Frank D. Gilroy dies, playwright created Burke’s Law

The cast of “Who Killed Julie Greer?” including Dick Powell as Amos Burke, first row, right

Frank D. Gilroy, a distinguished playwright, has died at 89, according to obituaries published in THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER, THE NEW YORK TIMES and THE WRAP.

Gilroy won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1964 play The Subject was Roses. Prior to that work, he did a teleplay that brought to life a TV character of note.

It was Gilroy who created the character of millionaire police detective Amos Burke, who made his debut in the first episode of The Dick Powell Theatre, Who Killed Julie Greer?

In that 1961 episode, Powell himself played Amos Burke, who proceeded to the crime scene in a chauffeur-driven limousine. The show has a brief exchange between a police sergeant and a reporter (Alvy Moore).

The reporter asks how Burke had become rich. “The smart way,” the sergeant replies, “he was born with it.” The sergeant informs the reporter that Burke started as a rookie cop and worked his way up to being the top detective on the police force.

“You mean he loves crime that much?” the reporter asks.

“Crime in general, murder in particular,” the sergeant replies.

Two years later, after Powell’s death, the concept was picked up as a series, Burke’s Law. This time, Gene Barry played Burke. After two seasons, the show got a major makeover, turning Burke into a secret agent. The series was renamed Amos Burke, Secret Agent. It was canceled midway during the 1965-66 season.

Throughout the series, Gilroy got a credit during the end titles that the show was “based on characters created by” the playwright.

Who Killed Julie Greer? included a lot of snappy dialogue, something that carried over to the series. For Gilroy, Amos Burke wasn’t the main highlight of his resume, but Burke still has his fans today.

Some (very early) predictions about the U.N.C.L.E. movie

Henry Cavill and Armie Hammer as Solo and Kuryakin
(Art by Paul Baack)

Guy Ritchie’s movie version of The Man From U.N.C.L.E. is scheduled to start filming next month. While there’s a lot that isn’t known, here are a few predictions about the film that may emerge.

No dancing gorillas (or other third-season silliness from the original series): The movie probably will be similar in tone to the director’s two Sherlock Holmes movies.

Based on the early information available in the film’s IMDB.COM ENTRY, much of the crew worked on Ritchie’s two Holmes films. There will be some humor, but there will be much serious adventure also.

That wouldn’t be a bad thing. The original show’s FOURTH AND FINAL SEASON perhaps over-corrected the silly THIRD SEASON. Both seasons have good episodes but the drama-humor balance was out of whack compared with the first two seasons. The third season was like an U.N.C.L.E. version of the Adam West Batman series. The fourth seemed as if it were produced by Quinn Martin; the final season was produced by Anthony Spinner, a QM veteran.

U.N.C.L.E.’s wheelhouse lies somewhere inbetween those extremes. Whether Ritchie & Co. can achieve that remains to be seen. But the guess from here is that’s the goal. The two Ritchie-directed Holmes films starring Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law were in that same general area. The question is whether Ritchie can achieve that with U.N.C.L.E.

It won’t be exactly like the television show because it will be done as a period piece. The television series was a product of its time. It was a post-Cold War series (an American and a Russian working together to deal with the greater evil) taking place in the middle of the Cold War (producer Norman Felton and author Ian Fleming had their first meetings a few weeks after the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962).

But when you do a story as a period piece, everything changes. The movies Murder, My Sweet (1942) and Farewell My Lovely (1975) are based on the same Raymond Chandler Philip Marlowe novel. They’re both good, but the latter, starring Robert Mitchum, emphasizes its 1940s settings in ways the earlier Dick Powell film didn’t.

The movie’s success will depend on the chemistry of the lead actors: The original show was intended to center around Robert Vaughn’s Napoleon Solo. But David McCallum’s Illya Kuryakin made such an impression, the two emerged as equals. The Vaughn-McCallum pairing ensured that, in the fall of 1965, that The Wild, Wild West (with Robert Conrad and Ross Martin) and I Spy (with Robert Culp and Bill Cosby) had the same dynamic.

For the new U.N.C.L.E. movie to work, Henry Cavill (as Solo) and Armie Hammer (as Kuryakin) have to display at least similar chemistry. Cavill was a late casting as Solo after Tom Cruise exited the project.

Still, late castings can work. Jack Lord was cast as Steve McGarrett in Hawaii Five-O just *five days* before the pilot to that 1968-80 series started production. Cavill got the U.N.C.L.E. job about three months ahead of production. Compared with Jack Lord and Five-O, that’s a breeze.

1965: Amos Burke (abruptly) becomes a secret agent

The fall of 1965 was quite a time for television spy shows. The Man From U.N.C.L.E. on NBC was entering its second (and most highly rated) season, with the network adding I Spy to its schedule. And, over on CBS, The Wild, Wild West was about to mix spies with cowboys.

ABC didn’t want to be left behind. But it made the most unusual move of the three networks. Instead of commissioning a new show, it opted to revamp Burke’s Law, an escapist show about a millionaire policeman, into Amos Burke, Secret Agent.

The show had its origins as an episode of the anthlogy program The Dick Powell Show, where its namesake host portrayed Amos Burke, an ace police detective. The series debuted in 1963, with Gene Barry cast as Burke, going to crime scenes in a Rolls Royce limousine. Burke’s Law also featured a lot of guest stars, including former movie stars. It was a formula that the show’s producer, Aaron Spelling, would re-use in other series.

With the new format, Barry remained (as did a faster tempo version of the show’s theme music by Herschel Burke Gilbert) but little else. Suddenly, Burke was reporting to a mysterious chief known only as “The Man” (Carl Benton Reid).

The move didn’t work. Amos Burke, Secret Agent got canceled in early January 1966. However, if you want to get a sense of what the revamped show looked like, a compilation of clips from an episode is below.