The Lonely Profession

I first saw "The Lonely Profession" as a teenager in 1969, when it aired as a movie of the week on NBC. It cannot on any level be classified as a great movie, but I responded viscerally to its main character, Leo Gordon, brilliantly portrayed by the underrated Harry Guardino.

Especially affective is the opening, with Leo walking in a mass of people down a San Francisco street, the camera slowly closing in on him and his tired, lonely face as those in the background fade into a blur. On the soundtrack as the opening credits roll we hear the beautiful and magnificent Barbara McNair singing the sixties pop hit" (If You're Going to) San Francisco."

I've tried unsuccessfully for years to locate a copy of the movie and a recording of McNair's rendition. Perhaps it's just as well. Both live fondly in my memory and the revisit may be disappointing.

In the Ross Macdonald tradition, a hangdog loner private eye finds himself a murder suspect after the girl he was hired to look after is killed on his watch while he's sleeping in a nearby room. Harry Guardino plays the hapless detective who spends most of the movie searching for the killer(s) and trying to determine why she was killed. The story takes the detective into a world of treacherous international high finance and suspect building-development deals involving the high and mighty and their secrets. Along the way we are introduced to a series of interesting characters who slowly propel the story to a surprise ending that some viewers will have guessed long before Guardino. All in all, a nicely done little movie of the week with fine location shooting - I'm guessing at that because the DVD I watched is poor quality - marred at times by swirling transition scenes popular with many directors in the late 1960s and 70s. I wish Universal had issued a general release for DVD of this movie.

This is quite an impossible murder mystery, as a desperate girl calls on a detective, but before she has had time to tell him anything she vanishes, he goes after her and finds her, she is persecuted by people who want to kill her, this is proved by an incident in which an innocent old man is gunned down while the shot was aimed at her, the detective offers her his protection and she spends the night in his bedroom with the door locked while he sleeps outside on the sofa with his clothes on, but next morning he finds her strangled, while no one could possíbly have entered her locked room during the night. Those are the facts of this utterly impossible case. Nevertheless, he accepts the challenge and starts digging and finds out all about her intricacies. Three years back she had had a relationship with one of the richest men in the world, a recluse living in splendid isolation on an island off the coast of California with a beautiful wife, allowing no visitors, no interviews, no communications, a worse case than Howard Hughes, but the detective will not give up trying to reach him, even when he is fired at when he accepts an invitation. Great business is involved, the tycoon manages a considerable empire of almost all powerful influence, so he is not to be trifled with. Finally the detective arrives at the truth long before it is revealed to the audience, and the police and FBI take over the case. It's a great script with splendid dialogue while only the music is dreadful.

I saw this television mystery film years ago and remember being impressed by it. Underrated actor Harry Guardino plays a trench coat wearing San Francisco detective who gets involved with a case that leads him to the inner circle of shadowy millionaire Dominic Savarona. The story had some nice twists and an interesting ending, so it fulfills the requirements of the detective story well. It uses some pretty Bay Area locations and the theme song is a version of the pop standard "San Francisco" that was well performed by actress Barbara McNair. It was produced by Universal Television and originally aired on NBC. The only downside here is that if you are familiar with the productions Universal TV churned out during the late 1960's to mid 1970's (McCloud, Name Of The Game), you probably already know the basic look and style of the production. Elements of this production were probably incorporated into later Universal TV investigator characters like Columbo and James Rockford. If you want to know a little about the birth of those characters, view this movie.