Meeting My "Match!"

Mercy, things have been nuts in The Underworld lately! It's like someone opened a stop-gap at work and it's all been headed my way. As a result, I haven't been able to blather on here in my preferred manner. To bridge the gap until my next post, I'm going to ruminate a little about one of my favorite game shows. Posting a recent pick of Jo Anne Worley on Match Game sort of whetted my appetite for more on that program.

Match Game first saw the light of day all the way back in late 1962 (when it was called The Match Game.) The pilot episode for the series involved two celebrity guests, Peggy Cass (later to become a fixture on To Tell the Truth) and Peter Lind Hayes (a then-famous comic singer and TV sitcom actor.) They each headed a team of three and sought to match answers amongst themselves to such benign questions as “Name a kind of muffin.” Then points would be earned for matches within the teams and the first one to reach 100 points proceeded to a bonus round, which involved matching an audience survey.

The host of that very first pilot and the resultant program was none other than Gene Rayburn, a radio personality and sometime actor who had just come off a run on Broadway as Dick Van Dyke's replacement in the smash hit Bye Bye Birdie. Rayburn would come to be known as the face of Match Game from 1962 until the mid-'80s (and is, of course, still the only host to have made any sort of impression with it in many peoples' eyes.)

Having been picked up as a series, the first episode aired on New Year's Eve of 1962 and this time featured Miss Arlene Francis (already a cornerstone of What's My Line?) and Skitch Henderson (a multi-talented composer and band leader who worked on The Tonight Show.) It was produced in New York City. With such scintillating questions such as “John loves his _____” and “Name a flavor of pudding,” the show ran into ratings trouble and was cancelled before the end of its first season.

Producer Mark Goodson (who was a game show legend, co-creating with Bill Todson such programs as Beat the Clock, Password, The Price is Right, I've Got a Secret, What's My Line?, Card Sharks and Family Feud) thus didn't see any point in worrying when one of the show's writers submitted a question that could be seen as suggestive, even perverse.

Dick DeBartolo posed the question, “Mary likes to pour gravy all over John's ______” and Goodson allowed it and others. Remarkably, in the wake of these potentially hilarious questions (which caused titters amongst the panelists and audience, but were nonetheless answered with restraint by the contestants) the ratings began to bounce back up! No less than Miss Jayne Mansfield (complete with dog in tow!) appeared as a panelist on at least one occasion, her competitor on this day being comedian Orson Bean. Bean would return years later on the '70s version of the show, as well as on many others including To Tell the Truth.

For most of the next five years, The Match Game won its time slot and became a top three hit amongst all daytime game shows. It was still doing well ratings-wise when NBC cancelled it in 1969 as part of a scheduling-marketing change in their daytime line-up. Most of those involved with The Match Game figured that it had moved on to that big bonus round in the sky. For his part, writer DeBartolo was hardly unemployed. He had managed to secure a steady position at the notoriously irreverent Mad magazine and holds a record for having had material of his published in the most consecutive issues (from 1966 – 2009!) That's him on the far right with Rayburn during a much later appearance with trash-TV host Geraldo Rivera.

But as it turned out, DeBartolo's warped sense of humor would find itself being put to use again, but this time in an all-new updating (this time on CBS) called Match Game '73! This time, there would be only two contestants and those two would do their best (over the course of two rounds) to match a six-pack of celebrity panelists. Again, Gene Rayburn would host. The first week of shows had the following panelists: Michael Landon, Vicki Lawrence, Jack Klugman, Jo Ann Pflug, Richard Dawson and Anita Gillette. Richard Dawson would become a permanent fixture, as would Charles Nelson Reilly and, at her husband Jack Klugman's express suggestion, Brett Somers.

Now with the 1970s in swing, the colorful program opened each episode with a twinkling, twirling portal that showed each star's face as the legendary announcer Johnny Olson (of The Price is Right fame -- “Come on down!”) called their name. Needless to say, this method of opening the show was and is my all-time favorite and I love to see who will be the next face revealed as the portal spins around!

As funky electric guitar music hummed, Olson, with his distinctive voice would say, "Get ready to match the stars!" One never knew WHO was going to pop up as the window revolved!

Again, the questions were suggestive (such as "After being hit by a steamroller, Norman had to slide his ______ under the door."), but now there was a tad more freedom in what the panelists could list as their answer. Even so, boobs and buns were about as far as anyone dared go. If genitalia, or anything very close to such, was mentioned, it was bleeped out and blacked out before airing! This lent a charming sort of wink-wink bent to the proceedings as the people involved would push the envelope of certain questions without ever actually opening it.

Match Game '73 was an instant hit, immediately becoming not only the #1 game show on television, but sometimes the #1 show on daytime, period! Host Rayburn (and his memorable long-necked microphone) began to abandon the buttoned-up, staid qualities that he'd generally displayed on the original program and proceeded to enjoy the loosey-goosey atmosphere of the new incarnation.

One reason the show got wackier as the week went on was that five shows were filmed in one day and five the next over the course of a Saturday and Sunday. Rayburn lived in Cape Cod, Massachusetts and would fly to Los Angeles, where the new show was taped, every two weeks, meaning that an entire month's worth of episodes were created in just four days. (With little to no preparation required beforehand, this was quite the cushy job! Wheel of Fortune has always been done the same way which means that Vanna White basically works four days a month, though she also has wardrobe fittings, promotional blurbs, occasional trips, etc... to deal with as well.)

Since a dinner break was called for towards the end of the day's taping – during which the host and panelists would often have a drinkie-poo – it soon became evident that the Thursday and Friday installments tended to be even more fun that then others and were particularly “can't miss.” Somers and Reilly reveled in taking pot-shots at one another, he ribbing her about her looks and she (and he himself) joshing about his less-than-burly manner.

Dawson, meanwhile, became extremely popular thanks to his proficiency in the bonus round, in which contestants had to match one celebrity of their choice (which was almost always Dawson) in completing a certain phrase (for example, “Tough _____” or “______ Chicken.”) He frequently took on a mincing quality meant to ape Hollywood Squares' Paul Lynde, though it was different enough (or bad enough?) that it only vaguely resembled its source.

Recurring characters would pop up in the (now lengthier and more involved) questions including Old Man Periwinkle, Horrible Hannah, Ugly Edna and, memorably, Dumb Dora and Dumb Donald. Rayburn would start a question, “Dumb Dora is so dumb...” to which the audience would roar back, “How dumb is she?!” As it continued, Match Game audiences grew more and more enthusiastic and vocal, sometimes to the delight, but sometimes also to the consternation, of the participants.

On many occasions, things would go haywire as Rayburn, Somers, Reilly, Dawson and Miss TV herself, frequent guest Betty White, would depart from the norm and get up from their seats to take part in all sorts of mayhem. Rayburn crashed through his entry door, White engaged in a fauz-striptease as bump 'n grind music played, Reilly fell to the floor in faux pain, Dawson ran out to kiss women in the audience and Rayburn drew a halt to the proceedings to fix broken mics or chairs.

Reilly, who had one of the most hideous toupees ever, would often take to wearing hats on the show while it was being “worked on.” One one occasion, he stunned viewers by briefly showing them his bald noggin under the Panama hat he had been wearing. Ironically, like Rayburn, he'd also gotten his Broadway start in 1960's Bye Bye Birdie (albeit in a small role) and would later act and direct several times on The Great White Way.

From 1973 to 1977 (with the name of the show augmented to fit each new calendar year), Match Game ruled the daytime airwaves and was a favorite program to many folks, young, old and in-between. In 1975, a weekly nighttime version called Match Game PM was introduced (with one episode being filmed at the tail end of each Saturday and Sunday tape day), which often featured stars of an even more notable caliber than the ones who often figured into the daytime version. This was a self-contained format (never spilling into a second episode) that I, as a structured type, appreciated a lot. It ran until 1981 and yielded 230 episodes.

At least two famous folks were contestants on Match Game before they'd made their mark. One was NFL coach and commentator Brian Billick (who now writes for MSN.com), shown here in all his lantern-jawed, leather-jacketed glory. Another was Kirstie Alley, miffed from the start at Rayburn's mispronunciation of her then-unusual first name and acting rather above it all throughout.

Things on the show began to sour a bit when 1978 brought the Star Wheel. By now, the finale of each game was more or less Richard Dawson's moment in the sun. For whatever reason, the powers that be decided to mix it up by putting the panelists' names on a huge wheel that the contestants would spin to see who they'd be trying to match in the bonus round. Not only did this lead to many mismatches in answers, but it took the wind out of Dawson's sails (who, by now, had his own mega-hit show Family Feud.) Things were never the same after this.

Dawson departed Match Game in 1978 after several months of surly demeanor and rotating male celebrities were placed in his signature spot such as McLean Stevenson and Robert Donner. At its peak, it had drawn 12.5 million viewers, setting records in daytime ratings that stood until General Hospital caught fire several years later with its “Luke and Laura” storyline. Now, after Dawson's departure and unsuccessful fiddling with the show's time slot (and, of course, the unavoidable slide in popularity that virtually all programs face eventually), the show was removed from CBS in 1979.

The series still had enough drawing power, though, to continue in a syndicated version and did so until 1982, adding three more years to its overall run. After this, various attempts were made to recapture the success of the '70s version, but none of them could make it. NBC bit once more with 1983's The Match Game-Hollywood Squares Hour, with Rayburn still hosting his half, but it didn't even last a year. A 1990 incarnation with Ross Shafer and a 1998 one with Michael Burger both tanked. This last one only featured five celebs in an effort to scale back... (In both 1985 and 1987, attempts were made to re-launch the show with Rayburn, but they didn't come to fruition.

Other tries have been made to get the show going again (including a bizarre re-working of it in 1996 with Dallas' Charlene Tilton as the host, which never got past the pilot stage.) Most likely, in this more crass, anything goes era, the entertainingly coy way in which suggestiveness was handled in prior years can never be replicated. Certainly the later editions of the game left much to be desired in their handling of the risque and were instead just crude and unfunny... None but about four episodes of the 1960s Match Game exist thanks to the practice of wiping/erasing tapes after each broadcast, but practically all of the '70s rendition have been saved for posterity.

By now, all of the principal on-camera participants from the glory days of Match Game have gone on to that great big bonus round in the sky. Rayburn died in 1999 at age eight-one of heart failure. Reilly passed away of pneumonia in 2007 at age seventy-six. Somers was gone just several months later of colon and stomach cancer at age eighty-three. The last of the four, Dawson, was taken by esophageal cancer just last year at age seventy-nine. With them, they took some of the funniest moments in game show history, but thankfully their legacy lives on through rebroadcasts of their hilarious shenanigans.

Today, I'm in a "Rage"

In The Underworld, we love a good, soapy story, the more chastely tawdry, the better. By chastely tawdry, I mean an old-fashioned potboiler with plush settings and clothes and attractive people, but all skim-coating an underlying core of sexual misbehavior and/or suffering. One lesser known entry into this realm is 1965's A Rage to Live, starring Miss Suzanne Pleshette. It's based on a novel by the same man, John O'Hara, who gave the world the hardbound basis for BUtterfield 8 and, like that book-to-screen translation, A Rage to Live is updated to the then-present day and given a beauty treatment. Perhaps due to it being filmed in black and white, it has failed to endure the same way BUtterfield 8 (which starred the more famous actress Elizabeth Taylor) has. It is not without its own pleasures, however!

The book, published in 1949, was firmly established as taking place in prim, Pennsylvania Dutch country (note the pastoral cover, which certainly shares nothing in common with the cinematic poster except that paper was involved in both!) The movie is mostly set a bit further ahead in time and, though still set in Pennsylvania, could be happening most anywhere in the northeastern United States or anyplace close by.

At twenty-eight in real life, Pleshette is hardly believable as a minor in the opening sequences of the story. I mean, great lady and a fine actress, but that Marlboro and martini-tinged voice is a dead giveaway that this is no high school senior! Anyway, she is the daughter of a well-to-do, but ill in health, widow (Carmen Matthews) who frets about the direction she's heading in. Matthews has good reason, too! In a truly hysterical turn of events, Pleshette returns home from school one day to find a note in the kitchen next to a freshly-baked cake that emphatically reads “Don't stuff yourself!” only to promptly do just that, only with one of her brother's friends, the aggressively horny Mark Goddard!! She heads upstairs to change in the otherwise deserted house when Goddard, a friend of her brother's, comes down the hall and stops at her door. Merely the silhouette of her shadow on the wall is enough to ignite him and he stares intensely (while his off-screen hand, almost imperceptibly, begins to move around below.) He aggressively comes after her and she resists for a little bit, but finally gives in. (Had I been Pleshette, he'd have had to run for his life!)

This is apparently her first sexual experience, but it somehow awakens in her a drive for more. She becomes “easy” and is soon getting it on in parked cars (even at her own parties!) and again with Goddard. In what is a treat for fans of Match Game, Goddard takes Pleshette home one day for a matinee and is caught by his mother, none other than Brett Somers! Somers tears into them both and really gives her one brief scene some gusto.

This scandal almost does her mother in, even though Pleshette denies having done anything. Soon after, at a glamorous Christmas party, her brother introduces her to an old pal of his, Bradford Dillman. She and Dillman, a nice, respectable and earnest sort of man, hit it off. Unfortunately, Goddard is at the party and begins to cause a scene, which Dillman breaks up. Note Miss Pleshette's highly stacked hair in this shot. This being 1965, there are a few such 'dos on the background actresses as well.

Her mother's health in question, Pleshette accompanies her to a vacation getaway down south. Here, the heat seems to get to Pleshette again and she can't resist trying out one of the room service waiters, much to her mother's extreme dismay. By the time the trip is over, so is Matthews!

Chiles and Pleshette now left to their own devices, they have a surprisingly frank talk - for a brother and sister - about her sexual appetites. When Dillman returns to pay his respects, she decides she loves him and wants to make an attempt at a monogamous relationship. She even comes clean to him, explaining that she is not going to be a virgin when their wedding night comes, though he stops her before she can run down her (lengthy) sexual resume.

The wedding, of course, is a frilly, picture book affair with all the trimmings. Here and throughout the film, Pleshette is dressed in Oscar-nominated Howard Shoup gowns, some of which suggest a demure quality while others, particularly some snug pencil skirts, show off her dazzling figure. Following the ceremony, Pleshette and Dillman settle in to her father's old farm, revitalizing the grounds and creating an idyllic home for themselves. They also have a young son together.

Cut to a couple of years into the marriage, Dillman arranges to have the barn fixed due to settling. Who arrives to work on it, but an old acquaintance, Ben Gazzara, the son of one of her mother's servants. Gazzara emerges from the house onto the patio where Pleshette is reading and sports one of the most blatant examples of bulgery from that or any other era! His trousers hiked up and his junk dressed left, he has a package to deliver to her and it's not the kind that comes with a bow on it. (Click to, er, enlarge) Finally happy, she pretends not to notice that she's being targeted by yet another admirer, but finally can't help but show evidence of a tiny crack in the surface. One day soon after, Gazzara's truck breaks down (supposedly!) and she gives him a lift. Unable to stifle himself any further, he gives in and confesses that he has desired her ever since he used to deliver soft drinks to her mother's house. She resists for a while, but has finally reached her own limit and the two kick off an affair while vertical, phallic tubes of blueprints press against the window of his office.

This affair carries on for a time, and the two have strong chemistry together. She still loves Dillman, but can't deny her attraction to the blue-collar Gazzara. Busy socialite that she is, she soon has to start pencilling him in in between charity engagements and plans for a big carnival shindig she is throwing on her property as a benefit. Part of this preparation includes meeting with still another man, handsome Peter Graves, who finds her hard to forget despite his marriage to a smothering and neurotic wife, Bethel Leslie.

Graves has genuine feelings for Pleshette, but she's rather booked up at the time being! Even though the two haven't done anything untoward, both Gazzara and Leslie begin to suspect them of it. Dillman, however, remains blissfully in the dark. Gazzara starts to stalk Pleshette while Leslie becomes more and more unhinged, tossing an accusatory drink into Graves' face and pressing him into admitting that he has feelings for Pleshette.

Thanks to his possessive and domineering behavior, Pleshette breaks things off with Gazzara, but this just makes him angrier and more wild. He takes to picking up some floozy in a roadside motel and beating the heck out of her, all the while drunkenly calling out Pleshette's name. This poor chick who was cast as the victim... Can you imagine? “We need an actress who can dress provocatively and get slapped around repeatedly with no lines – other than screams – and no billing.” Rough day at the office!

Dillman gets wind of the affair and finally comes down hard on Pleshette, threatening to take her son away and leave her forever. Naturally, it's the day of the big (and tacky!) carnival on their land, so they have to stick it out for appearance's sake that night. Trouble is, by now Graves and Leslie have split up and she is convinced that it's because of Pleshette. She heads to the carnival brandishing a firearm with plans to end the (nonexistent) affair.

The whole thing comes to a strangely anti-climactic head which is good, I guess, for those who carp at overly melodramatic endings in soap operas, but a tad disappointing for fans of squalid scenarios. Things are left without a concrete ending, though the direction in which things are headed is clearly indicated.

When color TV came into vogue in the mid-'60s, feature films would continue to find their way onto the airwaves a few years after their release. However, it was considered more of a draw for these airings to be in color. Thus, a fair amount of black and white comedies and dramas began to get slighted when it came to television showings. It was more common to find splashy, colorful movies being aired rather than ones that harkened back to pre-color TV and didn't take advantage of the new technology. A Rage to Live wound up, like quite a few other flicks, being passed over in favor of color products.

The film's music is by Nelson Riddle, but the opening theme was composed by and played by famed pianists Ferrante and Teicher, who released an instrumental version as a single. Lyrics were written to the theme and those are heard by vocalist Jimmy Roselli in the Christmas party scene.

Seen now in widescreen HD, the film has amazing cinematography by veteran Charles Lawton and can be better appreciated for the production values it has to offer. Pleshette, while always pretty in color, had eyes that truly suited black and white photography, they were so big and glistening, with heavy liner and lashes. Her raven-colored hair also made an impression in this format. (Incidentally, the actress first announced to play this role was Anne Bancroft.)

What she does here, which is no easy feat, is to make the audience sympathize with an adulterous nymphomaniac. She adeptly conveys the fact that it is a compulsion and an illness, not just the fact that she is sleazy. She's shacking up in a motel room with a hirsute engineer while her devoted husband and toddler son await her at home and yet we don't want for her to get caught. It's a testament to her amiability as an actress on screen.

Her film career becoming spotty by the early '70s, she would soon score a big success on The Bob Newhart Show as his sharp-tongued, but loving, wife Emily, for which she received two Emmy nominations. When his next successful series, Newhart, ended, she came on for the final episode in what was to become one of TV's most surprising and best-remembered finales. She also made an impression (and scored another Emmy nomination) for her fire-breathing role as Leona Helmsley: The Queen of Mean. After enjoying a late-in-life marriage to longtime pal Tom Poston, she died at age seventy in 2008 from smoking-related illness.

Dillman hasn't got a lot to work with here. It's a somewhat thankless role, though he does get to show some of his stuff when he takes on Goddard at the Christmas party and when he finally finds out about Pleshette's duplicity. For whatever reason (perhaps to add contrast against Pleshette?), his normally dark hair has been lightened, which was unusual for him. Though he never achieved top-tier success in Hollywood (mostly thanks to films that didn't fulfill their initial promise), he was a steady worker in the business for fifty years. He also married one of the most famous models ever born, Suzy Parker, and they stayed together from 1963 until her death in 2003, a rare example of longevity in a Hollywood marriage. He turns eighty-one in a couple of days.

Gazzara went from this into a successful TV show of his own called Run for Your Life, for which he was twice Emmy-nominated. A brooding presence on screen from his very first film The Strange One in 1959, he juggled stage, TV and movies throughout his career, establishing a close working relationship with John Cassavetes. He also turns eighty-one this year, but remains working steadily in supporting film roles.

Graves was soon to become immortal as Mr. Phelps on Mission: Impossible, a series he worked on from 1967 to 1973 (and revisited in a 1988-1990 redux) earning one Emmy nomination in the process. His work as host on the long-running A & E series Biography finally netted him a statuette in 1997. His screen career lasted sixty years with 1980's Airplane! an amusing highlight. Sadly, he passed away from a heart attack in 2010 at the age of eighty-three.

Another cast member soon to be made immortal by television was li'l slice of love, Goddard. He would go directly from this film to Lost in Space, playing Major Don West. Although that series devolved into the adventures of Will Robinson and Dr. Smith, Goddard still presented a heroic and handsome presence for youngsters to admire. I know I did when I saw the series in reruns! Now, hard as it is to believe, seventy-five years of age, he occasionally makes an appearance (such as a cameo in the dire, big-screen remake Lost in Space.)

Leslie was a busy Broadway actress for many decades with forays into film and TV. She had a late career Tony nomination for her work as Mary Tyrone in Long Day's Journey into Night. Working right up until her death in 1999 of cancer at age seventy, one of her last roles was that of Kevin Costner's craggy, tobacco-ridden mother-in-law in Message in a Bottle.

Matthews has an interesting distinction. She only worked in five feature films during her career and two of them were adaptations of John O'Hara's work. Apart from A Rage to Live, she played Dina Merrill's mother in BUtterfield 8 as well. She appeared in many, many hours of television, however. Considering the aged and weakly types of people she often played, it's surprising to note that she lived until 1995 and was only eight-one when she died.

Chiles had one of those manly, all-purpose faces that could be put to use anywhere (and was!) He has worked almost continually on stage, television and the big screen since his debut in 1960. Recently, he has become more active than he had been for a while and is enjoying playing older character parts in various projects. He's seventy-eight.

Among the supporting cast are the previously-mentioned Somers, who reigned on Match Game for several years and is notable as the longtime (though estranged for quite a bit) wife of Jack Klugman, George Furth, a busy stage and screen character actor and Virginia Christine. Christine was a steadily working character actress who often played servants, as she does here, and later became a household presence as Mrs. Olson in a long-running series of Folger's coffee commercials. She was also the wife of famed character actor Fritz Feld for fifty-three years until his death.

Fans of Miss Pleshette can't afford to miss this movie as it is really a showcase for her throughout. The men are interesting as well in most cases, but it is her show. A cousin to BUtterfield 8, it shares the basic outline of a beautiful brunette undone by her carnal desires. We can also highly recommend it to viewers who enjoy a look at the clothes, sets, furniture and furnishing of bygone days, all presented in crisp cinematography.