Starting with a terrific, insightful screenplay by William Altman, this segment sums up the thrust of the East Side/West Side series' concept, pitting social worker George C. Scott against the intractable establishment. His explosive performance, paired with career-peak assignment for character actor Clifton James, makes for a riveting, intellectually stimulating hour of drama.
The story is set up as a traditional "root for the underdog" saga, the sort of sure-fire crowd-pleaser epitomized by Sly Stallone's "Rocky" a decade later. But Altman opts for a realistic, frustratingly pessimistic depiction of the world as it is, namely how a bureaucracy, in this case the NYC web of dozens of departments, encompasses compromises and big decisions that seem impenetrable to the common man - the 8,000,000 people living in the Naked City.
Clifton James plays a neighborhood grocer, whose building that he leases is condemned by the city as part of a huge urban renewal project just getting underway (after seven years of planning and fighting for approval) to replace the nearby slums with a school, housing and other modern improvements.
James is fighting to stay put, where he follows generations in the family business and to protect the nine tenants in his building from being summarily uprooted. Scott tries to convince him to make way for the greater good, and when Scott decides instead to go to bat against impossible odds to save this man's life and livelihood, George's superiors (including Elizabeth Wilson -his adversary in this episode) remind him of his duties as a city social worker and give him ultimatums to cease and desist.
Altman creates plenty of drama in delineating both sides of the story, leading to a bravura climax scene where Scott blows his top and gets violent in a vast computer room (housing perhaps a UNIVAC or IBM apparatus), railing against a smug technocrat in charge, nicely played by a young Charles Durning. He follows up in the next scene blowing up against the NY bigwig named Hollister, who has successfully been responsible for the massive city planning projects (played by Paul McGrath), clearly modeled after the infamous Robert Moses.
Unlike "Rocky" and many a Frank Capra movie, reality wins and our heroes are defeated. This series was unafraid to go against audience expectations, much to its credit, while clearly lessening its chance for success in the commercial world of network television.
