TV Noir of the Week: Shotgun Slade

[Cross-posted from The Blackboard.]

A genre hybrid such as Shotgun Slade can be fun simply because it exists as a specimen. In the late Fifties, the two hottest genres in television were private eye shoes and Westerns, and it was probably inevitable that someone would think of combining the two. And the novelist Frank Gruber, who worked in both genres, is precisely the sort of “someone” that would be! The character Slade, who never reveals a proper first name, is a wandering “detective for hire” who takes on a variety of assignments. He packs what is apparently – I’m no gun expert – an interesting piece, a combination “over/under” long gun that fires both rifle bullets and shotgun shells, therefore useful both at distance and in proximity. Like other detectives of the era, his surname puns on his potential lethality (Gunn, Hammer, “Slayed”). But as played by Scott Brady, Lawrence Tierney’s saner brother, Slade is quite affable, although naturally he knows how to handle himself. He also provides classic-style voiceover narration.

Not a network show, Shotgun Slade premiered in syndication one year after Peter Gunn jazzed up the TV landscape, and lasted two seasons. In its look, it’s very much your typical low-budgeted oater, but the producers cleverly albeit imitatively covered for that routineness by having composer Gerald Fried contribute a lightly jazzy Gunn-like theme and soundtrack music. The ploy works: it makes occasionally lumbering material into something more sprightly.

Scott Brady was 35 years old when Shotgun Slade premiered, and although he couldn’t have known it, the show pretty much marked the end of his career as a minor leading man. After this, it was mainly bottom-of-the-barrel Sixties product, back-up roles in biker flicks, that sort of thing. He was a drinking buddy of Archie Bunker’s in a few episodes of All in the Family.

The Shotgun Slade episode “Sudden Death” from late in its first season is a fair sample of the show:



There is quite a lot of plot for a half-hour, with seven characters besides Slade - most haunted by ghosts of past events - a murder investigation, crooked casino games, bar girls and violence against them, a vengeance stalking based on ethnic pride, a hysteric, a secret passageway, and several people who know how to throw an axe for maximum effect. Realistically, Slade does exactly the job he was hired to do and leaves all the rest for others to clean up, a nice change from the many screen detectives who take on all kinds of stuff that they are not getting paid for.