"Why are you running?"
"Don't you know?
"No."
"Because I am longing. . . ."
-- Day of Wrath
It was born during Assassination Autumn, and no other American TV series has ever been as drenched in sorrow and loss -- largely due to Pete Rugolo's music -- as this one. There's an ominous death rattle on the soundtrack, the death rattle of its time: a world of gasoline and bus stations, diners, local motels, drive-ins, stone cities, asphalt palaces, mechanic shops, coal trucks, great warehouses and amusement parks, factories and pool halls -- a world where the air still smelled of the earth. And a power-saturated universe seething with conspiracies, all focused on the wrongly-accused of a famous murder, while the real murderer runs free. The mournful eyes of the star -- the eyes of a mountaineer -- and the voice -- like a wound in the throat -- match the eyes and timbre of the fallen leader.
It is hard to think of The Fugitive apart from the confusion and hurt the country must have felt as it began to realize the center of American life was passing the age where it could still look forward; now people looked back into memory, into the past of the nation. . .
"Landscape with Running Figures," Parts I and II.
