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| Mike Connors |
TIGHTROPE (1959). Half-hour television crime drama. One season. 37 episodes.
In this taut and memorable crime series, Mike Connors [
Day the World Ended] stars as a man known only as Nick, an undercover police officer who can have few friends and only furtive romances as he goes from city to city establishing phony identities so he can infiltrate the mob in one dangerous assignment after another. As part of his cover, Nick often has to treat innocent people pretty badly, but I imagine he figures the ends justify the means. These episodes were very tightly-plotted and fast-paced and always put Nick into intriguing and suspenseful situations.
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| Gangsters Daughter with Leslie Parrish |
Among the more memorable episodes: "Cracking Point" features Richard Jaeckel [
The Dark] as a man blackmailed into robbing a bank, with Simon Oakland as guest-star; "Two Private Eyes" features two sleazy gumshoes who get the business when they look for a missing wife; "Cold Ice" is a mini-suspense masterpiece about the cutting of a perfect stolen diamond; "The Model and the Mobster" has Nick taking on a monstrous hoodlum very well-played by Bruce Gordon; Mike Mazurki scores in " "Long Odds," wherein Nick tries to find out which mob boss ordered a hit on a cop; Margaret Field and Jimmy Lydon guest-star in "Brave Pigeon," in which a hit is put on an innocent man who is able to identify a certain criminal; "The Gangster's Daughter" presents the cultured daughter (Leslie Parrish of
The Money Jungle) of a wealthy mobster (Barton MacLane) with an overly ambitious nephew; "Bullets and Ballet" has Nick investigating why a top hood has come to town, with the excellent Doris Singleton (Carolyn Appleby on
I Love Lucy) as a guest-star. Arguably the best episode of the series is "Man in the Middle" with Nick coming between a newly-released mob boss (Marc Lawrence) who's in deadly conflict with a younger rival (Gerald Mohr). Mike Connors went on to greater success with his hit P.I. show
Mannix, which lasted several seasons.
Verdict: This show rarely dips below a "B+" level in quality and there are a lot of "A" episodes as well. ***.
I may have seen an episode or two of this in reruns. Connors was always very watchable.
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He's terrific in this show and made a good "Mannix" as well. In his early days as "Touch" Connors -- don't you love that name? -- he was generally cast as sexy bad boys, and he made good use of that background in this series, in which he frequently had to pretend to be a crook and romance gangsters' molls. Strange that he had his greatest success as a square-shooting private eye in Mannix.
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