The brusque title character (Liev Schreiber) specializes in cleaning up after celebrities — a dead girl found in an athlete's bed, a closeted actor being blackmailed.
The movie gave Gable's character Fleming's own rough humor, brusque authority and gritty chivalry.
In the new "Ironside," which begins on Wednesday on NBC, Blair Underwood makes the title character an unpleasant combination of macho and brusque.
The characters include a feckless stepfather, an impatient older sister, a brusque high school coach, a bumpkin of a country cousin and a neurotic mother.
The most winning subsidiary character was Michael Socha's Harvey, with his blond quiff, white jeans and brusque pragmatism, cutting through dither and delay with a curt: "No, mate, I'm not having it".
There's the stink of moral rot coming off the character played by Mr. Sutherland, who has lately become a master at playing brusque, manipulative father figures; his turn as the coach in "Without Limits" ranks among the best work of his career, and his performance in "Panic" is on a similar level.
The way Schmitz calls her young lover "kid" is tender and brusque at the same time, and it is the hook into the ambiguity of the character.
If most of the characters, including Nucuazia's sharp-tongued mother, soft-touch grandmother, wastrel brother and brusque corporate executive sister, share an uncanny family resemblance, it is because Mr. Linzy plays them all, brilliantly.
The characters are a standard array: a pair of veteran detectives, an anxious rookie, a brusque sergeant, a tart medical examiner.
