A Hole in the City

Finanly i was beginning to think there was no black people in new york city in the early 60's...the one black person they had he was shot down in 3 seconds....

Reading the cast list headed by Sylvia Sidney & Robert Duvall (plus several lesse-billed super talents) I got my hopes up, but this segment stunk!. Story editor Howard Rodman's screenplay was execrable.

For starters, the unusual pre-credits tease ran 8 minutes (this is before the Bond movies initiated that tradition of endless opening sequences in the movies before the titles came on) of nonstop action setting up Duvall as a ruthless robber/killer. The main body of the show was one long anticlimax, punctuated by many other anticlimaxes and a couple of poor flashbacks of his childhood, the second one imitating (poorly) Bergman's innovative "Wild Strawberries", only this one had Duvall as adult visiting his old stomping grounds and family including himself as a kid.

The psychological study of a killer was ridiculous. Leading to Duvall's nihilistic Cagney-esque demise. He was stuck playing a lousy role, and Sylvia was wasted (though extremely competent) as the hard-bitten, no-nonsense aunt. Five seconds for such a talent as Godfrey Cambridge is embarrassing in retrospect. Martin Balsam and Robert Blake are listed in IMDb, but I didn't spot either one on screen.

NOTE: I watched the segment on YouTube and the Closed Captions identified the opening narration as spoken by Bert Leonard -it sounds like his voice, but IMDb has instead been listing Lawrence Dobkin during the second season, which may be incorrect.