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.
But
Crawley had to compromise a bit. He hired a Hollywoodite as head of production
– Bernard Girard, who had directed several episodes of Bat Masterson and Adventures
in Paradise and would later helm the 1966 James Coburn crime comedy Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round and The Mad Room (1969) with Stella Stevens.
Crawley
hoped that Girard’s involvement would help get R.C.M.P. on a U.S. network, but it still wasn’t enough American
participation to satisfy the network executives down south. They preferred to
invest in a series, own it completely and broadcast it. So R.C.M.P. wasn’t bought by an American TV network, but instead syndicated,
playing on stations across the U.S. Unfortunately, syndication wasn’t anywhere
near as profitable as a regular network timeslot would have been.
Among
the actors brought in from the States to boost the series’ prospects south of
the 49th Parallel were Nancy Marchand (Marty – 1953 TV version with Rod Steiger), David White (Sweet Smell of Success), Richard Davalos
(East of Eden) and John Kellogg (Twelve O’Clock High, Gorilla at Large).
Canadian
actors who were to become well known also guest starred on R.C.M.P.: among them James Doohan (soon off to Hollywood and
immortality as Scotty on Star Trek),
Jack Creley (Dr. Strangelove, Videodrome),
Douglas Rain (the voice of HAL 9000 in 2001:
A Space Odyssey), John Vernon (Point Blank, Topaz, Animal House),
Shane Rimmer (Space: 1999, The Spy Who Loved Me) and Lloyd Bochner
(Tony Rome, The Detective).
R.C.M.P. ended abruptly in
October 1960. Over the years, reruns of the short-lived series garnered fans all over
the world, though it has rarely been rebroadcast in its country of origin. One
can wistfully hope that R.C.M.P. will
be resurrected in pristine condition on DVD to commemorate its 50th
anniversary.
Crawley died in reduced
circumstances in 1987. Pelletier, now 87, has yet to retire from acting: he last appeared in the quirky comedy Romaine par moins 30 (2009) and the dramatic short subject Mauser (2011). Both projects were filmed in Quebec.