House of Cards is perhaps the most popular reboot of an ancient failed TV show since the 2009 movie version of Star Trek. Let’s look back at the trippy oddball period piece that inspired the Netflix hit, the 1975 ABC series that was based on Rex Jackson’s novels about ruthless politician Frank Underwood.
First, let’s talk about Rex Jackson. Nobody reads him anymore, and his work is mostly out of print, but back in the ’60s and ’70s he was sort of a cross between Phillip K. Dick and Tom Clancy, writing novels that started off as political and spycraft procedurals before veering off into trippy LSD cuckoo-land. Jackson’s doctoral dissertation was on the Presidential Succession Act of 1792, and he became obsessed with various oddball ways someone could become President of the United States. He explored these various scenarios in a series of short stories and novellas featuring politician Frank Underwood. His best-selling novels were House of Cards, and Underwood ’76. House of Cards is a longer, and somewhat weirder, re-working of his short stories, Frank’s House and The House of Cards, which were originally published in the magazine Tales of Science & Wonder. Frank’s House was a story about Underwood in Congress, while The House of Cards was a story from his wife, Claire’s point of view, about the Underwood presidency, told almost entirely in flashbacks. Underwood ’76 was a novel of the near-future about a president–Underwood–running for re-election who is troubled by dark secrets. His dark secrets are, as it turns out, mostly hookers, who his chief-of-staff, ex-CIA assassin Doug Stamper, quietly eliminates. Mostly. Stamper becomes obsessed with one of the hookers and, well, bad things happen. We get more background on how Underwood became Vice President, then President in Underwood ’76 and the follow-up novel, Oath of Office, which is basically the Simarillion of presidential succession political thrillers. Jackson also wrote a series of free-standing Doug Stamper novels, which are mostly about Doug Stamper killing a motley assortment of Communists, hobos, drifters, hookers, drifter-hookers, and ex-Nazis, and taking drugs to ease the pain of all the drifter and hooker killing.
The main thing that separates the 1975 TV adaptation from the ’60s novels and short stories–aside from all the hooker/drifter killing–is that the stories were works of speculative fiction about the near future, while the TV series takes place in the post-Watergate here-and-now of 1975. So, all the speculative elements, like a Mars mission and voice activated gizmos and wrist-phones and a space station, are jettisoned. All the graft and corruption and crooked contracts associated with the expensive Mars mission in the book is tied to roads and bridges or something in the tv series. In the books, Frank Underwood is expecting to be named to the newly created cabinet post of Secretary of Space, where he can frolic around in all the space mission graft. Instead, at the advice of his long-time friend and advisor Raymond Tarkus, affable doofus President Gary Walker passes him over, and Frank vows vengeance. The series is also more linear than the books, which wander around in time and have flashbacks and varying points of view. A lot of the stuff with Stamper, you’re never sure if it’s really happening, or if it’s just drug-addled CIA killer paranoia. The books are full of basically unreliable narrators. Rex Jackson seemingly had trust issues.
The series straightens these issues out and presents a straight-forward linear narrative. Poor, doomed in-over-his-head President Walker is capably played by McLean Stevenson, who is more of a sympathetic figure than the cranky asshole in the 2014 Netflix series. The book version of Walker’s confidant, Raymond Tarkus is basically a Dr. No-style James Bond villain who Stamper, the old Nazi-hunter, strongly suspects is Nazi fugitive Reinhard Tarkanian. In the TV series he’s a business guy played by George Kennedy. Except for the ambiguously European computer expert Stamper tracks down to South America, there are no Nazi rocket scientist shenanigans in the 1975 TV series (or, needless to say, in the 2014 series, either). Doug Stamper is played by Frank Langella, who really captures the sinister edge of the book character.
But cool as Frank Langella is, you aren’t really watching the show for old Doug, anyway, or for sad-eyed dope President Walker, or folksy tycoon Raymond Tarkus. The glory of the show is Canadian character actor William Shatner’s hamtastic Macbeth-on-coke performance as Frank Underwood. The early 70s had been some lean years for Shatner, and he acts the HELL out of this part, like he’s worried he won’t ever get to act again. It actually sort of works, selling us on both Frank’s insecurity and lust for power. He’s counterbalanced by Angie Dickinson’s calm, cool Claire, who’s icy presence kept your old Zenith tv from exploding after Frank’s fiery rants. The dichotomy between Shatner’s portrayal of Frank and Dickinson’s portrayal of Claire, enjoyable as it is, really highlights one of the problems of the series: the wild inconsistencies in tone. The acting, while entertaining, is all over the map. Frank Langella is deadly serious, like he’s in All The President’s Men. Doug and Claire seem to be in the same serious drama. Shatner’s Frank, though, and his aide Seth, (played by Michael J. Pollard) appear to be in some sort of dark comedy, as does Frank’s political rival, Bea Arthur’s feisty Senator Agnes Dunbar. George Kennedy is glumly in it for the TV-movie paycheck. The tonal shifts in the books were attributable to the fact that, frankly, Rex Jackson is not that good a writer. He’s a history professor slumming as a writer of alternate histories. In the TV series, coming just a couple of years after a president who was a genuine Shakespeare villain, weren’t really sure whether the presidency was a subject of drama or farce. Unfortunately, the show never really had enough time to figure out where it was going. American viewers, having just watched a real presidency come apart on live tv, seemed to lose interest watching it happen again. The show was cancelled after only a season and a half.
