Gibbsville

1 9 7 6 (USA)
8 x 60 minute episodes

The saga of a small Pennsylvanian mining town and its people during the 1940s, based on The Gibbsville Stories by the late novelist John O’Hara.

The central character, Jim Malloy (John Savage), was a cub reporter for the town newspaper, the Gibbsville Gazette.

There he worked alongside his veteran colleague and mentor Ray Whitehead (Gig Young), a former big-shot foreign correspondent whose alcoholism had caused him to slide so far that his only salvation was a job on his hometown paper.

Mr Pell (Bert Remsen) was their boss at the Gazette.

Jim Malloy was actually O’Hara’s alter-ego and Gibbsville was really Pottsville, PA – O’Hara’s hometown and the inspiration for so many of his autobiographical stories.

Ray opened each episode with the words:

“When I walk through the streets of Gibbsville I see a small but growing town, a busy town with its roots deep in the coal-mined earth. But behind the closed doors and drawn curtains are the secret lives of its people. The lives of the wealthy and the poor filled with ambition and need, love and hate, sorrow and private wars, and the dreams that make men go on. Behind the closed doors of Gibbsville lies the truth about this town, about any town. The real stories waiting to be told”.

Jim Malloy
John Savage
Ray Whitehead
Gig Young
Mrs Malloy
Peggy McCay
Dr Michael Malloy
Biff McGuire
Mr Pell
Bert Remsen

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