#bert convy

Season 1 Episode 6a

Night Gallery - They're Tearing Down Tim Riley's Bar - NBC - January 20, 1971

Drama

Running Time: 40 minutes

Written by Rod Serling

Produced by Jack Laird

Directed by Don Taylor

Stars:

William Windom as Randolph Lane

Diane Baker as Lynn Alcott

Bert Convy as Harvey Doane

John Randolph as H. E. Pritkin

Henry Beckman as McDermott (The Policeman)

David Astor as Blodgett

Robert Herrman as Tim Riley

Gene O'Donnell as Bartender

Frederick Downs as Father

John Ragin as 1st Policeman

David Frank as Intern

Susannah Darrow as Kathy Lane

Mary Gail Hobbs as Miss Trevor

Margie Hall as Switchboard Operator

Don Melvoin as 1st Workman

Before Bert Convy looked like this

or even this

“I’m going to ask your husbands to describe Raquel Welch in ten seconds. The question is, will he use his hands to show us any feature of Raquel’s figure?”

If you turn off the sound, you’ll see Delmer Daves’ SUSAN SLADE (1961, TCM) as a great plastic work of art. Absent the tired plot and purplish dialog, it’s a very impressive work, with Daves and cameraman Lucien Ballard capturing the war between natural landscape, lush décor and human passions. Nobody can arrive at or leave a location without Daves’ holding the shot so we can appreciate the view in Technicolor and Cinemascope. His compositions and color scheme are sometimes more expressive than the performances. Of course, without the soundtrack you’d lose Max Steiner’s score. It may harken back to the days when his music accompanied Joan Leslie or Jane Wyman in search of young love, but it’s still effective. Of course, the film is also a throwback. It’s MY FOOLISH HEART (1949) with a mountain standing in for World War II.

Fortunately, nobody can accuse SUSAN SLADE of defiling a J.D. Salinger story. It’s adapted rather from a popular novel by Doris Hume, “The Sin of Susan Slade.” The title character played by Connie Stevens is a sheltered girl returning to the U.S. after a decade in the Chilean desert where her father (Lloyd Nolan) has been making millions for a benevolent mining magnate (Brian Aherne). On the ship home, she falls for a wealthy playboy (Grant Williams) who plans to marry her, only to leave her knocked up when he falls off Mt. McKinley. So, her father takes a job in Guatemala so mama Dorothy McGuire can pass the baby off as her own. Now Susan just has to choose between Aherne’s wealthy son (Bert Convy) and the man who stables her horse (yes, these are people who buy their kids horses for their birthdays) while he’s not trying to become the next John Steinbeck (Troy Donahue). If that’s not silly enough for you, know that there will also be a laughable flaming baby, though you have to wade through a lot of long dialog passages to get to it.

Today the plot seems antediluvian, attitudes toward unmarried mothers having changed a great deal. And to his credit, Daves underlines how cruel it is to force Stevens to deny her baby. But the plot machinations around that seem awfully, well, mechanical. As soon as Williams mentions his love of mountain climbing or Nolan says he has a bad heart, you’re just waiting for them to die. And the rich boy-poor boy triangle was a joke even back in 1961. You’d think they’d have given up on it after Ginger Rogers was comically torn between Burgess Meredith and Alan Marshall in TOM, DICK AND HARRY (1941). Perhaps it would work better with more technically accomplished leads. It’s amazing what a little good stage training can do to sell bad material. But…

I hate to say anything against Stevens. She’s a charming comedienne who was rarely given the best roles while under contract to Warner Bros. She could have done quite well in the parts Jane Fonda was getting early on and would have been a creditable Honey in WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF (1966), a role she fought for,  though likely not as brilliant as Sandy Dennis. Her silent moments in SUSAN SLADE are quite good, she’s adept at her earlier flirtation scenes, and when she learns of Williams’ death by mountain, she’s very powerful, aided by some really good filmmaking choices by Daves. But her voice is too high for the more serious moments, and she starts sounding like Catherine O’Hara doing a takeoff on the film. When she has to start spouting Daves’ more dramatic lines, they seem to curdle in her mouth. Of course, even that’s an improvement over Donahue, who does nothing with any of his lines. I kept wishing he’d fallen of that cliff and Williams had played the stable hand/great American novelist.

Fortunately, Daves always cast some old pros to do the heavy lifting in his teen melodramas. Nolan and McGuire, seemingly still together after he took on her and her children in A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN (1945), do very good work. He even manages to make the worst lines sound as if he not only thought of them for the first time but also had a personal connection to them. You know, acting. Aherne has little to do but does it well. Bert Convy manages to be a callow young man without being too obnoxious. And Natalie Schafer, as Aherne’s wife, steals one scene with just her eyes. They communicate more than all of Daves’ overheated dialog. It’s a pity she didn’t just pop up in every scene to silently save us pages of bad writing.