Before stumbling across this DVD all I knew about Peter Gunn was that it was a TV series in the late fifties, one of at least two - the other was Johnny Staccato - featuring a jazz-loving private eye. The jazz aspect - scored by Henry Mancini, not the first name that springs to mind in relation to 'cool' jazz - was so successful that it was issued as an album, Craig Stevens played the lead and that was the sum total of my knowledge. I now learn via IMDb that the film I have just watched was, in fact, the 90 minute 'pilot' for a potential new series, a full decade after the initial series. This perhaps explains the lack of violence and non-convoluted plot one would normally find in a feature film in this genre. Craig Stevens is replaced by Peter Strauss who does debonair reasonably well but apart from Pearl Bailey, who has less than a dozen lines, there are no 'names' in the cast. Nevertheless all hands turn in socko performances; the score is strangely truncated and harks back to the fifties with scads of bass flutes and vibes. It's a fairly painless way to spend ninety minutes but that's about all.
Review of Peter Gunn
