I've been watching Peter Gunn lately, on Amazon Prime. I'm not old enough to have caught it in its original time on television. Gunn, as played and written, is an odd mix of charm and manner coupled with Bogart like dialogue. So it's quirky. He's a handsomely paid private eye with a good friend who is a detective and a girlfriend who sings and pines at a jazz club he frequents called Mother's, where "Mother" is another character in support. Gunn is funny and prone to tough guy stances, but he also has a real knack for ending up on the losing end of a beating (if usually delivered by uneven numbers). The first couple of times I noticed this habit I thought he was unlucky. After a few more I wondered why he hadn't started to anticipate it. After a few more I began to suspect he'd chosen the wrong line of work.
It's entertaining though and you can see in that quirk and a few others the evolution of Bogart's wise cracking tough guy into something a little more vulnerable, in every sense of the word. Gunn foreshadows everything from Jim Rockford to Magnum P.I. It's a good little episodic show with more background questions than any apparent interest in answering them. Taken as it is, worth watching.
It's entertaining though and you can see in that quirk and a few others the evolution of Bogart's wise cracking tough guy into something a little more vulnerable, in every sense of the word. Gunn foreshadows everything from Jim Rockford to Magnum P.I. It's a good little episodic show with more background questions than any apparent interest in answering them. Taken as it is, worth watching.
