Kolchak: The Night Stalker - The Ripper and intro

(The IMDb group I've hooked up, The Sages of the Single Season, has voted to watch and review/discuss Kolchak: The Night Stalker one episode per week now that we have finished with Gerry Anderson's UFO.  You can find us on the message board for that show: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071003/board)

I was eight years old when Kolchak: The Night Stalker aired in 1974.  Because it was Friday, I had permission to stay up an hour past bedtime - it played right after My Partner, the Ghost (aka Randall & Hopkirk, Deceased).  It scared me plenty, and I wouldn't miss an episode.  Bits and pieces of it stayed with me all my life...scenes, scares, and even certain music cues which I never forgot a note of.  Even today, a sudden familiar noise at two or three in the morning will harken back to this show and suddenly I'll be wide awake with my heart beating too fast.

It was a time when American culture was taken with the 'supernatural'...with mysticism and the occult, with ancient Egypt and its mummies and curses and 'pyramid power', with UFOs, with Kirlian photography and ghosts and ESP, with reincarnation, with Bigfoot and spontaneous combustion.  We had a fascination for the morbid and dark, The uncaught Zodiac awakening the chill of Jack the Ripper.  Leonard Nimoy visited our living rooms for half an hour every weekend to take us In Search Of...the lost town of Roanoke, the Nazca Lines, the ghost of Van Gogh, the death of Pompeii.  People carried tattered paperbacks of "Chariots of the Gods" like it was the new Bible. We wanted to know...we were desperate to know, and to believe.  We were ready.  There had to be more out there, if anyone would just ask.

We wanted to know about power, too.  America's unlikeliest heroes that year were a couple of investigative journalists who broke a story of corruption in the highest office, and the name Watergate became a dictionary fixture.  After the murder of JFK, after Vietnam, and now the President himself deceiving us we had become disillusioned by authority and wanted more Woodwards and more Bernsteins, tenacious seekers of truth who would defy the Powers That Be, to root out just what it was we weren't being told.

Carl Kolchak was that kind of reporter. 

He'd already appeared in a couple of hit made-for-television films, The Night Stalker and The Night Strangler.  Kolchak had been a print reporter in Las Vegas when a serial killer terrorized that city in 1972.  As the gruesome facts came to be revealed, Kolchak was forced to reach a difficult conclusion that no one else was willing to: the killer was not a madman who thought himself a vampire, but was indeed a genuine vampire.  Kolchak was a rational man, unimaginative and not given to fancies, bull-headed to the point of rudeness...but he understood facts.  The facts were undeniable.

The movies worked for a number of reasons, but foremost among them was veteran character actor Darren McGavin as Kolchak, a newsman as exuberant as he was tactless.  He is described in The Night Strangler as having walked straight out of a production of The Front Page, with his vented porkpie hat and simple blue-collar attire.  That's him, boy, he'd have been at home in Hollywood's Thirties with his flippant jibes and irrepressible belief in his calling, his steadfast conviction in the people's right to know the truth.  Carl Kolchak flows from McGavin like water from a spring.  He's not a collection of mannerisms, he's a force of nature.  If The Night Stalker had been a stage play it would have closed early because in McGavin's hands Kolchak would have chased everyone else off the stage in pursuit of a juicy story. 

Stephen King wrote in his book Danse Macabre that Kolchak was the key to taking the vampire from its stuffy Gothic setting where we might see it as silly kids' stuff and making it a credible part of the real world - the mundane place of used car lots and property leases, of tired and hassled casino showgirls, of hospital blood banks and bureaucrats and bellicose editors.  The supernatural was a hard sell for a down-to-Earth, no-bullshit guy like Kolchak, but if he could believe in vampires, King argues, then so could we.  Producer Dan Curtis (of Dark Shadows fame) and author Richard Matheson convinced us by convincing Kolchak.  King was praising the original Night Stalker telefilm.  He was less laudatory of the series overall but still impressed with star Darren McGavin.

This eight-year-old didn't know anything about any of that.  I'd never even heard of the two TV movies.  But I knew what scared me, and Kolchak knew it before I did.

That's what this show is for me, the "safe scare" that the horror genre is at its heart unadulterated by gore, sex, subtext, or other concerns.  It is simple fear distilled. It is the tale told at the campfire, in the dark, in the open where nothing will shelter you.  You know it's not real, but...you look over your shoulders anyway.  Just in case.  'Cuz you can hear the woods moving.

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The Ripper

Our first two proper looks at Carl Kolchak (including a credits sequence that's a miniature masterpiece) establish him as 'a regular joe' and a working stiff.  He rides the L, has no head for fashion, and if his hat spends all day on the floor 'cuz he missed the coathook it's no big deal.

Writing for the Independent News Service, Carl is watching a big story pass him by.  Someone is murdering women in Chicago's sex trade.  That's the kind of mean, gritty beat Carl is good at...and he's stuck filling in for "Miss Emily", the advice columnist while the killer assignment lands on the desk of prissy Ron "Uptight" Updyke - a  reporter singularly unqualified for the job.  Carl has been sidelined as  chastised by editor Tony Vincenzo after Kolchak's latest act of overzealousness in covering a story: Kolchak made a 'citizen's arrest' of people who got in his way.  In Carl's view, that's just getting the job done.  Tony knows Kolchak's the best reporter he's got going but oh! The headaches!  Kolchak has a gut instinct for rubbing  every authority in sight the wrong way, and it always ends up in Vincenzo's lap.  That's Tony Vincenzo, bellicose with his underlings but timid with authority.  The lead characters and the dynamic that will drive them have now been expertly sketched out for us in a matter of minutes with  zero exposition and no fuss. 

These regulars are half the fun of K:TNS, balancing the careful build of fright setpieces with delightfully funny bickering.  Simon Oakland reprises the role of Tony Vincenzo from the two Kolchak movies that preceded the series, ever frustrated by his star reporter's eccentricities.  One of these days Vincenzo's gonna be driven to a breakdown.   Updyke (Jack Grinnage) is the butt of Kolchak's humor, never able to get the upper hand.  McGavin and Oakland had already established a chemistry with natural rhythm and timing into which Grinnage easily becomes a perfect third party.  They make a great comedy trio. 

Also funny are scenes of Kolchak being stymied at a massage parlor and encountering a Miss Emily fan who asks if he spends a lot of time checking on weirdos.  Cpt. Warren is not especially amusing in himself but his steadfast faith in rationality provides a launching pad for McGavin to send Kolchak on an outraged tirade - he's so much fun to watch when he's skyrocketing!

Humor is a staple of TNS, balancing extended sequences of terror.  We see the victims being assaulted, Kolchak investigates, the facts mount.  Our serial killer dresses like an escapee from  Gothic horror production with natty Victorian dress, cape, top hat and devil's-head cane.  He leaps from rooftops several stories high with no injury, walks away from being hit by a car, tosses  around grown men - trained cops - like rag dolls and never utters  a single sound. 

For  most of the episode we will only see the murderer's clothing, and in glimpses at that.  We are kept in the dark quite literally as time has darkened the film stock of what  was already a production set largely at night.  This renders some of the action difficult to make out (Kolchak declares that the killer demolished a squad car, but we don't see it), but it also increases the creep factor.  You can really feel those empty spaces where it's best not to lurk, or the isolation of a  city street at night.

Fellow journalist Jane Plumm sets Kolchak in the right direction when she points out that these killings are replicating Jack the Ripper's reign of terror in London of the late 19th century.  Even the crude notes left for police are the same, and a letter withheld by police contain a nasty taunt about devouring one of the victim's kidneys (Jane relates over a huge lunch).  Did you know, she asks, that the same killing spree has been re-enacted multiple times over the last century?  Contagious psychosis, that's her theory.  This story is going to make her career if she can land it for the tabloid paying her salary.  She's hungry for it.

Kolchak comes to a much more radical  conclusion of his own.  One of Jane's copycats was hanged for his crimes, and the next to appear had rope burns on his neck. That added to the superhuman power this killer is possessed of can mean only one thing.  This is the real Jack the Ripper, still alive and still killing.  I hate to say this, but I must... if you were to judge by the series alone without the prior movies, Kolchak comes off as kind of a flake sometimes.  The Night Stalker (1972) had a running length of about 75 minutes, plenty of time in which Kolchak - a down-to-earth skeptic toward the supernatural - could weigh evidence and become convinced that vampires are real. The Night Strangler originally ran for 75 minutes and has since had material restored bringing it to 90.  Following up on those two telefilms, K:TNS allows only some 50 minutes per episode, which necessarily means we get little or nothing of his process in reaching unbelievable conclusions.  We know he's right every time, but only because he's the hero.  By extension that means we know that people like Jane Plumm are wrong.  We get exasperated with people like Vincenzo, or figures like Cpt. Warren of the police who stonewall with their common sense.  All the same, these are the rational ones in Kolchak's universe.  I try not to let that bother me when watching, but sometimes it does.  because of the airtime limitations, Kolchak is kind of an incredulous nutter too quick to embrace the ridiculous.  Besides his bull-in-a-china-shop approach, it's no wonder the authorities won't give him the time of day.

This particular theory has some holes in it.  How exactly is the Ripper still alive and unaging?  Is he not human?  If not, then what?  Why does he keep repeating the exact same pattern of his infamous spree,  down to the same notes, instead of just...killing? How can he wear the same shoes for over 70 years without a hint of wear on them?  To be filed under YNSTA (You're Not Supposed to Ask).  You gloss over it because it's a campfire tale. The details just get in the way.  For many, Jack the Ripper isn't just another serial killer, he's the quintessential boogeyman.  You can use him any way you like in a story and it will work.

 

Where the banter with Vincenzo and Uptight have a playful score complete with a near-'wah-wahhhh' theme for horns, strings dominate the dark.  Otherwise, scenes of Carl hunting or preparing to confront a monster tend to be silent.  If he speaks. it's in pithy prose voiceovers, recorded notes from which he will write his accounts.  He tends to compose his thoughts with an ear for the melodramatic punch.  Not exactly the stoic hero, then.  The Ripper's final act is a confident tour of the Ripper's derelict home and lair, Kolchak making us cringe as he leaves his sign everywhere through sheer lack of grace.  That too is a nice touch, making us fear that he is waaay too incautious and really ought the get the fuck out.  But no, he takes us in with him, right into a closet where he and we hide as Jack keeps reaching his hand through a curtain and right past Carl's nose.  How does our stalwart hero hold up?  He panics and screams.  You have to love a hero who loses his shit like that.

The finale is well orchestrated, quiet dread building to a breaking point before erupting into frenzy.  It would have been nothing, though, without the firm base that the rest of the episode has provided.  We see women going about their lives, The Ripper literally intruding into the frame,  and then we see the aftermath.  it's not graphic, but the sense of transgression and violence is carried in the reactions of those who are on the scene.  Ron Updyke is an object of ridicule but his revulsion and horror are easy to sympathize with.
Carl Kolchak - a hero for the people.  I'll rate it 7 drawers stuffed with unopened letters asking for advice.

Asides:

The dialog keeps insisting that Jane Plumm is "fat" - that's the specific adjective repeatedly given.  Unfortunate enough, this body shaming, and in her one big scene she overloads at a diner.  Why, then,  was the part  cast with an actress who by any standard could never be considered anything but her ideal body index? There's not an ounce of fat on her.

Kolchak wears tennis shoes (or running shoes if you prefer).  This makes sense for a reporter, or these days for just about anyone: hard shoes suck.  I guess in '74 that wasn't the norm?  A masseuse (actually undercover police officer) remarks that Kolchak's  shoes "are so funny".

 

One of the series' signature music cues makes its debut at around 48:40 (per the DVD).  It's one of my favorites from childhood.  You'll be hearing it often throughout the show.  I also  love that title theme by Gil Mellé.  Mellé is credited with writing the music for (at least) this episode, however five composers contributed throughout the series.  They include Jerry Fielding and Robert Cobert from Dark Shadows.  Who wrote what exactly, I don't know. 

I like Johnny Depp, I do.  All the same, I have read with no small amount of relief that Disney has finally deep-sixed Depp's plans to play Kolchak in a modern film version of The Night Stalker.  I've nothing against Depp, who is adept at crafting memorable, colorful characters, but in any given performance he is as likely to rely on mannerisms and caricature as he is to push himself for something more genuine.  McGavin's Kolchak was not driven by mannerisms and tics but by sheer force of personality.  In that, McGavin and Depp's approaches would be polar opposites: one spontaneous and the other studied to death.   Depp proclaims that he is a huge fan of the series, the character, and McGavin, and that his movie would be respectful.  I'm sure he means it, but he said the same of Dark Shadows and we all saw the awful parody which he and Tim Burton delivered  instead. I like Depp, but keep him away from The Night Stalker.