Chrysler Theatre takes a foolish detour into comedy with "The Square Peg", a sophomoric Bob Cummings vehicle in which he plays a nerdy psychologist hired to give Runyonesque gangster Stanley Adams' set of goons aptitude tests to see if they're worth keeping on the mob payroll.
It's difficult to sit through, as the hour-long show is saddled with a horrible laugh track. Fortunately, the series' usual dramas are played straight, with no need for a hokey track to tell the audience when to gasp at a shocking plot twist.
Cummings' brand of very tame sex comedy is on display here as both he and his leading ladies Joanna Moore and Sue Ann Langdon (Sue wearing an unbecoming dark brunette hairdo) have teasing sort of strip scenes within a G-rated format. Other than this lame attempt at titillation it's just a silly waste of time.
This was a remake of a 1952 segment of "Studio One", also titled "The Square Peg", which starred Orson Bean and Thomas Mitchell as the psychologist and the gangster. A very different sort of odd couple in this vein came 35 years later with Billy Crystal and Robet De Niro in the hit "Analyze This", where the two actors playing off each other made magic, totally missing from this earlier junker.
It's difficult to sit through, as the hour-long show is saddled with a horrible laugh track. Fortunately, the series' usual dramas are played straight, with no need for a hokey track to tell the audience when to gasp at a shocking plot twist.
Cummings' brand of very tame sex comedy is on display here as both he and his leading ladies Joanna Moore and Sue Ann Langdon (Sue wearing an unbecoming dark brunette hairdo) have teasing sort of strip scenes within a G-rated format. Other than this lame attempt at titillation it's just a silly waste of time.
This was a remake of a 1952 segment of "Studio One", also titled "The Square Peg", which starred Orson Bean and Thomas Mitchell as the psychologist and the gangster. A very different sort of odd couple in this vein came 35 years later with Billy Crystal and Robet De Niro in the hit "Analyze This", where the two actors playing off each other made magic, totally missing from this earlier junker.
