50 Years Later, and I Still Remember It! See the Last Episode of Naked City, the Legendary TV Drama that Starred the Streets of New York City, Guest Starring Steven Hill: S04E34 “Barefoot on a Bed of Coals” (1963): Catch It at WEJB/NSU, Complete, for Free, and Without Commercial Interruption, Before the KK Do!

By Nicholas Stix

I didn’t remember everything about this episode, which I must have seen as a re-run on afternoon TV, about ten years after the series’ run had ended, and not knowing that this was the show’s last hurrah.

Here’s what I remembered (or think I did), before watching it again. The protagonist is a man who wants to help people. And so, he buys a New York City Police Department patrolman’s uniform from a store that sells costumes to actors. He’s the ultimate good-deed-doer, whose legendary acts of kindness, as retold by little old ladies, make their way back to the local precinct.

Following the final confrontation, the “real” cops stand at attention and salute the “fake” one.

Herbert B. Leonard was the producer of two revolutionary TV dramas in the late 1950s and early 1960s: Naked City and Route 66. The one show was shot on the streets of New York, while the other was shot on the eponymous, interstate highway. The shows made stars of writer Stirling Silliphant, and actors James Franciscus, Paul Burke, and George Maharis. However, Maharis then got a swelled head, thought he’d become a movie star, and destroyed Route 66, while Silliphant later devoted himself to writing the blaxploitation series of Shaft movies.

Steve Hill, as Lubavitcher Chassidim who were mutual acquaintances referred to him, was a New York acting legend. He was also an Orthodox Jew, which caused him professional problems.

The first time I saw him was as the husband of a suicidal Anne Bancroft, in the black & white movie, The Slender Thread. However, the co-star, with Bancroft, was magical negro Sidney Poitier, who played the saintly hot line operator, who kept Bancroft on the line long enough to get hubby and the cavalry (air cav?) there to save her. (I believe I saw Thread with Nana as half of a double-bill.)

Then I saw him as the original star of Mission: Impossible in 1966-1967. However, creator-producer Bruce Geller was a secular Jew, didn’t care for Hill’s refusal to work during the sabbath, and fired him, replacing him with Aryan Peter Graves. Too bad; Hill was the better actor.

In the early 1980s’ while in West Germany, I saw Hill play the potential father-in-law in the fantasy Shevi Singer/Barbra Streisand musical, Yentl. He was now middle-aged, balding, and more often playing ethnic Jewish roles.

In 1986, while I was staying at my old man’s on Martha’s Vineyard while working in restaurants, he let a drug dealer who was renting a room from him (but who skipped out on paying him) talk him into renting cable. The two things I recall from that summer on cable were a magnificent music video, inspired by Busby Berkeley musicals, in which Janet Jackson sang and danced “When I See You,” and an impeccably cast and written movie (1984?) which featured Hill. A serial killer is loose in Manhattan, and a then beautiful, young, eight-foot-tall Sigourney Weaver and Christopher Plummer are aristocratic Zionist leaders. Hill and then largely obscure Morgan Freeman play long-time, middle-aged detective partners, and an as yet unknown James Woods plays a youngish, working-class loser named “Aldo” who is being set up to take the rap for the killings, and who is best friends with William Hurt, who is… (Everybody is, somehow.)

Hill and Freeman are sitting in their unmarked car while on stakeout, as an embittered Hill talks about being estranged from his “loser” grown son.

They get their hands on Aldo, who complains:

Aldo: “I ain’t done nuthin!”

Hill: “And you’re doin’ it all over town.”

Real New York flavor.

Around 1986, Hill was cast in a Horton Foote ensemble drama set in a Southern small town (Thanksgiving Day? Valentine’s Day?), in the sort of role he was born to play: The young newlywed husband’s hopeless uncle. You know what’s coming, and yet when it happens, he still breaks your heart.

Beginning in 1989, Hill spent several years playing Manhattan DA Adam Schiff on Law & Order. The official story, is that Hill’s role was inspired by actual contemporary Manhattan DA Robert Morgenthau.

The official story couldn’t be more wrong. Morgenthau was a racist (against other Whites) anti-Semite. Just ask working-class Jew, Bernie Goetz. (Or me.) Morgenthau led a conspiracy to suborn perjury against Goetz, and violate the man’s civil rights by, among other things leaking the false claim that Goetz had shot one of his would-be robbers twice. Morgenthau had his ADAs prep the four black thugs to lie on the witness stand, in denying that they had sought to rob Goetz. (Years later, they all confessed that they had sought to rob him.) The campaign was designed to poison the jury pool.

And when the initial grand jury refused to indict Goetz for attempted murder (as opposed to mere illegal possession of a weapon—even the majority of blacks supported Goetz!), Morgenthau undertook the revolutionary step of empaneling a second grand jury to do his bidding. Morgenthau made it his business to destroy Goetz’ life.

Another thing: Morgenthau was a German Jewish aristocrat. His type (like my German Jewish relatives, the Stixes) betrayed no ethnic flavor. Steve Hill’s Adam Schiff, by contrast, had a distinctly Jewish ethnic flavor.


Naked City S04E34: “Barefoot on a Bed of Coals” (1963) Colorized

619 views, premiered Dec 22, 2022

“A man who failed to qualify for the NYPD takes to impersonating a uniformed patrolman. His motives have to do with wanting to serve the public and also wanting to attract more desirable women. When he becomes involved in stopping a robbery and uses his non-regulation firearm the real NYPD searches him out. This is the final episode in the series. However, Naked City was the root for another fine television drama Route 66. All 116 of those episodes are available on BINGOJOHN02. Route 66 was produced and directed by some of the same staff that did Naked City. Also, some of the performers from Naked City appear in Route 66 episodes.”