With Gun In Hand and Tongue In Cheek... - TV Guide Oct 1964

A beautiful woman kisses her lover good night, affectionately attaching a red carnation to his lapel. As she leaves, he instantly pulls off the flower to find an ugly black widow spider crawling on a petal.

A sharply dressed man, with gun in hand, creeps stealthily down a long, empty, streamlined hallway. Square lights blink wildly on and off. A siren alarm screams. Nervously opening a door, the man sees before him a figure. It is the hero of the piece. The intruder fires four times in rapid succession. But his target is behind bullet-proof glass, and as the bullets hit, the glass cracks in a dozen directions. And now, from a secret door appears our hero, his pistol blazing. The intruder is killed. The day is saved.

The hero is Napoleon Solo, Agent 11 for the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement. He is better known, of course, as The Man from U.N.C.L.E., whose outrageous adventures can be seen on NBC-TV Tuesday nights. The men behind U.N.C.L.E. are executive-producer Norman Felton (he has served in the same capacity on Dr. Kildare and The Eleventh Hour) and producer-developer Sam Rolfe (also of Eleventh Hour and co-developer of Have Gun, Will Travel).

It has been reported that the late Ian Fleming (by whose James Bond stories U.N.C.L.E. seems considerably influenced) had worked extensively on the series. Felton denies it. "I spoke with Fleming close to two years ago," he explains. The producer, a haughty-looking man with a pleasant, soft voice, sat at his large desk in his MGM offices. "I told him I was interested in developing an adventure show around a man who works for an international organization and each week gets involved with a person from what I call 'real life' - a housewife, a truck driver. Fleming was very excited about it and he particularly liked the 'real-life' person idea, as that would make it very different from James Bond, who works for the British Secret Service and couldn't care less about being involved with 'real-life' people.

"Anyway, Fleming was quite interested, but he had a heart attack around that time and felt that he couldn't continue because of the pressures involved with doing a weekly series. He did contribute the name, Solo, which was to have been the title of the show. However, the producers who bought movie rights to some of Fleming's novels objected to this because - although I'm sure Fleming had forgotten and I didn't know it - Solo is a name of a minor character in one of his books. He's a Sicilian. A very bad man. Not anything like our Solo. So we changed the title to The Man from U.N.C.L.E., which, actually, has aroused far more comment than Solo did." Felton paused. "But it is Sam Rolfe who has really developed this series. I give him all the credit in the world."

"I was very interested when Norman came to me with this," said Rolfe, a tall man who looks a little like a less dashing, less toothy Burt Lancaster. He sat on a large couch, barefoot, surrounded by scripts in different colors. "I've been wanting to try something along these lines for quite a while. You know, international intrigue, but with comic overtones. We didn't want to do anything actually connected with the Government because then we'd be doing anti-Communist stuff every week. Instead, we've gone completely fictional, and I came up with the word 'UNCLE.' I thought it was a funny designation, kind of provocative. People might think it stood for Uncle Sam, which it doesn't. Or the UN, which it doesn't. Finally, so many people wanted to know what it stood for, we had to make up something that fit.

"We also have an omnipresent evil," Rolfe went on, "named Thrush. This is a kind of international group for hire. And a sort of Professor Moriarty to U.N.C.L.E. But we're not going to see Thrush every week. It's there as a safety device. For instance, if I wanted to do something really awful and I can't think of a good motive, well, he's doing it for Thrush."

Be a member of U.N.C.L.E.

The invention of a secret, highly official organization such as U.N.C.L.E. has resulted in a bemused game among the participants. A charter has been legally registered, and everyone in the cast and crew has become an U.N.C.L.E. member, staffed in one of eight sections ranging from "Policy and Operations" to "Camouflage and Deception." At the conclusion of each episode is a card that reads: "We wish to thank the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement, without whose co-operation this program would not have been possible." So in earnest is the charade played that recently when a script named a mythical country, MGM lawyers sent a copy of the script to the UN for approval. There is a story, probably apocryphal, that the UN said that there is "trouble" in the mythical country.

Felton tells of a meeting of NBC affiliates for which he and Rolfe decided to have U.N.C.L.E. membership cards printed to serve as place cards. By accident, the printer used three different colors: gold, silver and blue. Soon after the meeting, says Felton, he began to receive calls from people complaining that they had received a silver card or a blue card and why hadn't they received a gold one, like their underlings down the hall. They were not soothed, either, by Felton's assurances that the colors made no difference. The calls continued, Felton says, the requests quite serious. In Cleveland a few weeks ago, an executive of the NBC affiliated station used his U.N.C.L.E. card (a gold one) to cash a check.

The only week-to-week format for the series - which steers an unpredictable course throughout the world, from South America to Italy to China and back again to New York City (U.N.C.L.E. headquarters, located in the East 50's [sic - Season One opening credits refer to East 40's]) - is Solo's enlistment of an ordinary citizen in his fight against the darker powers at large. In each segment a pretty schoolteacher, a Midwestern farm girl, an Army sergeant, or even someone's pet dog is taken from his quiet, placid life and thrown into a dizzy and dizzying world of jets, secret rendezvous, bizarre deaths, spies, mad scientists, revolutionaries, inventions from a 21st-century laboratory and deeds thought of only in nightmares or by television producers. And, worst of all, they are never allowed to tell their families or friends where they have been or what they have seen or done.

How to get out of a torture pit

Felton explained that the series has a cliff-hanger quality, although each situation is resolved by the end of its episode. He recalled his first day on the old "Jack Armstrong" radio serial. It was a Friday, and he sat in the studio listening in as Armstrong was trapped in a pit full of hissing cobras, while above him stood savage natives with poised spears, ready to kill. "I asked the producer how on earth he was going to get out of that one," said Felton. "But he wouldn't tell me. 'Wait till Monday,' he said. Finally, on Monday, the show began and the announcer said, 'When Jack Armstrong got out of the Ambamb torture pit, he went to Nampam...' That was it. And they went on with the story." Felton laughed. "We hope to be able to think up better ways than that for Solo."

Napoleon Solo is played with intelligence and a kind of amused detachment by Robert Vaughn (co-star of last season's The Lieutenant). "As an actor, I've never liked anything so much," Vaughn confides between shots one afternoon. "It has some parallel with the James Bond role. We have similar impediments. But I'm playing Solo lighter than Sean Connery plays Bond. We do want to keep it light as much as possible, striking that proper balance also between the real and the more outrageous elements. It's very important that everything be possible, believable."

Solo's super gun

A crew member handed the actor a weapon that looked like a fancy submachine gun. Vaughn explained that it was the U.N.C.L.E. Special, designed and built for the series. Four were made at a cost of $3500 and each is workable, shooting 38-caliber blanks (and bullets). It also dismantles into a pistol when necessary.

Director Dick Donner (one of many directors U.N.C.L.E. will employ) was setting up a shot with three of the other U.N.C.L.E. regulars: David McCallum (Judas in the forthcoming movie "The Greatest Story Ever Told"), playing Illya Kuryakin, a close-mouthed and serious Russian-born U.N.C.L.E. agent, kind of a blond-haired musketeer to Vaughn's D'Artagnan; Leo G. Carroll (TV's Topper and Gene Kelly's co-star in the Going My Way series) as the tweedy Mr. Waverly, one of U.N.C.L.E.'s head men; and May Heatherly as Heather McNab, a pretty U.N.C.L.E. researcher who works in the Personality Induction Center and the Research Information Center, also doubling when necessary in Communications.

Vaughn, wearing a tuxedo and a frilly dress shirt, sat at a light board and fiddled with the controls. A technician meandered over to him and asked several questions about various political matters (Vaughn is extremely interested in politics). Donner, a young man with long brown hair, yelled out for quiet. The shot was ready. "Come on, Bobby Vaughn," said the director. "Coming, Dickie Donner," said Vaughn. The actors were positioned. The camera rolled. "Quiet," yelled Donner. "Action, honey." May Heatherly began the scene, which ended soon after as Vaughn headed for a large, blocklike, knobless, "automatic" silver door. A technician pulled it open as he approached. As he went through, the technician pulled it shut again. The take was printed. Vaughn remarked that the door had closed on him once. "Nearly knocked me out," he said. "Closed right on my temple. Smash. So we've devised a set of hand signals." He explained that everyone in the company was encouraged to think up unusual way of murdering people for the series. "Those doors would be one way," he said and grinned.

'All for fun'

With its tongue-in-cheek, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. is seemingly endless in its possibilities. "I think of it as high entertainment," says Felton. "The other shows I've done - Kildare and Eleventh Hour - were concerned with social commentary and this one is all for fun. Though, who knows, perhaps there is a comment inherent in U.N.C.L.E. too. We're showing people things to come and we're doing it with a sense of humor. So rather than making a comment on life as it is today, we are commenting on life in the future." Felton paused and smiled. "That's profound. I have to write that down."