User Reviews

This episode of Naked City highlights my theory that time and place produce certain type of face and voice never to be seen or heard again. Frank Gorshin who always reminded me of Richard Widmark was symbolic of a time when actors were often all-rounders - interesting people with backgrounds of hard graft. Gorshin uses his knowledge of life and produces a genuinely moving portrait of a small time hustler and part time stool-pigeon who has inevitably painted himself into a corner and is now desperately fighting against his fate.

Gorshin did do a brilliant (astonishing!) routine prior to the debut performance of the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show. Perhaps it highlighted how things were about to change - Gorshin's sophistication to youthful energy and simplicity. Out with the old and in with the new.

****SPOILERS**** The late comedian Frank Gorshin who blew the Beatles, in their US debut in February 1964, off the stage in his warn up comedy act on the Ed Sullivan Shown does a pretty job as the in house police informer Alan Starkie. It's Starkie who's on the run because he was found out by some of the mobsters that he ratted on who are now looking to rub him out. Starkie has been secretly Working with his police contact Let. Mike Parker, Horace McMahon, in the 65 precinct for the last two and a half years. It's Let Parker who's his only lifeline to stay alive and now Starkie's life can end at any given moment. With Starkie now at a time of desperate need Parker is off duty, after 22 straight hours on the job, and there's no one in the precinct including the super sensitive and in love with all man and womankind Det. Flint, Paul Burke, kicking a sobbing and hysterical Starkie out of the police station when he went there for help.

It later when he's finally awakened, by getting a phone call from Det. Flint, that Let. Parker heard of Starkie plight that he tried to get him into police protective custody before the mobsters get to him first. Now a both marked as well as dead man walking Starke's only hope is to skip town to far off Stillwater Oklahoma where his both wife Joanna and little boy Garry live and where the mob can't find him.

***SPOILER***On the bus at the New York City Port Authority going to Oklahoma Starkie remembers the toy mechanical monkey that he promised to buy Garry as a birthday present and runs out to buy it at the local toy store. It's just there where the mob caught up with him and he never lived to make it back to the greyhound bus and his wife and son in Stillwater as he was gunned down on his way back to the bus on an escalator. As Starkie passes away the mechanical monkey that he brought for his son Garry bows a fuse and dies along with him.

P.S Check out a 24 year old Barry Newman as the taxi driver in the "Naked City" episode. Eight years later Newman was to star in the cult classic "Vanishing Point" as race car dare devil driver Kowalski. Kowalski who's also a Vietnam war veteran who in the movie made a desperate but fatal dash from Denver Colorado to San Francisco Calif. in his souped up white dodge challenger and ended up somewhere in between in the deepest reaches of the "Twilight Zone".