Howard Duff is well-cast in this lousy episode of Alcoa Theatre, a story of show biz cliches that goes nowhere.
He's a magazine writer in search of a story about a rock star named Rory who died a year ago in a car crash. His boring quest for the secret (sort of a Citizen Kane "Rosebud" gimmick) to explain the kid's meteoric success and sudden demise eventually leads him to Tokyo (at least a backlot version for TV) and lovely Miiko Taka to explain the real story of Rory.
With some briefly colorful characters presented by Barbara Bain and Joey Forman, the 1/2 hour is a tough slog, permeated by cynicism and the usual laments about how phony celebrity and show business is and the emptiness of sudden success. The lame scriptwriting seems to indicate that Duff's biggest problem is that he might succumb to sentimentality and spoil his character's image as a hard-boiled reporter, but of couse it is the show itself that dissolves into soggy sentimentality and an abrupt, completely unsatisfying ending.
As sometimes happens when I watch a particularly botched-up or drowning in cliches movie, I felt the need to fashion something out of nothing, In this case, it was in the end credits where an obscure singer named Kenny Loran is revealed to be the singer of the record we hear playing as a hit by the fictional Rory. Loran was a rockabilly singer in 1958-59 (when this show was shot) recording for Capitol Records who never made it, sort of the inverse of this boring tv episode about the career of "Rory". (Loran's contribution is not even memorialized in IMDb.) I imagined Duff doing another dull show searching for the true story of Kenny Loran, as if anyone cared about the failure of one of show biz's endless supply of wannabes.
