Capturing the Essence of ‘Fugitive’ : The ‘60s series inspired many TV pretenders, but none could match the original. The film version is a rare example of a show successfully leaping to the big screen.

Wrongfully convicted Dr. Richard Kimble was on the lam for four years, searching for the one-armed slayer of his wife while being doggedly pursued himself by the cop from whom he escaped en route to the death house.

It wasn’t easy being “an innocent victim of blind justice.”

Then came that night in 1967, when Kimble and the one-armed man duked it out atop a water tower in front of 72% of the Americans watching television at the time. The murderous brute was about to plug Kimble when he was picked off himself from below by the sharp-shooting, if somewhat thudding, Lt. Gerard, who had finally gotten the message and realized that Kimble was innocent. The one-armed man took his inevitable dive from the top of the tower, and Kimble ultimately walked away with his freedom.

Wow!

It was the end of the ABC series, but not the end of Kimble, who was to live on in rerun perpetuity (these days on cable’s Arts & Entertainment Network). And Warner Bros. Pictures last month released a cinematic version of “The Fugitive,” with Harrison Ford, that huffs and puffs you into a dripping sweat for its entire 2 hours and 7 minutes.

Just as this new take on “The Fugitive” is a grand movie for its genre, so was Quinn Martin’s “The Fugitive” a grand series for its time.

Its hero was trapped in a life of transiency, forced to relocate and encounter a different crisis each week. He was benevolent, a nonviolent Lone Ranger who, even while seeking out the shadows for his own protection, became a selfless champion of worthy causes. Then he’d move on, leaving behind good deeds instead of silver bullets. You’d think that there would be just one week in his life when he could find a little peace. But no.

“The Fugitive” had a fruitful, four-year run as a sort of “Route 66” with suspense and jeopardy, becoming a prototype for a slew of ensuing man-on-the-lam series. One was “Run for Your Life,” about a terminally ill guy who traveled to a different exotic locale each week, in effect fleeing the reality of his fate. Another was “The Invaders,” whose flying saucer-sighting hero each week tried to persuade his skeptical fellow earthlings that their planet had been invaded by evil aliens, while he sought to remain out of their clutches.

And at the low end was “The Immortal,” whose protagonist’s blood contained antibodies that shielded him from aging and disease. That made him the weekly target of a ruthless magnate who greatly desired to have him drop by for, you know, a little transfusion.

Although “Run for Your Life” was created by “The Fugitive’s” creator and executive producer, Roy Huggins, and “The Invaders” was also a Quinn Martin production, neither they nor any of the other pretenders was as compelling as the original.

That was due in part to good storytelling by “The Fugitive,” in part to David Janssen, the actor who played Kimble.

It was Janssen’s quiet elegance and vulnerability that made Kimble so distinctive. A perfect fit for TV’s intimacy, he was a true minimalist who underplayed a potential alp into a hill, never allowing his greased-back, leading-man good looks to overwhelm Kimble’s essentially reticent nature. That Kimble was intensely human and not a super-hero--and that his romances were more sweet than spectacular--made him all the more credible and appealing to his fellow mortals who tuned in weekly to watch him get out of his various scrapes and remain a step ahead of the plodding Gerard.

As part of the huge audience in 1967--TV’s largest ever, with ratings that went unsurpassed by another series until the “Who Shot J.R.?” cliffhanger on “Dallas” in 1980--I’ll never forget what an occasion it was at my parents’ home when our entire extended family gathered in front of the TV set to watch the two-part conclusion of “The Fugitive.”

We wouldn’t have missed it for anything. All across the United States, families were doing the same, watching Gerard use the one-armed man as bait to reel in Kimble, watching that epic confrontation at “the old amusement park” in which Kimble and his wife’s murderer at long last come face to face.

TV series rarely have movie legs, creatively. Exceptions are “Star Trek” and ABC’s short-lived “Police Squad”(the genesis for those “Naked Gun” movies). Another is “The Fugitive,” one reason being that unlike most long-running series, it offers a satisfying ending along with a beginning.

TV’s Kimble can’t bring himself to shoot the one-armed man even in self-defense. While the movie’s wronged hero is somewhat more two-fisted than his TV counterpart, the Kimbles of Janssen and Ford are essentially alike. Both are understated, both are Good Samaritans who put themselves in jeopardy to help others, both have you pulling for them.

The movie and series necessarily differ in many ways, and it’s Tommy Lee Jones who gives the former much of its intensity. Although equally obsessive, his charismatic, oft-ruthless, action-driven Gerard is stunningly unlike Barry Morse’s bureaucratically bland, stuffy and methodical cop in the series, who is more or less a plug-along Javert automaton in a gray suit.

That there would be a fuddy-duddy cop like Gerard--to say nothing of an urbane, high-toned physician like Kimble--in a hamlet such as Stafford, Ind. (the fictional setting for some of the TV series), is also quite a stretch. The movie’s Chicago setting offers more credibility.

Yet even after all these years, TV’s “The Fugitive” remains a kick to watch, and William Conrad’s voice-over narration from that seemingly final chapter in Kimble’s story still echoes. It was, he said, “the day the running stopped.” Until the movie, 26 years later.