprisingly like art. I’d
single out the season two episode ‘The Comic’,
starring Shelley Berman as a standup comic who
hires Gunn because he believes his wife is trying
to have him killed. The edits are pointed – a
fast cut to a blaring trumpet, a devastating final
iris to black – and in the last five minutes, with
Berman on stage, under the spotlight, sweating
through a routine that verges on the existential,
the shadowy black-and-white cinematography
pushes towards a vivid paranoia. It’s a reminder
of the good things Edwards did on the big
screen – the noirish An Experiment in Terror, the
diagram of ordinary people breaking down like
Days of Wine and Roses (1962). Only it’s better.
Archive Television by Robert Hanks
Peter Gunn In another setting, perhaps Craig
Stevens would have seemed merely stolid, but here
you can read him as imperturbable, even cool