Martin Kane, Private Eye

I recall listening to Martin Kane Private Eye on radio back about 1949. It was on late Sunday afternoons, about 4:30 p.m on Mutual after Nick Carter and before the Shadow. The irony of old time radio was that they had a lot of detective and crime shows on Sunday, when you would have thought people would have objected to the violence. Nevertheless, radio drama being what it was, it did not cross over the boundaries of good taste. I recalled that Martin Kane was sponsored by a pipe tobacco, but could never recall the name. A check in John Dunning's Encyclopedia of Old Time Radio only gave U.S. Tobacco as the sponsor. After some diligent checking, I found it was Old Briar Pipe Tobacco and recalled William Gargan smoking a pipe in magazine ads as well as on television. Apparently, there were other tobacco products that sponsored the show (Sano Cigarettes, etc.) but my recollection of Gargan was that he usually had a pipe in his mouth. Ironically, his tobacco addiction led to his cancer and made him an early spokesman against smoking.

Martin Kane, Private Eye is a ghost from television's prehistoric era. It debuted in 1949 and ran until 1954, airing on NBC Thursday nights at 10; I have vague memories of being allowed to see now and again it as a small child. Something about it stuck with me, and when I found selected episodes from a few of its seasons on videotape, I bit.

The title character changed over the seasons, drawing from a roster of Hollywood has-beens. William Gargan was the first Kane (no reference to the Orson Welles movie seems to have been intended), followed by Lloyd Nolan, Lee Tracy and Mark Stevens. Generally, Kane was the only recognizable member of the cast, the others consisting of regulars playing police investigators and occasional players drawn, I assume, from the lower echelons of New York's theater world, and looking incredulous at actually having found gainful employment in the fledgling medium. (In one episode, Una O'Connor gives what must have been the performance of her career as a deranged spinster with a carving knife.)

One other regular must be mentioned, however, as he was essential to the show's existence. Walter Kinsella played Happy McMann, proprietor of a tobacco shop which served as the story's home base. This was convenient as the show's sponsor was a tobacco company, advertising their now defunct brands such as Tweed pipe tobacco and King Sano cigarettes. Kane himself was always buying a pouch and discussing its merits with McMann, and bit players strolled in to look for a smoother-burning tobacco or a smoke with less nicotine. Martin Kane, Private Eye belongs to the prehistory of product placement, too, using a formula which derived from the radio serials bankrolled by sole sponsors.

The show was filmed live, and does it show. The characters all overact in the stagey way that indicates unfamiliarity with cameras, flub their lines, and desperately try to cover up. The plots are rudimentary, centering on such formulas as con-games perpetrated by Eastern mystics and shady fortune-tellers. The sets are bare-boned and not much helped by the lighting, which ranges from the harsh to the stygian (sometimes in the same set-up; candle flames, which abound, dance in a pitch-black nimbus).

Seen from today's vantage point, Martin Kane, Private Eye makes Magnum, P.I. look like a masterpiece and other shows like Murder, She Wrote and Diagnosis: Murder look pretty good. But there's a lot of nostalgic appeal in watching those desperate old troupers try to make the new-fangled medium of television work. Martin Kane isn't as spooky as I remembered it - it isn't spooky at all, except as a cautionary tale about lives lived too long in show business. But it's fun to watch because of its very primitiveness.

The part of Martin Kane P. I. was played by a number of actors - William Gargan, Lloyd Nolan, Lee Tracy, and Mark Stevens. With the exception of Mark Stevens, the actors playing Kane were in the twilight of their careers, and it was a feature of 50s TV that such actors could find a home on television when film roles were no longer readily available.

The mysteries were usually pretty good, with Kane working in parallel with the police and the police not squawking about this since Kane was the one to always solve the mystery.

An interesting and even humorous aspect of the show was common in early TV. There were no commercials per se. Instead, there was product placement in that Martin Kane smoked a pipe that he would load with Old Briar Tobacco at the beginning of the show (the sponsor was U. S. Tobacco). Also, at least one scene in the episode would be inside Happy McMann's tobacco store where he would talk up at least one sponsored tobacco product during the scene. Funny how Kane and the police would just happen to show up there at a key juncture to discuss evidence and the case in question.

Notice that there are lots of close ups so that there is no need to dress the sets, although the one set that is very well laid out is that of Happy's tobacco store with all kinds of signs advertising U. S. Tobacco company products.

Only kinescopes remain, so the images are murky but watchable, but it is worth spending some time with the show just for the TV history aspect of it all.

One of the first shows I watched when we got our television in 1953 was "Martin Kane, Private Eye" starring Lee Tracy. I remember being disappointed when Tracy was replaced by Mark Stevens. The show's producers made a big deal about the switch. The new Martin Kane was introduced as Tracy left the series. As it turned out Mark Stevens was almost as good as Tracy in the pivotal lead role.

Recently I watched earlier live Martin Kane programs on DVD starring Lloyd Nolan. While I still prefer Lee Tracy in the part, Nolan was very good, especially considering I was viewing a Kinescope made over 50 years ago. One of the episodes I watched, "Rest Home Murder," was at times creepy and very violent, even by today's TV standards. There was a goon-like muscle man who kept the patients in line by brute force, intimidation, and even murder. Seems the head of the nursing home was a greedy woman who "took care" of the occupants to get a cut of the inheritance money from equally mercenary relatives. One of the tortured souls is able to contact Martin Kane by phone, but not without being overhead on the extension. Kane finds himself in a situation where he may very well be the next victim.

Some viewers may find the tobacco ads which are interwoven with the plot offensive. Yet the same thing goes on today in movies, if not on TV. When you see Ford or Chevy cars used exclusively in a film, then you're looking at a commercial for those companies interwoven into the plot. "Martin Kane, Private Eye" came by the method honestly. It was already a mainstay of old time radio. Most early TV programs were patterned after radio shows of the day, though I did think it quaint that the camera zeroed in on a package of Old Briar Pipe Tobacco for several seconds after Kane filled his pipe and lit it. The benefit of interwoven commercials is obvious: There are no interruptions from the story with one-minute product promotions.

Postscript: There was a real-life Martin Kane. He was an executive with the advertising agency that produced the series.