This episode of NAKED CITY haunted me for almost 50 years, in between the time I first saw it in reruns (around 1965) and my next viewing of it, on ME-TV in 2013. It scared the hell out of me at age 9, and in preparing to see it anew, I wondered if it would hold up.
It's a quiet morning in the neighborhood where detective Jimmy Halloran (James Franciscus) lives -- his wife and daughter say hello to a neighbor, Andrew Eisert (Woodrow Parfrey) who wanders past them, oblivious to both. Eisert suddenly pulls out a pistol, walks into a small neighborhood shop, and faces an older woman behind the counter, who greets him. And he shoots her dead. He leaves the store, walks to another store-front where he confronts a shopkeeper on his way into the store, and shoots him. He walks into another store, gun drawn, and confronts a man behind the counter -- who knows him -- and shoots him. A milkman making a delivery sees what is happening and runs to his truck as he realizes that the man with the gun is focused on him, but Eisert runs down the sidewalk and shoots the milkman dead in the cab of his truck as he tries to turn a corner away from him. Next, he tries to shoot his way into a shop where people are huddled in fear, when the sound of approaching police sirens causes him to break off the attack and flee.
The episode holds up. The brutal violence of that opening sequence seems even more striking today, and what follows is even better. Woodrow Parfrey's performance is amazing, effectively conveying madness without a word of dialogue until 23 or 24 minutes into the half-hour episode. His Andrew Eisert and Franciscus's Jimmy Halloran are on a collision course from the moment that Halloran goes searching for him in a nearly-deserted Coney Island; and in this episode producer Herbert Leonard's mid-episode narration was almost completely unnecessary, and distracting. This was one of the first season episodes that might have been seriously considered for another go-around in the hour-long series that followed -- there was enough depth to the dialogue between Halloran and the priest, and enough unexplored about the Parfrey character's history and possible motivations, just touched upon fragmentarily in his little sliver of dialogue.
Watching it in 2013, there are too many resonances to recent real-life mass-shootings (something almost unknown in the 1950s). But the program also has some points that stretch credibility -- as per NYPD policy in place long before the 1960s, no squad commander would ever assign a detective to find an armed and dangerous suspect (in a case of multiple homicide, no less) by themselves. This episode mostly belongs to Franciscus and Parfrey (John McIntire has relatively little to do as Lt. Muldoon), and the lonely landscape of Coney Island in winter time.
It's a quiet morning in the neighborhood where detective Jimmy Halloran (James Franciscus) lives -- his wife and daughter say hello to a neighbor, Andrew Eisert (Woodrow Parfrey) who wanders past them, oblivious to both. Eisert suddenly pulls out a pistol, walks into a small neighborhood shop, and faces an older woman behind the counter, who greets him. And he shoots her dead. He leaves the store, walks to another store-front where he confronts a shopkeeper on his way into the store, and shoots him. He walks into another store, gun drawn, and confronts a man behind the counter -- who knows him -- and shoots him. A milkman making a delivery sees what is happening and runs to his truck as he realizes that the man with the gun is focused on him, but Eisert runs down the sidewalk and shoots the milkman dead in the cab of his truck as he tries to turn a corner away from him. Next, he tries to shoot his way into a shop where people are huddled in fear, when the sound of approaching police sirens causes him to break off the attack and flee.
The episode holds up. The brutal violence of that opening sequence seems even more striking today, and what follows is even better. Woodrow Parfrey's performance is amazing, effectively conveying madness without a word of dialogue until 23 or 24 minutes into the half-hour episode. His Andrew Eisert and Franciscus's Jimmy Halloran are on a collision course from the moment that Halloran goes searching for him in a nearly-deserted Coney Island; and in this episode producer Herbert Leonard's mid-episode narration was almost completely unnecessary, and distracting. This was one of the first season episodes that might have been seriously considered for another go-around in the hour-long series that followed -- there was enough depth to the dialogue between Halloran and the priest, and enough unexplored about the Parfrey character's history and possible motivations, just touched upon fragmentarily in his little sliver of dialogue.
Watching it in 2013, there are too many resonances to recent real-life mass-shootings (something almost unknown in the 1950s). But the program also has some points that stretch credibility -- as per NYPD policy in place long before the 1960s, no squad commander would ever assign a detective to find an armed and dangerous suspect (in a case of multiple homicide, no less) by themselves. This episode mostly belongs to Franciscus and Parfrey (John McIntire has relatively little to do as Lt. Muldoon), and the lonely landscape of Coney Island in winter time.