TV Times 
Los Angeles Times Daily TV Listings
week of Sept. 26 to Oct. 2, 1971

Cover story

BY CECIL SMITH

Franciscus: Some thoughts on a difficult role

James Franciscus came blinking out of the glittering sunshine into the cool 
dimness of his dressing room, closing his eyes and holding his hands over them, 
touching them gently with his fingers and saying: "They're not so bad yet, but 
by 4 o'clock each afternoon they are like balls of fire."

"They hurt from not seeing?" I asked.

"From seeing that I don't see," said Jim and shook his head and grinned. "It's 
the concentration, I suppose," he said. "Like turning your head. A sighted man's 
eyes move first when he turns his head; a sightless person moves his head first 
and his eyes follow.

"It's the concentration on not focusing with your eyes. The other actors are 
used to it now. Anytime I bring my eyes into focus on Marlyn Mason, she blows 
sky high . . ."

We'd come in from the set of Longstreet where Franciscus is starring in Stirling 
Silliphant's new series about a blind detective launched a couple of weeks ago 
by ABC on Thursday.

So many detectives are roaming the networks this semester that I'm beginning to 
feel sympathy for the crooks, the brigands and rascals and ersatz murderers -- I 
don't see how a man can get away with anything. I do think with Longstreet he 
has a fighting chance. You should get odds to outmaneuver a blind man.

But Mike Longstreet is not your ordinary run of detective or, for that matter, 
your standard breed of series, at least not to the mind of author Silliphant or 
actor Franciscus, the Mr. Novak of a superior series of an earlier day.

Silliphant defined this series thusly: "Longstreet is an existentialist 
statement based on the conviction that people who cannot suffer can never grow 
up, never discover who they really are."

That's pretty heavy words for so ephemeral an art form as a television series. 
Particularly when one faces the obvious that in a season swarming with 
detectives you need a gimmick to get another one on -- so make him blind.

Silliphant will not deny the gimmick and that it sold the series, but he also 
never puts down this medium that spawned him as a writer, not even when it 
tossed him out to movies and he won his Oscar for "In the Heat of the Night" (he 
has never won an Emmy). He has ever been steadfast in his belief that an adroit 
writer can do significant and intelligent things in television no matter how 
constrictive the series format, no matter how obvious the gimmick.

Thus, in the Movie of the Week "Longstreet," that served as the pilot and was 
reshown earlier this month, Stirling explored the fascinating ways in which a 
blinded man is made to function through his other senses, through developing 
innate qualities that lie almost totally unused within him. And thus in the 
script that opened the series two weeks ago, "The Way of the Intercepting Fist," 
there was within the melodramatic context that the playwright explored with 
expert Bruce Lee the philosophic as well as the physical blending of mind and 
body in the art (in Cantonese) of jeet kune do -- the intercepting fist. The 
script has Mike Longstreet tell Lee that in getting his body and head together 
"out of martial art, out of combat, I feel something peaceful, an absence of 
hostility -- as if by knowing it I never have to use it."

This variation on karate was one of a long list of things Franciscus suggested 
to make Mike a functioning human being within his dark world.

Franciscus is a cerebral actor despite his open-faced, blond good looks. After 
Novak, he plunged into film production in partnership with Fred Brogger, forming 
Omnibus Productions which made a series of classic movies, "Heidi," "David 
Copperfield" and the recent "Jane Eyre" with George C. Scott and Susannah York. 
All were shown on NBC in this country and in theaters abroad. Jimmy said the new 
one, Stevenson's "Kidnaped," just completed, is strictly for theaters.

"What grabbed me with Longstreet," he said, "is that it's the only TV series I 
know in which the hero is the most interesting character. This is not about 
Longstreet's cases, it's about Mike Longstreet, how he functions, what he must 
do in order to function.

"We deal with the way he lives in New Orleans, his hostility for the housekeeper 
(Ann Doran) when she moves the furniture and he bumps into it, the humor and 
humanity in his relationship with Marlyn as his associate Nikki and with his 
friend and former boss, Peter Mark Richman as Duke. "It used to be Mark Richman, 
but now that he's a famous painter it has to be Peter Mark . . ."

He grinned, then added: "But an actor's chief weapon in film is his eyes. That 
and the voice are all he really has. Watch Ray Burr in Ironside, chained to that 
chair he can still act the pants off anybody with those eyes and that voice. 
Losing the eyes makes this so difficult. It cripples your acting.

"But it's become so convincing I think I've got the seeing-eye dogs fooled. 
There are two of them, you know, who alternate -- Pax I and Pax II. Pax I is 
calm but Pax II is a dingaling. But in the show that's on this week, I'm drugged 
with LSD to keep me quiet. I stumble around with the dog until help comes. We 
did the scene with Pax I. He wouldn't let anyone get close to me. We tried it 
with Pax II. Even that dingaling bared his teeth and kept everybody away.

"It can get too real for comfort."