In
1959-60, the distinguished Quebec actor Gilles Pelletier (who had earlier
appeared in Otto Preminger’s The 13th
Letter and in Alfred Hitchcock’s I
Confess) came to Ottawa to shoot 39 episodes of the R.C.M.P. television series, coproduced by Crawley Films, the
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and the British Broadcasting Corporation.
Executive
producer F.R. “Budge†Crawley cast Pelletier as Corporal Jacques Gagnier, a
Mountie working at a detachment in rural northern Saskatchewan. Interiors were
shot on a brand-new soundstage near Ottawa at Old Chelsea, Quebec. Exteriors
were filmed in nearby Aylmer, Quebec, and in Outlook, Saskatchewan, which stood
in for the fictional western town of Shamattawa, the center of the action of
this contemporary adventure series.
With
all that talent on board, why did R.C.M.P.
only last one season? The show was well produced. Crawley partnered with
the CBC, the BBC, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and figured it would
be a snap to break into international TV markets, especially in the United
States. R.C.M.P. was a
crisply-shot, realistic and sometimes extremely violent crime drama which stood
in stark contrast to the usual stagebound and fusty Canadian television
programming of the time. Influenced by the
European neorealist school of filmmaking, the show
had the look and feel of a documentary, very convincingly conveying the dismal
Canadian ambience (especially in wintertime) and the homegrown criminal element
of small-town Canada. R.C.M.P. more
than held its own against similar U.S. TV fare.
According
to Pelletier, what was overlooked was the fact that the American TV networks,
distributors and producers operated like a closed circuit. They weren’t interested
in buying a foreign TV series unless they had a hand in its production from the
word “goâ€, and Crawley wouldn’t allow that. He said if they had that kind of
control, R.C.M.P. would lose its
distinctively Canadian cachet and be like any other American-style series.
When Eon Productions went into production on the 1985 film version of Ian Fleming's short story From a View to a Kill, it was announced that the unusual title would be kept intact for the movie. However, marketing tests showed that the title was confusing to moviegoers, hence the From was dropped and the film was titled A View to a Kill. Jason Whiton of the excellent web site SpyVibe provides insights into Fleming's short story and provides illustrations of how it was presented in a 1964 men's skin magazine, Swank. Click here to view.