The Executioners

This is the third major go at the same material.

John D. Macdonald wrote the novel back in 1957, and it was called The Executioners.

Hold on to that title, because it comes back later in a way I actually really liked.

That book became the 1962 film with Gregory Peck and Robert Mitchum, and then Martin Scorsese remade it in 1991 with Robert De Niro and Nick Nolte.

Riverside, houseboats, his family rooted out there on the water.

I never got to the book, so I can't tell you if that's truer to how MacDonald originally wrote it, but I understood what they were going for, and it gives the show a proper southern gothic flavour.

And calling the final episode The Executioners, the actual title of the original novel, I thought that was a really classy touch.

But here's where the conversation turns, and I have to be honest with you, the back third of this show is where it all came apart for me.

... a variety of genres, some in sci-fi, mainly in mystery and suspense.

In 1957, MacDonald released a novel called The Executioners, and that novel told the story of a lawyer being stalked and tormented by a narcissistic psychopath who he helped put in prison.

The story of this Executioners eventually would wind up in the hands of actor, actor, uh, Colonel Wilde, who, uh, acquired the rights to the book for $30,000 in 1958.

Uh, Wilde was a fairly popular actor at the time, uh, starring in such films as A Song to Remember, for which he receives an Oscar nomination for.

Now, after making the war film The Guns of Navarone, The Guns of Navarone-

Great film

... uh, Peck and Bartlett planned to adapt The Executioners into a film.

They eventually hired J Lee Thompson, who had directed The Guns of Navarone, uh, for the job 'cause they liked working with him.

Before we can even conceptualize a 10-hour runtime, how was this narrative originally constructed?

So the foundational text is a 1957 novel by John D. MacDonald titled The Executioners, and Feenberg astutely points out in his review that this original source material was the very definition of, um, brutally efficient.

MacDonald was a master of the pulp format.

He wasn't interested in sprawling sociological treatises, you know.

Step away from contact.

Okay, so this week all stems from a book that came out in 1957, a novel called The Executioners, which, what a good...

Yeah.

That's pretty solid.

But no, it all stems from this.

Everybody puts it in the credits.

It's all stemming from the novel The Executioners.

Yes, yes.