BY JOHN
M. WHALEN
There is a television series that has attained something
of a cult status, even though it hasn’t been seen by anyone since it was first
broadcast on the ABC Television Network during the 1971-1972 TV season. The
show was “Longstreet,†starring James Franciscus (“Naked City,†“Mr. Novak,â€
“Valley of the Gwangiâ€) as a blind insurance investigator based in New Orleans.
The show had some interesting features that made it out of the ordinary,
including scripts by Oscar Winning screenwriter Stirling Silliphant, a great
performance week after week by Franciscus, and the participation of martial
arts legend Bruce Lee in four of the 23 episodes that were produced.
The fact that there were only 23 episodes is why a lot of
people may have heard about the show but not many have actually seen it. There
were not enough episodes to make “Longstreet†suitable for syndication, so the
show remained unaired and unseen for almost 50 years, locked away in the vaults
of Paramount Home Video. In 2017, however, CBS TV licensed the series for home
viewing to Visual Entertainment Inc., of Toronto. And now the entire series,
plus a 90-minute TV pilot film, are available in a box set of four DVDs.
Viewing the episodes now, you realize how really good the series was.
The regular characters, appearing week after week,
included an assistant named Nikki (Marlyn Mason), who taught Longstreet braille
and helped him get around town in a Jeepster Commando convertible. Mike’s boss
at the Pacific Northwestern Insurance Company was Duke Page (Peter Mark
Richman), a man constantly amazed and aggravated by Mike’s risk taking and
ability to solve cases. Mike’s other “assistant†was Pax, a white German
Shepherd guide dog. The final member of the cast was Mrs. Kingston (Ann Doran),
who cooked and took care of Mike’s home on Chartres St., making sure everything
was kept in its proper place.
Longstreet was an unusual character for TV, not the kind
you usually find on a crime show. For one thing, he was haunted, still trying
to cope with both his blindness and the loss of his wife Ingrid. The incident
that caused these tragedies was depicted in the 90- minute TV pilot film—a bomb
inside a champagne bottle left on their doorstep by criminals Mike had come up
against several years ago. Images of that incident and memories of his wife
flash through Mike’s mind constantly as he proceeds with each week’s
investigation. He’s also got a chip on his shoulder. Not satisfied with merely
coping with his handicap, he wants to prove to the world that he’s still the
same man he was before the injury. That particular trait poses some interesting
problems as the series goes on.
The show was created by Oscar and Golden
Globe winner Stirling Silliphant, who executive produced and wrote four of the
episodes. Silliphant based Longstreet very loosely on a character created by
Baynard Kendrick in a series of novels written between 1930 and 1950.
Silliphant’s character bears little relationship to Kendrick’s Duncan Maclain,
who suffered blindness from war injuries. Silliphant’s humanistic style is all
over the Longstreet character, with most of the episodes going beyond mere
crime solving, instead focusing on Longstreet’s constant battle against fear,
grief, and panic, and his need to prove himself.
Perhaps the most famous episode, the one most
people have heard about even if they haven’t seen it, is “Way of the
Intercepting Fist,†which featured martial arts legend Bruce Lee in a key role.
At the time, Silliphant had been taking instruction from Lee in Jeet Kune Do,
Lee’s special brand of Kung Fu. They became friends and he had already written
him into a part in James Garner’s “Marlowe.†The Longstreet episode begins with
Mike attacked in an alley by three goons who warn him to back off his
investigation into the theft of pharmaceuticals from a shipping company. But
suddenly a whirlwind flies into the darkened alley and the goons don’t know
what hit them as a young Chinese cat, Li Tsung (Lee) cleans their clocks. Mike,
picking himself up off the ground, asks what he did to them. Li replies: “They
did it to themselves.â€