THE ADVENTURES OF NICK CARTER (1972)

New York City, 1912. A man sees an unconscious woman being carried out of a hotel room, put in a carriage, and driven away. He tries to follow but is shot and killed coming down the fire escape. Sam, the dead man, had worked with private eye Nick Carter (Robert Conrad, pictured), though at the time Sam was working for Freddy Duncan, a son of the rich (and dying) big shot Otis Duncan, keeping an eye on Freddy's estranged wife Ivy, the woman who was kidnapped. Nick decides to get to the bottom of his death. Nick goes to the Plush Horse, a fancy club and gambling house, where Freddy is celebrating his birthday, and picks a fight with Freddy's men, getting tossed out. Next, Nick goes to Otis for information. (Otis: "I don’t like private detectives"; Nick: "I don’t like robber barons"; Otis: "Fair enough.") Otis hires Nick to track down Ivy, though Otis' other son, Neal, doesn't seem to be enthusiastic about helping out. In time, Nick crosses paths with Bess Tucker, owner of the Plush Horse, who also doesn't seem happy about being questioned by Nick, and Lloyd Deams, a favorite of Bess' who may have been having an affair with Ivy. Nick gets into fisticuffs, dons disguises, and has run-ins with Capt. Dan Keller, a crooked cop who was the reason Sam quit the police force years ago. Ivy's body is pulled out of the river, but Nick soon suspects that it's not really Ivy, and he's right.

This is the third TV-movie pilot for a rotating detective series from ABC that was never picked up, the other two being for Sherlock Holmes and Hildegarde Withers. This one certainly had potential, with Conrad in a comfortable role as a crime fighter (see the 1960s series Hawaiian Eye and The Wild Wild West). He's a good-looking and manly fellow, but his sex appeal is downplayed here—he has no romantic ties, though his secretary Roxy (Brooke Bundy) could have been developed into one eventually. This has the strongest cast of the three movies. Shelly Winters is Bess, Broderick Crawford is Otis, and Dean Stockwell is Freddy (an underdeveloped character who gets sort of lost in the plot twists). Best of all are Pernell Roberts (Adam Cartwright on Bonanza) as Neal and Sean Garrison as Lloyd, both becoming important characters. I'm not typically a fan of the gruff Neville Brand, but he's good here as the crooked cop. The period setting is par for the course for a TV movie, and there are good fight scenes, especially the climactic one on city rooftops. Nick Carter got his start as a pulp hero in the 1880s and books featuring him were published up to 1990, by which time he had become a secret agent. I've never read a Carter story but I reviewed a 1940 B-film with Walter Pidgeon playing Carter as a rather generic detective. [YouTube, and widely available as a grey market DVD]