Once upon a time in 1960, an era for TV which FCC Chairman Newton Minnow famously declared to be “a vast wasteland,” America weekly, avidly, watched a whole hour in glorious black-and-white depicting two guys riding around the U. S. in a two-seater Corvette.

Viewers’ passion for the adventures of this anthology show’s winsome duo lasted four seasons, even enduring a mysteriously abrupt cast change midway through the third season. The car was iconic, and so were the actors. The show was called Route 66.

With the release of the first fifteen episodes of season one of Route 66, now everyone can discover or relive the initial, vicarious thrill of TV’s revelation that America was becoming a mobile society, set free by the construction of interstates, the availability of cheap gas, and the strange allure of “the other America,” the one outside studio soundstages and single camera vantage points.

Has any network TV series since married so successfully and effortlessly the romance of the road with the prospect of life-changing adventure just around the corner–all captured against uncommon on-locale vistas of America’s little-seen western heartlands and coastal shorelines? And indeed the direction of their Corvette was always Westward or Southward. No u-turns.

Unfolding America

We forget how provincial and place-bound the typical American’s life was in the middle of the 20th Century. Except for soldiers, diplomats, news correspondents, movie and sports stars, who traveled overseas or overland more than 75 miles from home? Newsreels still found prominence in movie theatres so people could witness what America landscapes looked like for themselves, what “non-local” Americans did, thought, revered; and America’s unique dialects, not mine or yours but somebody else’s, could finally be tapped for stories and storytelling and regional differences could be celebrated as true differences and not melted into the gigantic pot of generic Americana.

Route 66 brought these qualities to TV’s original road trip, albeit with the misleading title. Misleading? Because hardly any of the four years worth of episodes were actually spent on the Mother Road itself. The mystique earned from naming it “Route 66” alone drew viewers, and adroitly captured the wanderlust of American youth with its growing fascination with cars as something other than mere transportation. (As Flannery O’Connor’s Hazel Motes says in her 1952 novel, Wise Blood, “Nobody with a good car needs to be justified.”)

There seems to me no doubt that this brilliant, high concept show made possible the veritable discovery of the surf culture of SoCal and thus paved the way for the music of the Beach Boys (themselves ingenious cultural barometers); before their Corvette sped into town, who knew these people existed?

Cast

Starring 20-somethings Martin Milner and George Maharis, whom the teen magazines of the day casually referred to as “heartthrobs” (though much later it was revealed that Maharis was a closeted gay actor), Route 66’s protagonists represented the restless souls of the children of those who had fought in two or more world conflicts whom we now call babyboomers.

The new breed of youth, most of whom had not been to war and were not college graduates or perhaps even college material (only the rich or idle went to college, and never to learn how to make a living), were still wondering how to be Americans in peacetime, when staying put or anywhere close was not an inevitable answer.

These vagabonds–Todd (Milner) a listless, clean-cut, Yale graduate, the intellectual “discovering himself,” and his unlikely companion, Buz (Maharis), a boisterous, often belligerent street kid from Hell’s Kitchen, NYC, the increasingly sophisticated brute “recovering himself”–proved one could leave home and survive through wit, verve, and cunning. And a few fisticuffs.

Drifting as Occupation

Neither had jobs; jobs found them, as they made their way across the map, their exploits uncovering vocations and livelihoods unheard of in network TV Land, where everyone who worked at all was either a police officer, doctor, lawyer, teacher, comedian, or stay at home mom. (There are few of the latter on Route 66, which marks it as perhaps one of the few proto-feminist prime-time dramas of the era.)

In each episode, the two precipitated odd encounters and frequently violent confrontations borne of injustices and personal trials of all sorts: racism, bird flu (yes, bird flu), Nazis gone underground, children born out of wedlock, wayward sons, corrupt sheriffs, prospects of nuclear holocaust, the demise of the family farm, loneliness, isolation, alienation, “the fear of fear itself.” They were directly or inadvertently the catalyst for a life-changing experience, theirs or someone else’s; there was resolution in a Route 66 episode, but not necessarily a happy ending, another distinctive in its time and place.

Writing

Their adventures took place amidst an amazing ethnically and regionally diverse cast of characters who populated the highly literate scripts. This was no surprise because the genius behind Route 66 was veteran and venerable Hollywood screen/teleplay writer, Stirling Silliphant.

It was Silliphant who had given viewers the dark and gritty, character-driven TV series, Naked City, authentically set in NYC, probing the premise that there lurked compelling life stories behind both those who committed crimes, and those who caught them in the act. Silliphant served as producer for and wrote almost every Route 66 episode, which featured the finest character actors, as well as up-and-coming stars, in Hollywood. Prominent TV actors such as Leslie Nielson, Harvey Korman, Jack Warden, Deforest Kelly, Arlene Martel, Walter Matthau, and Zina Bethune appeared throughout the series’ run.

Silliphant’s trademark 54 minute episode featured these key elements: the Corvette’s epochal arrival into town announcing the duo’s search for a job that will get them through the next days or weeks before moving on; within the first five minutes, one or both encounter and are drawn to assist a person or family mired in a dilemma whose roots the unfolding narrative exposes; compelling dialogue between individual characters–and stage-worthy soliloquies–move the drama forward as much as scenes of action toward a climax whose closure is neither forced nor forged.

Music

Route 66 also appreciated earlier than just about anybody else how a memorable, soaring, liberating soundtrack could embody and extend the experience of the show itself. The show’s distinctive opening/closing score by the inimitable Nelson Riddle — considered America’s “greatest arranger of popular music,” and credited with helping to revive Frank Sinatra’s career in the 1950s and Linda Ronstadt’s in the 1980s — proved to be a major radio hit (even though there is nothing in common with the popular song, “Get Your Kicks on Route 66,” that had preceded it by more than a decade).

Listen to the theme song here:

 

 Route 66 Theme [1.9mb] [2:10m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Then & Now

The appeal of Route 66 then was its stern freshness, its unpredictability of setting, theme, and conflict; it was “out there,” literally, and broke with great assurance from TV’s conventions by its shifting ensemble cast, its sparkling, furious dialogue (it recalls David Mamet), and its refusal to reduce the mystery of the American road to breezy travelogue platitudes.

Its appeal today is in its direct influence on subsequent TV and film (e.g., it inspired such later, popular on-the-road series as Run for Your Life and the Fugitive, while Silliphant won an academy award for his racial murder drama, In the Heat of the Night, which in its own way is a road trip movie for Sidney Poitier), its demure capture of a pivotal period in the evolving American psyche, and its technique: its supreme, self-effacing lack of self-awareness in its storytelling technique and subject matter. The stories were allowed to speak for themselves.

A Sterling Sample Episode

My favorite episode from this first set can illustrate this profound difference between TV audiences, script writers, and producers in the 1960s and now. Here a very young Suzanne Pleshette plays a wayward single mother who has found her way into a revival tent, seeking to change her life by embracing Christ, on the run from a murder charge in a small town just down the highway. When the Route 66 boys arrive in a rainstorm, they rescue this damsel in distress by accidentally returning her to the scene of the crime.

What distinguishes our times from theirs is that her possible conversion, and the role of the revivalist preacher who visits her in jail in the episode’s climax, is treated entirely without irony, absent smirk or snidery, and with no insinuation that the evangelist who has brought her back from brink has any but the purest motives for doing so. He leads her in an elongated prayer of repentance and confession of faith not unto a generic god, but to Jesus Christ. No ellipsis. No symbolic cut away to shadows of hands folded. The whole prayer, camera steady, verbatim.

What a difference 50 years makes. It is incredible to realize that in 1960, a TV show could get away with lots of challenging topics and themes, and treat them with intelligence and even-handed restraint. Even religion. Even Christianity.

 
Posted in TV, Vintage TV by Bruce Edwards

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