| The Adventures of Hiram Holliday | |
|---|---|
Wally Cox as Hiram Holliday with Angela Greene, 1957. |
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| Genre | Comedy/Adventure |
| Starring | Wally Cox Ainslie Pryor Thurston Hall Stanley Adams Lita Milan |
| Country of origin | USA |
| Language(s) | English |
| No. of seasons | 1 |
| No. of episodes | 20 (original run) |
| Production | |
| Producer(s) | Philip Rapp |
| Running time | 30 minutes |
| Production company(s) | California National Productions |
| Distributor | NBC Television |
| Broadcast | |
| Original channel | NBC |
| Picture format | Black and white |
| Audio format | Monaural |
| Original run | October 3, 1956 – February 27, 1957 (original run) |
Adventures of Hiram Holliday is a 1939 novel by Paul Gallico, later adapted to a TV series, The Adventures of Hiram Holliday, a half-hour filmed comedy/adventure series which ran for 20 episodes on the NBC Television Network and is now better known than the literary original.
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The series originally aired from October 3, 1956 to February 27, 1957. Its full 23 episodes later ran on the BBC from the fall of 1960 to the summer of 1961.
The series is similar to the book, and focused on the adventures of a newspaper proofreader who through years of secret practice has gained James Bond-like skills in many forms of physical combat, shooting, and in activities as diverse as rock-climbing and scuba-diving. The proofreader, Hiram Holliday, was played by Wally Cox, who when stripped was revealed to be as muscular as his longtime best friend Marlon Brando had ever been in his heyday. Thus, Cox made a surprisingly convincing action hero.
The starting gimmick of the series was that Holliday had inserted a comma in a news story which saved the publisher a small fortune in a trial. The grateful publisher rewarded Holliday with a trip around the world, which set the scene for him to solve crimes and thwart foreign spies in every port of call he visited. The series was hampered by a low budget which did not permit convincing recreations of the different exotic foreign locations featured in each episode.
Other cast members included actor Ainslie Pryor (1921-1958), as Holliday's reporter sidekick, Joel Smith, and Sebastian Cabot as a criminal mastermind he repeatedly encountered. There were a number of directors including George Cahan and William Hole, and a number of writers including Philip Rapp and Richard Powell. Philip Rapp also served as producer. Star Wally Cox was best known as Mr. Peepers in an early live NBC sitcom about a mild-mannered junior high school science teacher; it was typecasting he was never able to escape in later years. Hiram Holliday was Cox's last starring role.
In its BBC rerun, The Adventures of Hiram Holliday was the first US series to be "stripped," that is, shown 5 days a week in the same time slot.
The original novel was Gallico's first published book. It was published by Grosset and Dunlap on the cusp of World War II in 1939. In form, the novel is a connected series of adventures, rather akin to short stories which flow into one another.
In the book, Holliday was rewarded with time off and a cash reward which he used to go to Europe. In Europe he fights spies and Nazis, finds his true love, achieves some fame as a foreign correspondent with his newspaper back in New York, and becomes the man of action he aspired to be. The book has the major themes of the protagonist coming to grips with his own character and destiny, how individuals act when confronted by great evil, and the over-arching question of would war come to Europe?
In Gallico's view, war would NOT come, but events would shortly prove him wrong. Unlike the typical adventure story of today, his book has expositions on evil and character, so it is not just "action for action's sake." It also evinces a witty and subtle dark humor. For most Gallico fans, the book does not attain the quality of writing of his later works, but it still is rewarding.
The book encapsulates Gallico's views and insights at the time of writing, without the hindsight of later events - some of which turned out to be wrong and others were quite accurate.
In one scene of the chapter set in Britain, Holliday is in a plane flying over London and gets the premonition that enemy bombers would soon fly in the same sky - as was all too true. However, it is assumed that the British have become "soft" and would not be able to stand the rigors of the coming war - which was clearly written under the influence of Neville Chamberlain's Appeasement policies and would be disproven by events. In the same scene, Holliday also gets a premonition of a future when a single bomb would be able to destroy a whole city - an interesting prediction of the rise of nuclear arms.
The part set in Austria, soon after its annexation to Nazi Germany in the Anschluss, clearly takes the attitude that Austrians were victims of Nazi aggression - an idea current among many people, at the time itself and up to the present, bur also disputed by many others and constituting a hotly controversial issue in Austria itself.
The Austrian part also includes a very strong perspective of a restoration of the Habsburg Monarchy to a post-Nazi Austria. (Holliday helps get to safety a young (fictional) Habsburg Prince who would be the next Emperor. The idea of a restored Habsburg Monarchy, sometimes under the name of "A Danubian Federation", was an option seriously discussed at the time - though the development of World War II, culminating with the Soviets taking power in most former Habsburg lands, made such ideas moot.
In the book's Italian part, Holliday takes up an ancient Legionary sword which had belonged to a soldier of the Roman Empire and - making a kind of telepathic contact with the ghost of its original owner and with his help defeats a famous Italian fencing champion in a duel. This the story makes into the symbol that Americans are true heirs to the Roman Imperial tradition - rather than Italians, whom Benito Mussolini tried to cast in that role. Also, the book features chivalrous Italian characters who start out as allies of Germany - but when the Germans' villainy is revealed, the Italians eventually change sides and support Holliday - all of which is a quite accurate prediction of the way Italians would actually act in the coming war.