The Fugitive (1963 TV series)
The Fugitive is an American crime drama television series created by Roy Huggins and produced by QM Productions and United Artists Television. It aired on ABC from September 17, 1963, to August 29, 1967. David Janssen starred as Dr. Richard Kimble, a physician who is wrongfully convicted of his wife's murder, and unjustly sentenced to death. While Dr. Kimble is en route to death row, the train derails over a track defect, allowing him to escape and begin a cross-country search for the real killer, a "one-armed man". At the same time, Richard Kimble is hounded by the authorities, most notably by Police Lieutenant Philip Gerard.
The Fugitive aired for four seasons, with 120 51-minute episodes produced. The first three seasons were filmed in black-and-white, while the fourth and final season was filmed in color.
The series was nominated for five Emmy Awards and won the Emmy for Outstanding Dramatic Series in 1966. In 2002, it was ranked number 36 on TV Guides 50 Greatest TV Shows of All Time. TV Guide named the one-armed man number five in their 2013 list of the 60 Nastiest Villains of All Time.
The popularity of the series led to various adaptations and the creation of a titular franchise.
Plot
The series premise was set up in the opening narration, but the full details about the crime were not offered in the pilot episode; at the time of the pilot, Richard Kimble has been on the run for six months, having exhausted all of his appeals against his death sentence. While in transit, the train carrying Richard Kimble derails, and becomes the titular "fugitive" attempting to clear his name. The premise was summarized in the opening title sequence of the pilot episode as follows:Viewers were not offered the full details of Dr. Richard Kimble's plight until episode 14, "The Girl from Little Egypt". A series of flashbacks reveals the fateful night of Helen Kimble's death, and for the first time offers a glimpse of the "one-armed man".
Cast and characters
Main characters
Dr. Richard Kimble
The show's lead, and the only character seen in all 120 episodes, was Dr. Richard David Kimble.Though Dr. Richard Kimble was a respected pediatrician in the fictional small town of Stafford, Indiana, he and his wife Helen Waverly Kimble were generally known to have been having arguments prior to her death. Helen's pregnancy had ended in a stillborn birth of a son, and surgery to save her life had also rendered her infertile. The couple was devastated, but Helen refused to consider adopting children as Richard wanted.
On the night of Helen's murder, the Kimbles had been heard, earlier the same day, arguing heatedly over this topic by their neighbors. Richard later went out for a drive to cool off; as he was driving home, he nearly hit a man with only one arm, who was fleeing from the vicinity of the Kimble house. Richard then found that Helen had been killed, but no one had seen or heard Richard go out for his drive, or seen him while he was out, and no evidence showed that the "one-armed man" whom Richard Kimble saw ever existed. At his trial, Richard Kimble was unjustly convicted of Helen's murder and sentenced to death.
After the train wreck and his escape from custody, Richard Kimble moves from town to town, always trying to remain unobtrusive and unnoticed as he evades capture and tries to find the one-armed man. He adopts many nondescript aliases, and toils at low-paying, menial jobs. In many episodes, he comes across a damsel in distress or possibly a child in danger; he then chooses to put his anonymity at risk by aiding this deserving person. Another frequent plot device is for someone to discover Richard Kimble's true identity and use it to manipulate him, under the threat of turning him in to the police.
Dr. Richard Kimble is smart and resourceful, and is usually able to perform well at any job he takes. He also displays considerable prowess in hand-to-hand combat. In the episode "Nemesis", he distracts, then knocks out, a forest ranger, then quickly unloads the man's rifle to ensure he cannot shoot him if pursued. In the sixth episode, Richard Kimble revealed that he had served as a doctor in the Korean War.
Richard Kimble's family makes scattered appearances throughout the series, most notably his sister, Donna and her husband, Leonard Taft. Richard Kimble's family first appears in the 15th episode, "Home is the Hunted", wherein he returns to his hometown after reading in his hometown newspaper that his father, Dr. John Kimble, is retiring. Also introduced is Richard Kimble's brother Ray. While Donna and John believed Richard Kimble's innocence, Ray was unconvinced and grew to resent Richard, as their association cost Ray his job and his fiancée; however, Ray becomes convinced of Richard's innocence during his stay. Also featuring are Leonard and Donna's sons, David and Billy ; despite their appearance, though, only Billy appears in the series' two-part finale "The Judgment". Although the whole family was introduced, only Donna and her family reappeared in subsequent episodes. Ray was not mentioned again in the show, and the third-season episode "Running Scared" dealt with Richard Kimble and his sister Donna reuniting to grieve over their father's death.
In "The Survivors", Richard Kimble re-establishes contact with Helen's family, the Waverlys, after learning that her father Ed is facing bankruptcy over medical bills for his wife Edith, who has developed a heart condition by obsessively clinging to Helen's memory and listening to phonograph records she made before her death. Richard Kimble visits the family and stays with them, despite Edith's objections, and with help from Helen's sister Terry locates a secret bank account Helen kept for emergencies. He signs the account over to Ed, saving him financially, but his safety is compromised when Edith learns that Terry believes in his innocence and is in love with Richard Kimble, and Edith threatens to report him to the police. Richard Kimble gently but firmly lets Terry down with a few well-chosen words that put an end to years of misguided thinking on Terry's part, and he soon leaves the house with Ed, who takes him to a remote bus stop where he can escape from the area.
David Janssen's understated, compelling, sensitive portrayal skillfully captured the essence of Dr. Richard Kimble's plight. He won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Television Series Drama in 1965, and was nominated in 1966. He was nominated three times for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series.
Lt. Philip Gerard
Dr. Richard Kimble is pursued by the relentless Stafford police detective Lt. Philip Gerard, a formidably intelligent family man and dedicated public servant. Gerard directly appears in 37 episodes and also in the main title sequences of all 120 episodes; Barry Morse is also listed in the closing credits of almost all episodes, even those in which he does not appear.Barry Morse portrayed Gerard as a man duty-bound to capture Kimble. Guilt or innocence was of no consequence to Gerard, whose own beliefs have been stated as follows:
In "Never Wave Goodbye: Part I", he states again, "The law pronounced him guilty, not me." In "Nightmare at Northoak" and "Wife Killer", he states with certainty that the one-armed man does not exist and that Kimble is guilty; in "Corner of Hell", even after his own Kimble-like experience, he still scoffs at the existence of the one-armed man. He also tells Kimble, "The truth is, you're still guilty before the law."
Contributing to Gerard's obsession with re-capturing Kimble is the personal responsibility he feels for Kimble's escape, which happened while he was in Gerard's custody. As he remarks to an LA police captain in "The Judgment: Part I", the show's penultimate episode, "I've lost a lot of things these past four years... starting with a prisoner the state told me to guard."
Parallels can be seen between Gerard's pursuit of Kimble and the pursuit of Jean Valjean by Inspector Javert in Les Misérables, though Javert never lets go of his obsession to follow the letter of the law, and hunts down his fugitive, even killing himself when he discovers that he cannot reconcile his tenets with the mercy Valjean shows him. Gerard, though, was portrayed externally as a man like Javert, but internally as more of a thinking man who could balance justice and duty. According to some of those who worked on the show, these parallels were not coincidental. Stanford Whitmore, who wrote the pilot episode "Fear in a Desert City", says that he deliberately gave Kimble's nemesis a similar-sounding name to see if anyone would recognize the similarity between "Gerard" and "Javert". One who recognized the similarity was Barry Morse; he pointed out the connection to Quinn Martin, who admitted that The Fugitive was a "sort of modern rendition of the outline of Les Misérables." Barry Morse accordingly went back to the Victor Hugo novel and studied the portrayal of Javert, to find ways to make the character more complex than the "conventional 'Hollywood dick as whom Gerard had originally been conceived. "I've always thought that we in the arts... are all 'shoplifters', Barry Morse said. "Everybody, from Shakespeare onwards and downwards ... But once you've acknowledged that ... when you set out on a shoplifting expedition, you go always to Cartier's, and never to Woolworth's!"
The One-armed Man
"The One-armed Man" is a shadowy figure, seen by Richard Kimble as he was fleeing the Kimble house after the murder of Helen. The series revealed little about the man's personal life and never explained how or when he lost his right arm.In the 29th episode of the first season, Helen Kimble was revealed to have been strangled. This is not the method of choice for a man with only one arm; accordingly, this detail was later retconned, with the murder having been committed due to blunt force trauma with a lamp.
The One-armed Man was rarely seen in the series, appearing in person in only 10 episodes. He also appears in the opening credits beginning with season two, and in a photograph in the episode "The Breaking of the Habit". He is seen extremely infrequently in the first three seasons, and has almost no actual dialogue until season four, when his character begins to take a more prominent part in the plotline.
The One-armed Man is aware that Kimble is after him, and frequently tips off the police as to Kimble's whereabouts, most notably in "Nobody Loses All The Time", when he telephones his girlfriend at a hospital and orders her to call the police, though Kimble risked arrest to save her life. Like Kimble, The One-armed Man uses a variety of aliases and holds down various jobs while on the run. He uses the alias "Fred Johnson" on a couple of occasions, and both Kimble and Gerrard eventually take to referring to him as "Johnson" for the sake of convenience. There is no reason to believe, however, that Fred Johnson is the character's real name. In fact, The One-armed Man adamantly denies it under questioning, and a case could be made that a more likely real name is "Gus Evans"
Bill Raisch played a bitter war veteran who starts a bar fight with Kirk Douglas' John W. Burns in the 1962 film Lonely are the Brave. The role was a natural lead-in to his part in ''The Fugitive.''