The Kaiser Aluminum Hour – “The Deadly Silence” (05/21/1957)

Shatner plays a father’s second-favorite son 🙁

A few months after first appearing on Studio One’s “The Defender”, a program originally created and produced by Worthington Minor, Shatner returned to the show Minor was currently executive producing, The Kaiser Aluminum Hour, for the third and final time.

The Kaiser Aluminum Hour was only on TV for one season and 25 episodes so that means Shatner appeared in 12% of the episodes. Too bad it didn’t run longer I guess, maybe he could have somehow beefed up that ratio! Although I was not able to view his prior two appearances, for this one I was able to see it a few years back at the Paley Center in Los Angeles, which now appears to be closed. Good thing I watched when I did! I also found a few pics, but obviously not much visual evidence exists.

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Westinghouse Studio One – “The Defender: Part 2” (03/04/1957)

Time for some good old courtroom trickery!

Hello, ShatnerWeb readers! I’m back! I was stuck in outer space for the last few years, and lost track of all time. Hopefully I’ll be able to make sure I continue to bring you Shatner reviews (still in chronological order) at a relatively steady pace. What that pace might be, I have no idea…but hopefully it’s steady.

This post will be a review of Studio One’s The Defender: Part 2. Part 1 was only partially complete when published a few years back, so I hope that you go back and fully inbreathiate the finished product before moving on to Part 2 below. Come on, you know you want to. It’s like getting 2 for the price of 1!

Thanks for being patient and, as always, for reading!

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Westinghouse Studio One – “The Defender: Part 1” (02/25/1957)

Shatner appears with “The King of Cool”

Just a few short weeks after being on the well-regarded Kraft Television Theatre playing a doctor for the first time, Shatner appeared on the much more prestigious Westinghouse Studio One as a lawyer…again for the very first time in his career. Studio One started out in 1947 as a radio program, but after one year moved to CBS television where it aired under a variety of names from 1948-1958. Much like Kraft Television Theatre, over the years Studio One gained a fantastic reputation for mounting high-quality dramatic programs featuring some of the best writers, directors and actors working in live television. These included directors like John Frankenheimer, Sidney Lumet and Daniel Petrie, writers like Rod Serling, Reginald Rose and Gore Vidal, and yet another who’s who of great actors including Charlton Heston, Jack Klugman, Warren Beatty, Grace Kelly and James Dean.

Several of the productions even made the leap to the big screen, probably the most notable being “Twelve Angry Men.” That teleplay was first broadcast on Studio One in 1954, winning a number of Emmys before becoming the motion picture 12 Angry Men in 1957 and being nominated for three Oscars, including Best Picture. The writer of Twelve Angry Men was Reginald Rose who returned to Studio One and to the courtroom setting with “The Defender,” featuring William Shatner performing with veteran actor Ralph Bellamy and future great (and King of Cool) Steve McQueen.

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Kraft Television Theatre – “The Discoverers” (02/06/1957)

Shatner plays a doctor for the very first (but not the very last) time!

From 1947-1958, the anthology program Kraft Television Theatre aired more than 650 original or adapted comedies and dramas. According to Wikipedia, the show “was broadcast live from Studio 8-H at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, currently the home of Saturday Night Live.” The actors, directors and writers whose work was featured reads like a veritable who’s who of Golden Age television, and included folks like Paul Newman, Rod Steiger, George C. Scott, James Dean, Joanne Woodward, Sidney Lumet and Rod Serling. In fact, Serling’s “Patterns” was first broadcast on Kraft Television Theatre and remains not only the script that brought Serling stardom but also one of the best-remembered episodes of the show’s illustrious 11-year run.

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Omnibus – “Oedipus, the King” (01/06/1957)

Well, this is a bit confusing.

On Sunday, January 6th 1957, the Tyrone Guthrie directed motion picture version of Oedipus Rex (starring Douglas Campbell and featuring William Shatner) debuted in Canada (one night before it would make it’s NYC debut.) On that very same night, the ABC anthology television show Omnibus aired a live version of the play, evidently billed as “Oedipus, the King” and also evidently starring Christopher Plummer as the titular character. The play also still (naturally) featured William Shatner.

As with many productions during this “hazy” period of Shatnerica, I was a bit confused by this for quite a long time.

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Oedipus Rex (01/06/1957)

Shatner’s second motion picture is…underwhelming.

In 1950, when Shatner was most likely a junior at McGill University in Montreal, he appeared in his very first motion picture The Butler’s Night Off. In that film, he played one of the “crooks,” a very small role with only a few lines. Seven years later he would appear in his second motion picture, this time a filmed version of the classic Sophocles play Oedipus Rex. Once again however, and actually even more so than The Butler’s Night Off, this was the very opposite of a starring or featured role.

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1956 – Shatner Year in Review

Welcome to the 1956 edition of the “Shatner Year In Review.” At the end of each year covered in the review posts I will provide a summary as it relates to Shatner and his career, as well as display some key entertainment statistics.

1956 was a huge year for William Shatner, both personally and professionally. He appeared in his first Broadway production, spent his third and final summer as part of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival’s acting company, possibly had an affair that may have led to an illegitimate son (and certainly got me blocked on Twitter by Shatner), got married, moved to New York and got his first starring role on American television. Wow. Let’s review…

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The Kaiser Aluminum Hour – “Gwyneth” (12/18/1956)

Lost in the sands of time…

For the second time in less than three months Shatner would appear on an episode of The Kaiser Aluminum Hour, the short-lived but quality anthology program that only ran for one year (the 1956-1957 season.) And once again I have very little information about the program as it doesn’t seem to exist for viewing anywhere. But let’s check out what I did learn about the production as well as the fun Shatner connections that spun out of it, shall we?

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Omnibus – “School for Wives” (11/11/1956)

Spit take!

As stated in several previous posts, much of Shatner’s early work in Canada would in for what he termed “juvenile” roles. When he was doing repertory theater, Shatner himself explained that he often would play “a young guy…with an innocent smile big enough to reach the back rows.” As the golden age of television proceeded there were more and more of these “young man” roles coming available to be truly played by young men…with radio it’s easier to hide your true age. With TV, next to impossible.

With the dearth of young professional actors in Canada, it’s easy to see just how desirable Shatner’s skillset and (most importantly) experience would be to executives and casting directors in the newly burgeoning television division of the CBC. In the mid-1950’s Shatner estimated that there were no more than two dozen full-time professional actors in Toronto. Of those, probably a significant portion were older and some were of course women. So there was a pretty small pool from which to cast those “young man” roles and Shatner must have been at the top of the list for just about all of them. His resume was excellent: he had been working for several years in repertory theater, the TV work he had gotten and his ability to memorize scripts were already earning him a good professional reputation and, of course, he was part of the troupe at the prestigious Stratford Shakespeare Festival. And so as Shatner acknowledges, his start in the business owes an enormous debt to these “juvenile” roles. Even the roles he played at Stratford were quite often these earnest young men usually trying to woo the girl.

Although performing in these types of roles was invaluable in getting Shatner a foothold in the industry, steady work and experience, he obviously wanted to advance beyond them and become a serious stage actor. Moving to New York was one of the first steps towards this goal, and starring roles like the one he received in “All Summer Long” show that directors and producers were beginning to see and cast him as different and more mature characters. But Shatner wasn’t quite done with the earnest young men just yet.

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Goodyear Television Playhouse – “All Summer Long” (10/28/1956)

And Introducing…William Shatner!

“And Introducing William Shatner”

For many years, while the idea for and structure of this blog percolated in my head, I assumed that this would be the very first post that I would ever write and those words above would be the very first to appear. That was because “All Summer Long” was the oldest extant William Shatner appearance in my library for a long time. But two things came along to change that plan. The first was that I found two other earlier Shatner appearances to review (The Butler’s Night Off and “Billy Budd.”) The other was that I decided to post not only on viewable appearances but on all other Shatner work that I could reasonably verify because I’m OCD and/or fucking obsessed. And so you loyal reader(s) have been subjected to over 3 dozen (!) posts up to now about the great Shatner’s many appearances in movies, TV shows and in the theater.

But “Introducing William Shatner” is still a very apt description of the importance and impact “All Summer Long” was to have on Bill and his career. Before this program Shatner was almost a complete unknown in the United States, having only moved to New York City a month or so prior and before that doing all of his work in Canada which then, as now, had a much smaller viewership than almost anything shown in the USA. As Basil Rathbone once told Shatner on the set of “Billy Budd,” “…in the United States there’s thirty to fifty million people watching a television program, but in Canada it’s only five to ten million.” With this one episode of Goodyear Television Playhouse, William Shatner was about to perform for an audience 3 to 6 times larger and potentially more influential than ever before…

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