This DVD has four of them. The show's assets and liabilities were already touched upon in this writer's review of Naked City -- Portrait of a Painter. Naked City -- Spectre of the Rose Street Gang is more of the same.

As with the previously released shows, viewers will have fun spotting soon-to-be-famous actors and actresses cutting their teeth on anthology and quasi-anthology shows like this. All four episodes have decent scripts and performances, make good use of real New York City locations, and have a realism rare for early-'60s television.

Frank Cranks for Winter...Ten Cranks for Spring Written by Stirling Silliphant. Directed by Paul Stanley. Airdate: 10/24/62. Apparently a remake of an earlier, half-hour show, this episode features Robert Duvall as an ex-fighter willing to go back into the ring and risk a brain hemorrhage to send beloved wife Shirley Knight to a flower show. These two powerhouse talents are joined by former blacklisted actor Herschel Bernardi (later the voice of Charley the Tuna) and Stefan Gierasch (The Hustler) as crooked promoters. Detroit TV icon Bill Kennedy reportedly appears unbilled, but this reviewer didn't spot him. The best thing about this episode are the delicate performances of Duvall and Knight -- both deliver sweet, sad monologues about the other -- while Herschel Bernardi is subtle and devious in his part. The episode also has a noteworthy seediness to its boxing scenes, a look worthy of Raging Bull.

Torment Him Much and Hold Him Long Written by Stirling Silliphant. Directed by Robert Gist. Airdate: 11/7/62. One can only imagine the confusion this episode must have generated, with Robert Duvall again guest-starring in an episode that originally aired just two weeks after "Five Cranks for Winter." This time Duvall is a good citizen, a bartender who tips the police off to a robbery only to find his family terrorized when a technicality sets the criminals free. Actress-turned-director Barbara Loden is Duvall's wife this time, with character favorites Alfred Ryder and Murray Matheson as a gangster toymaker and his lawyer, respectively. Jesse White makes a rare dramatic turn as Duvall's frightened boss. This show is notable for its ahead-of-its-time pessimism, and for some great noir-like photography early in the show, which recalls John Alton's great cinematography of the late-1940s.

Goodbye Mama, Hello Auntie Maud Written by Sy Salkowitz. Directed by Robert Gist. Airdate: 6/20/62. This was the last episode of the 1961-62 season, a solid season-ender. The unusual teleplay moves out of the urban landscape to a palatial estate where a dying matriarch has been murdered. The police suspect the old woman's daughter (Salome Jens, familiar to contemporary audiences thanks to a recurring role on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine), who was going to lose her beloved childhood home when her mother threatened to sell the estate. The show co-stars James Coburn as Jens's lover-chauffer, and Carroll O'Connor as the mansion's Cockney (!) butler. The show has a biting Upstairs / Downstairs tension between the bluebloods and the servants. Coburn's character might easily have lapsed into something like his unsympathetic grifter in Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round, but Salkowitz's teleplay gives it unexpected shading, and the actor already shows his considerable star power.

Spectre of the Rose Street Gang Written by Alvin Sargent and Jerome Gruskin. Directed by James Sheldon. Airdate: 12/19/62. Jack Warden guest stars, as yet another hard luck dreamer, this time a lower-middle class vacuum salesman looking to move "an hour out of town." His chance comes when the 25-year-old, skeletal remains of a 14-year-old boy are unearthed at a construction site. Fellow ex-gang members Carroll O'Connor (again) and a pre-mustache Roger C. Carmel (he looks like Dom DeLuise here; no wonder he grew it) are among those responsible. Once again, the show is sympathetic to the hapless underdog, and critical of the viciousness and cutthroat mentality of Warden's former colleagues, now "respectable" members of society. Warden is very good at expressing his awkwardness among Manhattan's elite, while O'Connor and Carmel are subtly devious and cruel in their roles.

This episode also exemplifies the problem with the Nancy Malone character, detective Flint's acting school girlfriend. The part seems to have been created to offer a softer counterpoint to the hard-nose detectives, and for the character to act as a buffer between victims and the police. In this show, as in several other episodes, she likewise serves to sidestep laws and procedures that would otherwise leave victims with nowhere left to turn. This strains credibility and deflates the drama of the detectives' legal limitations.

Video & Audio

The four black and white, 4:3 shows on this disc are near flawless with good audio. Audiences that enjoyed the show in syndication, particularly during the '60s and '70s when local TV stations used 16mm prints, will be very pleased by the program's clean appearance. Indeed, the image is so sharp one can spot all kinds of little goofs that would have been less apparent when the show first aired, or in its early syndication days. For instance, in "Torment Him Much and Hold Him Long" a hand inexplicably appears from the back seat of a patrol car where supposedly no one is sitting; in "Goodbye Mama..." one can glimpse cables snaking around a staircase and the reflection of the film crew off Coburn's limo, and peppered throughout all four episodes are shadows of microphone booms. The DVD offers no subtitles nor Extras.

Parting Thoughts

Fans of classic television and/or cop shows might want to give these budget-priced discs a look. These well-produced, well-written shows still hold up, some forty-plus years after they originally aired.

Stuart Galbraith IV is a Los Angeles and Kyoto-based film historian whose work includes The Emperor and the Wolf -- The Lives and Films of Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune. He is presently writing a new book on Japanese cinema for Taschen.