Scott Duhamel's blog

Well before Harrison Ford was jumping into waterfalls and trying to stay one step ahead of Tommy Lee Jones terrifying case of lockjaw there was The Fugitive as a television series. What a strangely downbeat and moody bit of television this inexplicably popular series was. It ran for 120 episodes from 1963-67, was created by Roy Huggins (The Rockford Files), starred Richard Janssen as Dr. Richard Kimble, the falsely accused title figure, and the last episode remains one of the highest rated in TV history.

Having recently hitchhiked through the full first season (Paramount DVD, 4 discs, $38.99), my dim memories of the series needed a serious recharging. The TV show was neither a cut-and-run suspense machine as I thought, and Janssen’s central figure was far more complex and decidedly less heroic than I recalled. What actually attracted me to this show as a Beaver Cleaveresque pre-teen? It depicts a monumentally grim world, with the truly laconic Janssen sleepwalking from one location to the next, all the while pursued by his equally tortured nemesis, the visually drained and dogged Barry Morse’s Lieutenant Phillip Gerard. The show allows for no reoccurring characters outside of the intertwined duo (a twosome that were decidedly weird for primetime—-both twitchingly neurotic, hollow and haunted), as Kimble stays on the road and on the run, backing himself into the deep shadows of America’s backwaters, stumbling into the briefest friendships and quickly doomed romances.

Somebody get to the contempo philosopher King known as Sting and inform him that I owe him one. (You know, synchronicity and all that.) Recently sick at home and determinedly trawling through a batch of Wagon Train episodes I wound up continually spying one of the grittier character guys in Hollywoodland, Robert Wilke, in a number of different appearances. At the same time, I also spotted the one and only Ernie B (born Ermes Effron Borgnino in Hamden, CT in 1917, better known as Ernest Borgnine) boarding that ol’ prairie train a few times too. Being a natural born, dyed-in-the-wool, genuine A#1 pop cult shamus, I couldn’t help but contemplate what exactly what the non-transferable magic quality that allowed a barrel-chested, bug-eyed, salt-of-the-earther like Ernie B to climb into starring roles on television and in the movies and sustain one hell of a lengthy career (199 movie and television credits since 1951) on top of it. (A career that recently included a top-billed performance in the recent Hallmark Channel’s original movie Wishing Well at the tender age of 92.)

Why Ernie B and not the always dead on Wilke? Why not another abjectly coarse minor icon of big and small screen masculine characterizations like Ted DeCorsica, M. Emmet Walsh, Bert Remsem, Adam Williams, Jack Elam, Claude Akins, Don Stroud, Strother Martin, Robert Webber, or James Gammon and dozens more? Did Ernie B, a few more of his ilk (Jack Palance, Warren Oates, and certainly Lee Marvin), have better acting chops, greater career circumstances, or simply all out more significant mojo?

Despite my day-to-day guise as a verile, pugnacious, veritable man-of-the-people Union leader, you don’t have to slip slide yer footwear into one of my dark alley hideaways in order to discover my not-so-secret lifetime vocation as a certifiable Doctor of Igology, as a perpetual pupil forever steeped in The Ways of the Stooge, as a knee-bending pulpiteer awash in the dirty but divine light of The Bleeding Church of Raw Power.

 1.       Youngstown, Ohio, 1961.Twelve year old Steven Bators (Stiv Bators), in attempt to goose up his visiting cousins, tosses a jump rope over a backyard tree branch, and ties a noose around his neck, delivering a self-hanging showtime for a few huge snot-producing moments.

After many years of being a full shoe-gazing participant in the sweaty-palmed carnival of freaks known as rock fandom, I’ve come to realize  that Ultimate Sin # 1 a band or artist can commit in the eyes of those-who-know is to blow away fringe or cult categorization and actually score a hit, i.e., create a song or an album that sells. Committing that Ultimate Sin # 1—achieving a modicum of popularity—will result in posters being torn down, websites shut off, compact discs tossed away, while also unleashing a steady, whiny, siren song that generally goes “He/She/Their not half as good as they used to be when I saw ‘em play in front of twenty college kids and a coupla half-zonked rock scribes at the cool daddy rock club that’s now a Starbucks.”