But great discoveries can come from laziness, and so after seeing an old vagrant ride a city bus to the end of the line and get strangled by a weightlifter under Santa Monica Pier, the story moved to an L. The first show did not reek of tough-guy promise. First of all, he turned down the job he was hired for not once but twice, and except for his California P.
His concerns seemed unheroic and, perhaps worst of all, he did not even carry a gun, keeping one only for emergencies in a cookie jar in the kitchen of his house trailer. It did for me. By cheating a little, it seemed a clever man could take down a bully. I was hooked. And finally, if you want the dream of a home office without paying a secretary, then rent an answering machine rather new at the time.
Rocky was appealingly played by Noah Beery, with his can-do s cowboy demeanor. If you have seen Red River he is part of the montage of cowhand faces howling to launch the famous cattle drive. Writer Stephen Cannell created Rocky thinking of his own father, who was puzzled by his strange choice of profession instead of joining the family business. There is scant evidence in the show that Jim ever had a mother; perhaps it would be too painful to talk about.
Rocky hopes Jim will get married and find a less dangerous line of work, but always helps him out when goons come to the trailer, which is often. The Rockford Files seemed revolutionary in being so funny and still delivering a tense crime plot. Maverick , its creator maintained, was a show in which the situation was often hopeless but never serious. Garner, an Oklahoman of part-Cherokee heritage his production company was Cherokee Productions , had joined the Merchant Marine as a teenager in World War II and later received two Purple Hearts for his service in Korea, yet made a convincing leading man reluctant to go to war, most famously with Julie Andrews in The Americanization of Emily.
The self-interested hero was charmingly done on Maverick , where Bret toured Western towns and river boat cities in search of poker and brief romance and usually found danger besides. Maverick was a departure from the glut of TV Westerns; he was neither noble nor icy veined, and not disposed to gunplay yet capable if trapped by frontier circumstances.
