Burke's Law: Who Killed Mr. X?

(This post is part of the 12th Annual Favourite TV Show Episode blogathon hosted by A Shroud of Thoughts)

Amos Burke (Gene Barry) is captain of the LAPD homicide division, and thanks to an inheritance lives in an 18-room mansion in Beverly Hills, wearing ascots around the house and tuxedos on dates with an endless string of girlfriends. He’s suave and sophisticated, although chaste (always flirting – with the occasional double entendre – never kissing), and shuns police cars for his chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud.

Nearly all of the 64 episodes of Burke’s Law (1963 – 64) followed the same outline: someone either a) wealthy or b) famous is murdered, Burke is called in to investigate, he and his detective colleagues Tim (Gary Conway) and Les (Regis Toomey) question a list of quirky suspects with the means and motives for killing before Burke solves the crime and wraps up the loose ends.

(I could have chosen just about any episode of Burke’s Law since the show seldom strayed far from formula. A nicely colorized version of Who Killed Mr. X can be found on YouTube).

Aside from the gimmick of Burke’s wealth, the weekly slate of guest stars made Burke’s Law unique, a cornucopia of casting that blended veterans of the Golden Age of Hollywood along with current stars in roles that allowed for plenty of theatricality and over-the-top performances.

The list of guest stars for the show’s two-year run totals more than 100, from A (Mary Astor) to Z (ZaSu Pitts) and includes fathers and sons (Ed and Keenan Wynn), sisters (Zsa Zsa and Eva Gabor) stars of silent films (Gloria Swanson and Buster Keaton) and beach party flicks (Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello), future Batman villains (Cesar Romero, Burgess Meredith, David Wayne, Ida Lupino, Eartha Kitt), Sherlock Holmes (Basil Rathbone) and the Bride of Frankenstein (Elsa Lanchester).

In Who Killed Mr. X Elizabeth Montgomery, Barrie Chase and Dina Merrill play three kept women who’ve been signed to “exclusive” contracts by the late Mr. X, who has essentially locked them away in expensive homes and beach houses.

Montgomery flirts and trades snappy banter with Burke; Chase (Dick Shawn’s go-go girlfriend in It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World) guzzles martinis non-stop; Merrill (another future Batman villain) has turned to picking up strangers off the street and gets a big dramatic scene, smashing a mirror with a fireplace poker.

Barry and Montgomery: I'm sure this was unintentional positioning

The rest of the cast – suspects all – includes Ann Harding (nominated for a Best Actress Oscar in 1931 for Holiday), Soupy Sales (at the time host of a local Los Angeles kids’ program), Charles Ruggles (with a film career dating back to 1915) and Jim Backus (ubiquitous on television and movies in 1963).

Amos Burke questions Soupy 

Shades of Sunset Boulevard color Who Killed Mr. X, and the murderer turns out to be the least likely of suspects who, in a clever turn, is done in by a studio headshot of Robert Mitchum hanging on a wall.

Before Burke’s Law, Gene Barry spent four years starring in the Bat Masterson series, another debonair crime fighter. It’s not much of a stretch to imagine that in some fictional crossover universe, Amos Burke is related to Masterson, possibly even his grandson. Did Bat Masterson and Annie Oakley ever cross paths?

But watching the show today makes one think more of Batman than Bat Masterson: the often tongue-in-cheek campiness, a rich guy alter ego, Gary Conway as Tim, the boy wonder detective, and the Rolls, as much of a uncredited major character in Burke’s Law as was the Batmobile. In Who Killed Mr. X, the plot moves along in the car’s backseat as Burke takes a call on his clunky car phone, interrogates suspects and offers Elizabeth Montgomery her choice of music on tape.

Jazz or classical?

Burke’s Law died a sudden death in 1965 when it was rebranded at ABC’s insistence with a new format, titled Amos Burke, Secret Agent. The show was about as awful as the title suggests and was cancelled midway through the season. A revival in of Burke’s Law in 1994, with a 76-year-old Barry, lasted 25 episodes.

The Day New York Went Dry

Intrigued by the cover art, 59 years ago I bought a paperback copy of The Day New York Went Dry at a second-hand bookstore. Over the years it was moved from box to box with other paperbacks and, for some reason, I overlooked it until now. It’s a good thing I didn’t attempt to read it at age 13 because I wouldn’t have lasted past the first few pages.

The Day New York Went Dry, published in 1964 and written by Charles Einstein, is – despite the cool cover – not science fiction but something more along the lines of social satire. The premise is real and somewhat scary: there hasn’t been any measurable rainfall in more than a year and the reservoir levels that serve New York City are dropping.

But the story revolves around several bureaucrats and politicians who are trying to solve the problem, none of whom are very appealing or sympathetic, speaking in self-aware shorthand, quoting lines from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in casual conversation.

The book is just 160 pages, and one gets the impression that the author was researching a comprehensive piece about the New York City water supply infrastructure, something that would have been at home in The New Yorker and, looking over his notes, decided to turn it into a novel.

Satire? There’s a senator from Alabama who suggests that black professionals migrate from New York City to Africa (less people to consume water), the notion of the disenfranchised turning on all their taps and running water as an act of civil disobedience and a professor who cites in mind-numbing detail why water shouldn’t be served with meals.

Along the way there’s also a fair amount of padding, including (for three unforgivable pages) blackjack strategies.

It isn’t until the final chapters that The Day New York Went Dry starts to feel like science fiction. An apocalyptic gloom settles on New York City as rationing takes over, travel drops off the charts, a plan is drafted to move schoolchildren out of the city and the Pennsylvania National Guard is mobilized to protect that state’s waterways.

Author Charles Einstein was a San Francisco sportswriter, serving for many years as editor of The Fireside Book of Baseball, a ubiquitous compendium found in nearly every library in America. He wrote a couple of books about Willie Mays, dabbled in fiction and wrote How to Win at Blackjack: The Einstein System.

His father was Harry Einstein, the radio comedian known as Parkyakarkus, remembered today mostly for his very public death in 1958, suffering a fatal heart attack on the dais during a Friar’s Club roast of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz.

After Einstein delivered his monologue, he returned to his seat, ad-libbed a joke then slumped down. Everyone laughed when Milton Berle, who was seated next to Einstein, called out, "Is there a doctor in the house?" Einstein never regained consciousness.

Comedians Albert Brooks (yeah, he named his son Albert Einstein) and Super Dave Osborne were Charles Einstein’s half-brothers. Einstein died in 2007.

Flipside (2023)

In the feature documentary Flipside (2023), filmmaker Chris Wilcha tries making sense of a spaghetti plate of unfinished film projects left hanging when he made the transition from documentary maker to television commercial director.

Flipside is Wilcha’s attempt at tying these loose ends together while seeking answers to bigger mid-life questions about the purpose of work and about letting go of a lifetime of accumulated stuff. Yeah, these are third-world problems and at times the narrative grows a little too self-absorbed, but Flipside’s main attraction is its documentary-within-a-documentary about the record store Wilcha worked in as a teenager, Flipside Records in Pompton Lakes, N.J.

Chris Wilcha outside Flipside Records

Shopping at Flipside, which I sometimes did way back when, took persistence as you worked your way through its overwhelming crush of inventory. Described in the film as a “hoarder’s runaway train,” if Flipside Records was a Brooklyn storefront instead of in suburban Pompton Lakes, vinyl freaks from throughout the tri-state area would be beating a path to its door.

The store, as Wilcha says, preserves a piece of the world that’s gone and it’s no surprise that Uncle Floyd Vivino, the New Jersey entertainer with one foot in the modern world and the other in a long-lost land of vaudeville and pre-war American pop, was a Flipside customer. He’s shown kibitzing around the store and, dramatically lit, improvising a Flipside Records theme song; a touching moment now that Floyd has left us.

Uncle Floyd improvises

(At one point Floyd comes across an ancient-looking Sesame Street busy box sitting among the records and wonders out loud when the toy was last cleaned. I took my three-year old son to Flipside once – he’s 35 now – and I swear the owner brought out the same toy for him to play with).

By movie’s end, Wilcha has found new homes for much of his childhood and teenage stuff and weaved together a satisfying ending to several of the parallel storylines and unfinished projects that have plagued him over the years. As we watch him close the closet door on his childhood bedroom, it’s a literal and figurative closet cleaning.

(Tellingly, when he sells off his record collection it’s not to Flipside, where he fears his records will be lost forever, but to a rival shop also located in Pompton Lakes).

I’ve been making steady progress on also reducing a lifetime of accumulations which, as he says, “can “transport you back but simultaneously make a suffocating mess that reminds you of how much time has passed,” says Wilcha.

I can totally agree. Recently I sold more than 300 LPs that I’d been hunting and gathering since middle school. It took more than a year to clear that mental runway, but when I was ready, I didn’t hesitate. Now to face down the four cartons of old sports magazines in the attic.

Show us your pizza rolls

If Super Bowl commercials were a thing in 1968, this ad for Jeno’s pizza rolls would have had people talking Monday morning:

It was written and produced by Stan Freberg, whose list of accomplishments in television, radio and comedy recordings is long and remarkable, although he may be best remembered for his inspired advertising work with such clients as Contadina tomato paste (Who put eight great tomatoes in that little bitty can?), Chun King: (Nine out of ten doctors recommend Chun King Chow Mein) and Sunsweet prunes (Today, the pits; tomorrow, the wrinkles. Sunsweet marches on).

(The Chun King line of canned Chinese food and Jeno’s pizza rolls were both developed by the same guy, Jeno Paulucci).

The story goes that after one showing on The Tonight Show, Johnny Carson remarked that the Jeno's commercial was the first to receive spontaneous applause from the studio audience. 

The ad is funny, memorable and works off a shared experience, something much more easily achieved in 1968 than today when we all watched the same handful of television channels and didn’t – couldn’t – mute commercials.

First, the ad plays off this then-ubiquitous Lark cigarette commercial:

Secondly, it works off the shared knowledge that, going back to the 1930s, the William Tell Overture served as the theme music for the Lone Ranger radio and television programs. Not to mention that nearly everyone who ever had a music course in elementary school knew that piece of music.

In other words, everybody got the joke.

The guy playing the Lark lurker in the Jeno's commercial is Barney Phillips. With 188 acting credits listed on IMDB, he’s probably best known as the diner counterman with three eyes in a 1961 episode of The Twilight Zone.

Clayton Moore and Jay Silverheels reprise their roles as the Lone Ranger and Tonto, a full decade before Jack Wrather, who owned the Lone Ranger character, obtained a court order prohibiting Moore from making future appearances as The Lone Ranger. There was a countersuit from Moore before Wrather dropped the lawsuit in 1984.

C.C. & Company

The following is part of the So Bad It's Good blogathon hosted at 

Taking Up Room – Reviews. History. Life.

It’s never good when the best part of a movie is its first five minutes.

C.C. & Company (19700 starts with Joe Namath, as a member of an outlaw biker gang “The Heads,” pretending to grocery shop while actually making a sandwich for himself by taking food from the shelves (and resealing packages as he goes along – the golden age of product tampering), washing it down with a stolen pint of milk, then helping himself to a napkin and a package of Twinkies, begging the question, do biker gang members use napkins? Or eat Twinkies?

Never underestimate the importance of a nutritious lunch 

From that point forward, C.C. & Company unfolds like an R-rated Elvis movie, with Namath as the loner with a chip on his shoulder but a heart of gold. He even gets a cool Elvis character name, C.C. Ryder. And like many Elvis movies, C.C. & Company ends with a climactic alpha-male competition where the hero wipes the smirk from his rival.

(There’s no way Presley would have signed on for C.C. & Company. There’s beer guzzling, disrespect for authority, a biker chick skinny-dipping, a couple of blurred nude biker asses and Ann-Margret telling a biker to fuck off).

Namath, at the time one of the most recognizable people in America, got the call. When his New York Jets upset the heavily favored Baltimore Colts in the 1969 Super Bowl, he was everywhere. Books, magazine covers, a syndicated talk show, commercials. The path led, inevitably, to movies.

After their not-so-cute first meeting – C.C. steps in to stop two of his motorcycle buddies from raping Ann (Ann-Margret) when her limo breaks down in the desert – C.C. wins first prize in a motorcross event and leaves The Heads, pocketing the prize money instead of tossing it into the gang’s beer fund, angering head Head Moon, played by the always menacing and excellent William Smith. Other Heads include notables Sid Haig and Bruce Glover, all of whom, in the golden tradition of biker movies, generally behave like the apes in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

It also leads us to wonder how clean-cut C.C. ever got mixed up these guys. He doesn’t drink or smoke, and while the rest of the Heads are acting up, he works on his motorcycle. Marlon Brando = the Wild One, C.C. = the Mild One.

C.C. quits The Heads, trades in his motorcycle jacket for track suits and striped bellbottoms, and hooks up with Ann. They hit a club where, in an ultra-meta moment, the bizarrely coiffed Wayne Cochran and his band, the C.C. Riders sing the blues/rock standard See See Rider.

Wayne Cochran gets ultra-meta

That’s followed by a Hallmark moment “falling in love” montage, C.C. and Ann feeding ducks and riding a pedal boat as Today: The Love Theme from C.C. & Company sung by Miss Margret provides a suitable soundtrack.

But the Heads are still trying to reclaim the money C.C. took. They kidnap Ann from her huge glass-walled home – we’re not sure what she does for a living. At one point it’s said she owns a New York City “fashion house,” but she also seems to art direct photo shoots and write news releases.

All of it leads up to the big motorcycle race/duel to the death between C.C. and Moon seemingly lit with a flashlight.

Namath is personable, self-deprecating and laid-back. He isn’t given much in the way of dialogue (or at least many lines of dialogue strung together) so there’s no need for any emotional heavy lifting. Ann-Margret and William Smith handle that department.

As biker gang movies go, C.C. & Company is pretty tame. It’s worth checking out, but if you switch to something else after the sandwich scene, it’s understood.

The home of the brave

The textbook year for divisiveness in America that’s always cited is 1968: Vietnam, race riots, the murders of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and on and on. Today, it’s only February yet 2026 is shaping up as possibly one of the most brutal and contentious years in U.S. history.

The Super Bowl should be apolitical, but it seldom is and this year’s halftime entertainment has right-wingers jumping down a Bunny-hole. Ironically, in 1968 another Puerto Rican-born singer pissed off a different generation of conservatives during a sporting event.

Born blind, Jose Feliciano was 20 years old when his jazz/folk take on the Doors' Light My Fire went to #3 nationally, winning him Grammies for Best Contemporary Pop Vocal and Best New Artist. Choosing Feliciano to sing the national anthem before the fifth game of the 1968 World Series between the Detroit Tigers and St. Louis Cardinals seemed like a safe bet.

Sitting on a stool in the infield with his guide dog lying next to him, Feliciano shed the bombast usually associated with the anthem, slowed it down and reshaped it much as he did with Light My Fire.

Conservatism in 1968 meant membership in the “silent majority,” a hawkish view of U.S. involvement in Vietnam and, according to public opinion polls “found the antiwar movement, particularly its radical and ‘hippie’ elements, more obnoxious than the war itself.” If you were male, you likely served in the military at some point. 

Short-sighted viewers were presented with a singer with longish hair, who doesn’t even have the decency to remove his sunglasses and with a foreign name yet, fooling around with the national anthem. People freaked out and provided feedback the old-fashioned, pre-social media way: angry calls to the NBC switchboard and letters to the editor for weeks afterwards. One example: “I have never heard anything so disgraceful or disrespectful.”

“When I did the anthem, I did it with the understanding in my heart and mind that I did it because I’m a patriot,” Feliciano said in 2018. “I was trying to be a grateful patriot. I was expressing my feelings for America when I did the anthem my way instead of just singing it with an orchestra.”

Earlier in the World Series, the anthem was sung, predictably and colorlessly, by 1950s pop singer Margaret Whiting and Marvin Gaye, whose version is straightforward (at a time when Berry Gordy was looking to move his Motown acts deeper into the world of white entertainment and before Marvin’s soul got psychedelicized). “I was very disappointed that Gaye didn’t do his own thing,” said Feliciano later. “Gaye chose to follow the old, safe path. He had a wonderful opportunity to say something for his people.”

Gaye made up for it before the 1983 NBA All-Star Game with a version that, just as Feliciano reshaped the anthem in the same manner that he reinterpreted Light My Fire, turned The Star-Spangled Banner into a coda for his 1983 hit Sexual Healing.

Released as a single, Feliciano’s version of the anthem went to #50. He's also performed it at naturalization ceremonies welcoming new immigrants to America.

Snap it, pal

Two disparate anniversaries that occurred in early January, unfortunately and unexpectedly, converged with Floyd Vivino’s death on January 22.

January 8 marked Soupy Sales’ 100^th birthday. His daily show on WNEW Channel 5 in New York City was a quirky inside joke of comedy bits that often ran way too long, double entendres that went over kids’ heads, puppets lip-synching novelty songs and cheap sets – a format that Vivino would evolve, build on and turn into The Uncle Floyd Show.

The ten-year anniversary of David Bowie’s death was January 10. While performing in The Elephant Man on Broadway in the early 1980s, he watched The Uncle Floyd Show while in make-up, something that another fan of show, John Lennon, turned him on to. In 2002, Bowie wrote Slip Away, a nostalgic, almost melancholy homage to the New York City of the early 1980s, with Floyd and his puppets Oogie and Bones Boy as avatars.

From 1974 to 1998, The Uncle Floyd Show could be found, if you knew where to look, on cable, UHF, regional syndication or New Jersey public TV. All told, something like 7,000 shows total and always with Floyd’s bomb squad supporting cast of aspiring comedians and knuckleheads.

The immortal Oogie and Uncle Floyd

Go snap!

And his puppets. Bratty yet endearing Oogie, whom Floyd always introduced as his partner, was an off-the-shelf factory model named “Walter” produced by a British puppeteer. Bones Boy was an irritable and ill-tempered skeleton in a suit that looked as if he’d been a prize in a claw machine on a boardwalk arcade. His trademark phrase, “Snap it, pal,” captured Jersey attitude (or at least how the rest of the country perceives it). If Bones Boy stopped for breakfast at a diner, he would order black coffee and a hard roll.

Floyd’s career seemed to always be on the verge of something bigger than New Jersey. An Uncle Floyd Show album on Mercury Records was left to die in cutout bins. He had small parts in Good Morning, Vietnam (1987) and Crazy People (1990), but a role in Paul Simon’s One Trick Pony (1980) was cut. When The Uncle Floyd Show went into syndication, it was shown in New York City on NBC, but at 1:30 a.m.

But he persevered and never became one of those stuffed monuments to lower tier show business that used to populate Joe Franklin’s couch. He made seemingly thousands of personal appearances around New Jersey, acting as MC, playing Tin Pan Alley piano in restaurants; he played piano at a record show I attended in the 1990s.

New Jersey lost Bruce Springsteen to international stardom, but Floyd stayed and represented the uniqueness that once flourished in this state, although it’s slowly being squeezed: wooded acres losing ground to yet another townhouse development, dead zone shopping malls that all offer the same stores, CVS pharmacies every hundred feet. The Star-Ledger, Bergen Record and Jersey Journal all gone. Boarded up storefronts along Broad Street, Newark.

Somewhere in the cosmos, Bones Boy is taking names. Snap it, pal.