The Lieutenant
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| The Lieutenant | |
|---|---|
| Format | Drama |
| Starring | Gary Lockwood F. Robert Vaughn John Milford Henry Beckman Richard Anderson Don Penny Carmen Phillips Steven Franken |
| Country of origin |  United States |
| No. of seasons | 1 |
| No. of episodes | 29 |
| Production | |
| Running time | 60 min. |
| Broadcast | |
| Original channel | NBC |
| Original run | September 14, 1963 – April 18, 1964 |
| External links | |
| IMDb profile | |
| TV.com summary | |
The Lieutenant is an American television series that appeared on NBC for the 1963-1964 television schedule. It was the first television series program ever created by Gene Roddenberry and/or produced under the banner of Norway Corporation, which was launched as a "satellite" company of Arena Productions, one of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's most successful in-house production companies in the 1960s. Situated at Camp Pendleton, a West Coast recruit depot of the U.S. Marine Corps, it focused on the men of the Corps in peace time. The title character was Second Lieutenant William Tiberius Rice, a rifle platoon leader and one of the training instructors stationed at Camp Pendleton. An hour-long drama, The Lieutenant explored the lives of Marine recruits and general officers alike.
Contents |
[edit] Cast members
[edit] Regulars
Gary Lockwood - Second Lieutenant William Tiberius Rice
F. Robert Vaughn - Captain Raymond Rambridge
John Milford - Sergeant Kagey
Henry Beckman - Major Al Barker
Richard Anderson - Lieutenant Colonel Steve Hiland
Don Penny - Lieutenant Harris
Carmen Phillips - Lily
Steven Franken - Lieutenant Samwell 'Sanpan' Panosian [Season 1, 1963]
Chris Noel - the regular female cast member, who never had a regular "character;" Gene Roddenberry had her acting out different characters each week
Prior to his selection as The Lieutenant, Lockwood had appeared as magazine researcher Eric Jason in the ABC series Follow the Sun during the 1961-1962 season.
[edit] Guest stars
Barbara Bain - Cissie Van Osten (guest star)
Ina Balin - Jan Everest (guest star)
Edward Asner - Walter Perry (guest star)
Eddie Carroll - Sgt. Perry (guest star)
James Gregory - Sgt. Horace Capp (guest star)
Leonard Nimoy - role unknown (guest star)
Nichelle Nichols - Norma Bartlett, "To Set it Right" (never aired)
Bill Bixby - character name unknown, one of Rice's old high school friends, now assigned to his platoon, who tries to take advantage of the relationship to get out of work (guest star)
Martin West - role unknown (guest star)
Yale Summers - Lt. Barry Everest (guest star)
Anna Lisa - Maria (guest star)
Pilar Seurat - role unknown (guest star)
Madlyn Rhue - Jackie Madian (guest star)
Nita Talbot - role unknown (guest star)
Linda Evans - Nan Hiland (guest star)
Jerry Fujikawa - role unknown (guest star)
Paul Burke - character name unknown, an ineffectual Marine captain who will have to leave the Corps for serving too long in rank if he is not promoted to major (guest star)
Rip Torn - character name unknown, a tough drill sergeant who may, indeed, be so tough that he is actually killing his own trainees (guest star)
Neville Brand - character name unknown, a brilliant, arrogant USMC major general to whom Rice is assigned as an aide in one installment (guest star)
Patricia Crowley - character name unknown, Captain Rambridge's ex-wife (guest star)
Andrew Duggan - character name unknown, the heroic commander of Rice's platoon during World War II, a man who might not really have been a hero (guest star)
Dennis Hopper - character name unknown, a bigot who is giving a tough time to a black man in his squad (guest star)
Henry Beckman - Major Barker (guest star)
Bob Davis - Farley Crosse (guest star)
Frank Gardner - Private Matthews (guest star)
Joan Tompkins - Elsie Hammond (guest star)
Richard Jeffries - Lieutenant Tait (guest star)
[edit] Synopsis
Gary Lockwood, who had appeared in Follow the Sun, starred in the series program as USMC Second Lieutenant William Tiberius Rice, a recent graduate of the United States Naval Academy who had been assigned his first command, that of a rifle platoon. His company commander was Captain Raymond Rambridge, an up-from-the-ranks officer; F. Robert Vaughn acted out this role. Richard Anderson, better known to 1970s television audiences as Oscar Goldman in The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman, had a recurring role as Lieutenant Colonel Steve Hiland, and Linda Evans, better known to 1980s audiences as Krystle Grant-Jennings-Carrington in Dynasty, appeared in several early episodes as Colonel Hiland's daughter Nan, who flirted with Rice.
In character, Rice himself was a young, attractive, educated, idealistic professional man who still had much to learn from an older mentor, the way John Kennedy had been on his way to the office of President of the United States. Kennedy's assassination followed the premiere of the series program by two months, and an ongoing conflict in Vietnam would soon escalate.
[edit] Production and transmission progress
Actor Gary Lockwood was twenty-six years of age, and still an apprentice actor, at the time the series program premiered. Lockwood received his stage "family" name from early mentor Joshua Logan, who had participated in Mister Roberts and Picnic and whose middle name was Lockwood. A former UCLA college football player who could be violent and quick-tempered, and who had seriously injured a man in a brawl at a party, Lockwood had a higher-than-mean-average opinion of his own intelligence and attractiveness. He tried to withdraw from the series program at the last moment, hoping instead to concentrate on films. He did not do so because the producers and network executives convinced him that there would be unpleasant payback if he did. Lockwood later compared being a series program star to being a jet pilot: many experts, he said, worked behind the scenes and then the pilot entered the hot seat and made it all work.
Lockwood told TV Guide Magazine that he eventually wanted to be an actor, a writer, a producer, and a director. Warren Beatty, whom Lockwood had acted alongside in Splendor In The Grass, would eventually go on to achieve that ambition; Lockwood himself would not. Lockwood, during that interview, also displayed contempt for "insecure" women, an accusation he would not be able to level against eventual castmate Sally Kellerman or the woman he later married, the very secure Stephanie Powers.
[edit] Controversy
Robert Vaughn, thirty years of age at the time, received the same compensation for each installment as Lockwood did, even though he was usually in only one scene per installment. Vaughn had already been one of The Magnificent Seven, and he had even received an Oscar nomination for The Young Philadelphians. This meant that he might have considered being second to Lockwood in the cast something of a climb-down. Vaughn had political aspirations and, indeed, was then working on his Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Southern California. (He would later publish this dissertation, which was his examination of the devastating negative effects McCarthyism had had on 1950s entertainment, as the book Only Victims: A Study Of Show Business Blacklisting. The title he used for the book was taken from a statement Dalton Trumbo made that the blacklist period produced "only victims.") Vaughn asked both MGM Television and Norman Felton, under whose Arena Productions banner The Lieutenant was being produced and which was sponsoring Norway Corporation, for his own series program during the run of The Lieutenant. The result was The Man From U.N.C.L.E., which began the next season and proved to be highly successful.
One episode of The Lieutenant was never aired. "To Set It Right", written by Lee Erwin, was about race prejudice, and featured Nichelle Nichols as the fiance of a black Marine. The subject of race was considered taboo in entertainment television in 1964. The episode can be viewed at The Paley Center for Media in New York City.
[edit] After The Lieutenant
The Lieutenant performed well in the ratings, but it was canceled after only one season because, according to Roddenberry, the Vietnam War had made present-day military dramas toxic for television. In the final episode of the series, Rice is sent to a fictitious Asian country based on Vietnam as an advisor, mirroring the same real-life situation that the series had been cancelled for.
Roddenberry recruited Lockwood one more time, in "Where No Man Has Gone Before," the second pilot installment for Star Trek, as Lieutenant Commander Gary Mitchell.
The Lieutenant also brought together several other actors--amongst them Leonard Nimoy, Nichelle Nichols, and Majel Barrett--who would later join Norway Corporation Repertory Company, under Roddenberry, in Star Trek.
