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Tricks & Schticks. Each Eye is an unabashed copy of the last. Characters who ought to be able to trace their lineage all the way back to Edgar Allan Poe have been changed by their packagers until each one looks and sounds like the spawn of a supercilious contemporary named Peter Gunn. Ever since last fall, when Gunn began to impress the public as a guy who could probably carry out his own dead—and ever since the program's hipped-up background jazz began to sell on disks—the TV imitators have been at work. Just as Stu Bailey's 77 Sunset Strip is a far-out California version of Gunn, the new Hawaiian Eye might well be called 77 Waikiki. Johnny Staccato takes the audience back to Manhattan, but, though Star John Cassavetes is an actor of considerable talent, this time he is only Gunn at the piano, in a minor key. Diamond and Marlowe are Gunn from the cut of their Ivy League threads to the last high-rising whine of their score. Like Gunn's, their faces are stiff with concern for their clients—or anyway, with something that makes their faces stiff.
Tough as they are. the TV Eyes have been manhandled by the scriptwriters. All that they have of their own is an occasional schtick (a show business adaptation of a Yiddish word meaning bit, or gimmick). Gunn has Edie Hart (Lola Albright), an insinuating saloon singer who keeps his hearth warm while he prowls the streets. Staccato has his Steinway, which is hardly an adequate substitute. Richard Diamond comes considerably closer with Sam, a sultry answering-servica operator who never slinks into camera range above her comely neck. Sunset Stri) has Kookie (Edd Byrnes), a bop-talking car jockey minus a haircut. Philip Marlowe has to make do with a suggestive scar on his cheek.
Moments of Truth. But under the schticks, they all have the same style. They start work on a case with hardly enough leverage to lift a dime off a cigar-store counter; they consult their pals from the far edge of the underworld to the higher echelons of the police. It is proper this season for TV Private Eyes to get along with the police, a typically unrealistic TV compromise, for even on TV no real cop would dream of asking a detective for so much as the loan of a leather-covered sap. Of course the Eyes absorb their beatings, and in the end they beat the cops to the kill. "The whodunits we make," says Marlowe Producer-Writer Gene Wang, "are as ritualistic as a bullfight."
A veteran of Perry Mason and radio's Thin Man, Wang speaks with authority. "The bullfight parade," he explains, "is, for us. the parade of suspects. The entrance of the torero is the entrance of the detective, the point at which he takes the case. You cannot leave the audience wondering why the detective's clients have not gone to the police. The cape work is when the detective sees his various suspects. The picadors come on, and it's the time of murder. The moment of truth is when the Private Eye says, 'You killed Cock Robin.' "