| The Lieutenant | |
|---|---|
| Format | Drama |
| Starring | Gary Lockwood Robert Vaughn John Milford Henry Beckman Richard Anderson Don Penny Carmen Phillips Steven Franken |
| Composer(s) | Arthur Morton Jeff Alexander (1.12, 1.14) |
| Country of origin | United States |
| No. of seasons | 1 |
| No. of episodes | 29 |
| Production | |
| Running time | 1 hour |
| Broadcast | |
| Original channel | NBC |
| Original run | September 14, 1963 – April 18, 1964 |
The Lieutenant is an American television series, the first created by Gene Roddenberry. It aired on NBC on Saturday evenings in the 1963-1964 television schedule. It was produced by Arena Productions, one of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's most successful in-house production companies of the 1960s. Situated at Camp Pendleton, the West Coast base of the U.S. Marine Corps, The Lieutenant focuses on the men of the Corps in peace time with a Cold War backdrop. The title character is Second Lieutenant William Tiberius Rice, a rifle platoon leader and one of the training instructors at Camp Pendleton. An hour-long drama, The Lieutenant explores the lives of enlisted Marines and general officers alike.
The series is scheduled to be released on DVD by the Warner Archive Collection some time in 2011.[1]
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Gary Lockwood starred as USMC Second Lieutenant William Tiberius Rice, a recent graduate of the United States Naval Academy who had been assigned his first command, that of a rifle platoon. Robert Vaughn played Captain Raymond Rambridge, Rice's company commander, an up-from-the-ranks officer. Richard Anderson, better known to 1970s television audiences as Oscar Goldman in The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman, had a recurring role as battalion commander Lieutenant Colonel Steve Hiland, and Linda Evans, better known to 1980s audiences as Krystle Grant-Jennings-Carrington in Dynasty, appeared in several early episodes as Colonel Hiland's daughter Nan, who flirted with Rice.
In character, Rice himself was a young, attractive, educated, idealistic professional man who still had much to learn from an older mentor, the way John Kennedy had been on his way to the office of President of the United States. Kennedy's assassination followed the premiere of the series program by two months, and an ongoing war in Vietnam would soon escalate.
Actor Gary Lockwood was twenty-six years of age and still an apprentice actor at the time the series program premiered. Lockwood received his stage "family" name from early mentor Joshua Logan, who had participated in Mister Roberts and Picnic and whose middle name was Lockwood. A former UCLA college football player who could be violent and quick-tempered, and who had seriously injured a man in a brawl at a party, Lockwood had a higher-than-average opinion of his own intelligence and attractiveness. He tried to withdraw from the series program at the last moment, hoping instead to concentrate on films. He did not do so because the producers and network executives convinced him that there would be unpleasant payback if he did. Lockwood later compared being a series program star to being a jet pilot: many experts, he said, worked behind the scenes and then the pilot entered the hot seat and made it all work.
Lockwood told TV Guide magazine that he eventually wanted to be an actor, a writer, a producer, and a director. Warren Beatty, whom Lockwood had acted alongside in Splendor in the Grass, would eventually go on to achieve that ambition; Lockwood himself would not. Lockwood, during that interview, also displayed contempt for "insecure" women, an accusation he would not be able to level against eventual castmate Sally Kellerman or the woman he later married, the very secure Stephanie Powers.
Robert Vaughn, thirty years of age at the time, received the same compensation for each installment as Lockwood did, even though he was usually in only one scene per installment. Vaughn had already been one of The Magnificent Seven, and he had even received an Oscar nomination for The Young Philadelphians. This meant that he might have considered being second to Lockwood in the cast something of a climb-down. Vaughn had political aspirations and, indeed, was then working on his Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Southern California. (He would later publish this dissertation, which was his examination of the devastating negative effects McCarthyism had had on 1950s entertainment, as the book Only Victims: A Study of Show Business Blacklisting. The title he used for the book was taken from a statement Dalton Trumbo made that the blacklist period produced "only victims.") Vaughn asked both MGM Television and Norman Felton (under whose Arena Productions banner The Lieutenant was being produced) for his own series program during the run of The Lieutenant. The result was The Man from U.N.C.L.E., which began the next season and proved to be highly successful.
One episode of The Lieutenant was never even transmitted, nor would the network pay for it. That installment, titled "To Set It Right" and written by Lee Erwin, was about race prejudice, and featured Nichelle Nichols as the fiancee of a black Marine. The subject of race was considered taboo in entertainment television in 1964, and because the network refused to transmit or even pay for "To Set It Right," MGM had to eat the entire cost of production. Viewing the episode at The Paley Center for Media in New York City became possible in more modern times.
The Lieutenant performed well in the ratings, considering the competition from The Jackie Gleason Show on CBS. The program had occupied the time slot previously held by the legal drama Sam Benedict starring Edmond O'Brien and Richard Rust. Rust also guest starred in an episode of The Lieutenant. Despite its success and promise, The Lieutenant was nevertheless canceled after only one season because, according to Roddenberry, the Vietnam War had made present-day military dramas toxic for television. In the final episode of the series, Rice is sent to a fictitious Asian country based on Vietnam as an advisor, mirroring the same real-life situation that the series had been canceled for.
Roddenberry recruited Lockwood one more time, in "Where No Man Has Gone Before", the second pilot installment for Star Trek, as Lieutenant Commander Gary Mitchell.
A middle name would be reused for Star Trek: The title character in The Lieutenant was Second Lieutenant William Tiberius Rice; on Star Trek the title character would be Captain James Tiberius Kirk.
The Lieutenant also brought together several other actors—amongst them Leonard Nimoy, Nichelle Nichols, and Majel Barrett—who would later join Roddenberry in Star Trek.
Prior to his selection as The Lieutenant, Lockwood had appeared as magazine researcher Eric Jason in the ABC series Follow the Sun during the 1961–1962 season.
| Episode # | Episode title | Original airdate | Plot |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1-1 | "A Million Miles From Clary" | September 14, 1963 | Platoon morale is threatened when an enlisted man uses his friendship with Rice to gain favors. |
| 1-2 | "Cool of the Evening" | September 21, 1963 | Rice goes to the aid of a young woman (Kathryn Hays) when he hears her scream in a dark alley, but then finds himself facing serious charges. |
| 1-3 | "The Proud and the Angry" | September 28, 1963 | Rice goes undercover as a Private to investigate charges that Sgt. Karl Kasten (Rip Torn) is brutal in his training of new recruits. |
| 1-4 | "The Two Star Giant" | October 5, 1963 | Rice is mistakenly assigned as an aide to General Stone (Neville Brand) just as the general is ordered to Washington to defend his policies at a Senate hearing. |
| 1-5 | "A Very Private Affair" | October 12, 1963 | Rice must choose between winning the confidence of his new platoon by overlooking a fight or revealing the truth to Rambridge. |
| 1-6 | "To Take Up Serpents" | October 19, 1963 | Rice is assigned to an air base for training and comes to the realization that he has a fear of flying. |
| 1-7 | "A Touching of Hands" | October 26, 1963 | Rice offers sympathy to the lonely wife of a fellow officer (Ina Balin), but soon finds himself the subject of malicious gossip. |
| 1-8 | "Captain Thomson" | November 2, 1963 | A gruff and tactless guerilla warfare instructor (Paul Burke) makes impossible demands on his trainees. |
| 1-9 | "Instant Wedding" | November 9, 1963 | Rice tries to protect a fellow officer's girlfriend from the romantic attentions of a Navy officer. |
| 1-10 | "A Troubled Image" | November 16, 1963 | Rice trains a group of Vietnamese combat officers and finds one of them is a beautiful girl. |
| 1-11 | "Fall From a White Horse" | November 30, 1963 | Rice is assigned to defend a fellow Marine officer who is accused in a hit-and-run accident and is in danger of being court-martialed. |
| 1-12 | "Alert" | December 14, 1963 | Rice falls in love with a business executive's daughter who gives him an ultimatum of either leaving the Marine Corps or breaking off the relationship. |
| 1-13 | "The Art of Discipline" | December 21, 1963 | Rice loses control of his new platoon when he relaxes discipline to win friends. |
| 1-14 | "The Alien" | December 28, 1963 | Rambridge conducts a double courtship in an effort to get married as quickly as possible in order to a Korean orphan. |
| 1-15 | "O'Rourke" | January 4, 1964 | A famous author (Eddie Albert decides to prove the contemporary Marine Corps is far less effective that it was during World War II. |
| 1-16 | "Gone the Sun" | January 18, 1964 | Rice is blamed for the death of a Marine during maneuvers by the parents of the deceased soldier. |
| 1-17 | "Between Music and Laughter" | January 25, 1964 | A party girl (Patricia Crowley) asks Rice to help her win back the affections of her ex-husband, Captain Rambridge. |
| 1-18 | "Interlude" | February 1, 1964 | Rice career in the Marine Corps is threatened when he is paralyzed in an accident automobile, but he finds love during his rehabilitation. |
| 1-19 | "Capp's Lady" | February 8, 1964 | Rice makes an effort to warn Sgt. Horace Capp (James Gregory) that the woman he plans to get married to has a notorious reputation along with a police record. |
| 1-20 | "Green Water Green Flag" | February 15, 1964 | Rice meets and old adversary just when he is suddenly given command of important maneuvers due to Rambridge's illness. |
| 1-21 | "To Set It Right" | February 22, 1964 | Rice tries to play peacemaker when he has to resolve a racial dispute between two young members of his platoon. |
| 1-22 | "In the Highest Tradition" | February 29, 1964 | Rice is assigned as a technical adviser with a film crew making a movie about a Marine battle. |
| 1-23 | "Tour of Duty" | March 7, 1964 | A Marine (Ricardo Montalban) returns from overseas and learns that his wife was killed while riding with another man, then takes advantage of Rice's sympathies. |
| 1-24 | "Lament for a Dead Goldbrick" | March 14, 1964 | A newspaper reporter (Robert Duvall) writing an expose of Marine training methods holds Rice responsible for the accidental death of a recruit. |
| 1-25 | "Man With an Edge" | March 21, 1964 | Rice loses his girlfriend to a Naval Academy football All-American (Chad Everett}, who also happens to be the nephew of the colonel. |
| 1-26 | "Operation Actress" | March 28, 1964 | Rice is shocked when a conniving Hollywood actress announces that she is going to marry him. |
| 1-27 | "Mother Enemy" | April 4, 1964 | Rice recommends Sgt. John Delwyn (Walter Koenig) for officer's school, but then discovers that the man's mother is a leading member of the American Communist party. |
| 1-28 | "War Called Peace" | April 11, 1964 | Rice is assigned to surreptitiously check on careless security measures that have developed on a top-secret scientific project called "The War Called Peace." |
| 1-29 | "To Kill a Man" | April 18, 1964 | Rice is assigned to deliver top-secret military information to combat troops in Vietnam, but when his plane is shot down, he and a Vietnamese aide are forced to fight their way back. |