The Dain Curse (1978 TV mini-series)

The Dain Curse is a U.S. television mini-series which originally screened on CBS in 1978. It comprises three feature-length episodes. James Coburn stars as private detective Hamilton Nash.

It is based on Dashiell Hammett’s second published novel, The Dain Curse. The novel was published in book form in 1929 but had been serialised in the Black Mask pulp magazine in 1928.

The TV retains the time setting of the novel and that is important. These events take place in 1928, before the Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression. This is a Jazz Age story, not a Depression-era story.

The hero of the novel is known only as the Continental Op. He figures in two of Hammett’s novels and many of his short stories. In the TV mini-series he is given the name Hamilton Nash (and is played by James Coburn).

It’s worth pointing out that there’s a good reason that Hammett’s private eye stories have an air of authenticity. Hammett spent seven years as a private detective, working for the world’s most famous detective agency, the Pinkerton Detective Agency. That’s also why the hero of The Dain Curse is not a Philip Marlowe-style down-at-heel PI working alone out of a seedy office. Nash works for a very big agency and judging by his fancy clothes he is very well paid. It’s also why he works as part of a team of operatives.

If you’re not familiar with the novel you might think that they’ve added a lot of 70s elements such as dope addiction and the crazy religious cult, but that stuff is all in the novel. It’s easy to forget that drugs were a big thing in the 1920s and that wacky religious cults had been around since the late 19th century. And phoney mystics fleecing foolish rich people were a huge thing in the 1920s.

It starts as an insurance investigation. There was a burglary of some diamonds but the stones were small and of very poor quality and hardly worth stealing. The burglary occurred at the Leggett house. The daughter, Gabrielle (Nancy Addison), seems rather strange. The whole household is strange. Nash doesn’t think there was any burglary.

Then comes the first murder and the plot is soon getting quite complicated. The Leggetts all have odd mysterious murky pasts and the past is more important to them than the present. There are secrets. Big secrets.

Nash solves the case to everyone’s satisfaction but his own. He knows that the solution doesn’t add up. This is the sort of thing that really bothers him.

At which point we need to talk about Hamilton Nash because he is not your stock-standard PI. He works for a big agency jealous of its reputation for honesty and integrity and that suits Nash because he has ethics. He also has professional pride. He believes in doing his job properly and thoroughly.

He’s not surprised to discover that this case has in fact only just begun.

There’s a connection to an obviously phoney religious cult run by the mysterious slightly sinister Aaronia Haldorn (Jean Simmons) and her husband Joseph. Joseph doesn’t just claim to be God. He believes he is God.

Nash gets some advice from his old friend Owen Fitzstephan (Jason Miller), a colourful author of occult potboilers.

There are romantic triangles and romantic quadrangles, lots of betrayals and of course everyone is telling lies.

Money is a motivation for some of the players in this complicated but jealousy, lust and an obsessive desire to preserve secrets are bigger motivations.

Nash is in danger of getting emotionally entangled with Gabrielle which, given her morphine addiction and general craziness, may not be a good idea.

And then there’s the Dain Curse. A family curse going back centuries. Gabrielle has Dain blood.

And this is just the first episode! There are two more to come. With countless plot twists.

James Coburn’s star quality is clearly in evidence but he’s called upon to do some real acting here and acquits himself well. He bears little resemblance to Hammett’s Continental Op and it’s best to think of Hamilton Nash as essentially a new character devised for the TV production. What matters is that Coburn has plenty of charm and he doesn’t play Nash as a straightforward tough guy.

Nancy Addison does a fine job as Gabrielle. It’s a tricky part. We have to be sympathetic to her even though she’s exasperating and she has to keep us guessing as to how far Gabrielle can be trusted.

This was an expensive and lavish production and it looks terrific. The makers wanted a cinematic look and had major battles with the network over the issue but for the most part they got their way. It does look a lot more cinematic than typical American television productions of that era.

The problems with this mini-series are actually inherent in the source material. The novel was in fact four short stories cobbled together so it’s very episodic. 

The mini-series is therefore also very episodic. There’s no one clear central plot strand and overall there’s a bit too much plot.

Fortunately there’s enough wild stuff to keep things interesting and I enjoyed The Dain Curse a good deal. Highly recommended.

The Image Entertainment DVD release is still fairly easy to get hold of and don’t be put off by the fact that it’s DVD. It really looks very very nice. 

Most importantly the three episodes are complete and uncut (there was a heavily butchered version floating around at one time).

Firefly (2002-2003)

Time to revisit Joss Whedon’s ill-fated science fiction 2002-2003 TV series Firefly. I disliked it at the time but perhaps I’ve mellowed since then. It is possible that at the time was suffering from Joss Whedon Fatigue.

At that stage Whedon’s fans thought he could walk on water and perhaps he was starting to believe that himself. He was apparently thinking in terms of a show running for seven seasons, which was certainly wildly optimistic. It was cancelled midway through the first season. It was his first taste of failure.

To be fair it was not entirely his fault. The network was unhappy with the series right from the start. They helped to ensure its failure, starting by screening the episodes out of order. Disastrously, they screened the first episode midway through the show’s run. That episode gives us crucial backstory on the main character and crucial background information. As a result viewers had no clue what was going on.

The basic premise is breathtakingly unoriginal - an ill-assorted band of misfits adventuring through outer space. This is the exact same premise as Blake’s 7, Farscape, Lexx, Cowboy Bebop and Outlaw Star. By 2002 it was the most over-used cliché in science fiction.

Mal Reynolds (Nathan Fillion) is the captain of the Serenity, a battered Firefly-class cargo spaceship. He and his crew are smugglers, thieves and all-round criminals and they’re notably unsuccessful. The crew also includes Inara Serra (Morena Baccarin), a high-priced whore. More on her later. They have taken on a few passengers. One of them is a preacher man. There’s also a young doctor and his insane sister River (Summer Glau). The Alliance government has done something nasty to her brain. 

The Alliance are the bad guys. Mal supported the Independents in their war against the Alliance. The Independents lost and this left Mal bitter and twisted.

We have nine ill-assorted people who don’t necessarily understand or trust each other and some of them are not what they appear to be. And romantic and sexual attractions start to happen. There’s potential for interesting character developments and relationships.

So what went wrong? The answer is, almost everything. The hints that there is going to be interesting character and relationship stuff and that there is something really bizarre about River don’t really kick in until we’re well into the series and by that time most viewers had switched off. Realistically you have to grab the audience in the first three episodes or so and Firefly fails to do this, for reasons I’m about to explain.

We expect the crew of the Serenity to encounter new and different strange worlds in each episode but every planet has normal Earth gravity and normal Earth atmosphere and normal Earth vegetation. In fact every planet looks just like California, in the days of the Old West. Every planet has a Wild West town. It’s too much of the same thing each week. Even when they visit a more urbanised world it looks like the 19th century. Firefly’s aesthetic is just awful. It’s boring.

Whedon was hoping that it would be original and exciting to make it a western set in space. The blending of space opera and Wild West elements is always very uneasy. How do we know this is a western? There are guys on horses, with six-guns. There are saloon brawls. There are cattle rustlers! The dining table in the mess hall is straight out of Little House on the Prairie. The captain of the ship looks like a poor but honest rancher in the Old West. His second-in-command looks like a lady gunslinger. The spaceship, the Serenity, is basically a stagecoach in space.

I can understand Whedon’s thinking. He wanted to avoid science fiction clichés. He wanted to avoid a futuristic aesthetic because such things always date very badly. He wanted it to look as unlike Star Trek as possible. He succeeded in this. This is the anti-Star Trek. This is Star Trek if the Federation were the bad guys. This is the anti-Star Trek. I’m OK with that as a concept but it just doesn’t come off. He needed to create an aesthetic that was different and exciting, but it’s dull.

And in an effort to avoid science fiction clichés he ended up with a series that lacks any real science fiction feel. Too many of the plotlines seem like they belong in 50s B-westerns, with B-western villains. Apart from the spaceships there is no cool technology at all.

These mistakes undoubtedly alienated the target audience - science fiction fans. 

Perhaps Whedon, whose previous TV successes Buffy and Angel had been aimed primarily at a female audience, failed to understand that a science fiction series was going to have to aim much more at a male audience. Offering hints of complex character and relationship stuff is all very well but a male sci-fi audience is going to want more actual actual sci-fi and more cool tech stuff.

A major problem is that Whedon wanted Mal Reynolds to be dark and brooding and cynical, a character we would slowly come to understand and admire. The network vetoed that. He had to be a conventional hero from the start so he is turned into a bleeding heart tough guy with a heart of gold and it makes him boring. Nathan Fillion is OK but the series needed more acting charisma and more colourful characters.

Inara is potentially interesting. She insists that she’s a Companion, not a mere whore. And in this future being a Companion is a respectable high-status profession. They have a union and everything. There’s also a suggestion that there’s a quasi-religious element - that it’s a bit like the temple prostitution or sacred prostitution that (possibly) existed in the ancient world. It’s an intriguing idea which presumably Whedon intended to develop but I’m inclined to agree with Mal Reynolds - he regards Inara as just a high-class hooker. But at the same time he’s very attracted to her.

Whedon learned some hard lessons from Firefly and in his next foray in TV sci-fi, Dollhouse, he did not make the same mistakes. Dollhouse has a much cooler premise which grabs our interest right from the start. It has a cooler and more consistent aesthetic. It feels like a genuine science fiction series. It has colourful but ambiguous characters. And in Eliza Dushku it has a very charismatic lead actress.

I’m afraid that on a rewatch Firefly still doesn’t grab me.

Dollhouse season 2 (2009-2010)

Much to everyone’s surprise Joss Whedon's Dollhouse was renewed for a second season. You do need to watch season 1 first. I reviewed it here.

There were some changes in season two, some of which were forced upon Whedon but some reflected a slight change in his approach to the series. Whedon also wanted a different visual style - more shadows and a more atmospheric film noir-tinged look.

Whedon and his writers are as convinced as ever that women are physically much stronger than men. Apart from being silly this leads to some poor writing. Instead of finding ways in which Echo can use her brains and her female strengths to get out of trouble the writers are content to just have her effortlessly beat up big burly guys. The nonsensical GirlPower! stuff gets totally out of hand in the second season.

The character of Echo undergoes some changes but they make sense. Whedon always liked very long characters arcs. The Buffy of Buffy season 5 is a totally different person to the Buffy of season 1 but the changes are plausible and organic. She has grown up. She has also begun to understand the full implications of being a Slayer. Cordelia has a complex character arc in both Buffy and Angel, and again it makes sense. She has also gone from being a high school girl to being an adult woman.

Echo’s evolution has more to do with her attempts to become a real person rather than just a Doll but it’s presented in a plausible way. Echo starts to remember things that she’s not supposed to be able to remember. She starts to develop intellectually. She’s no longer a child-like zombie. She starts to have emotions. Sierra and Victor start to evolve as well. They develop emotions, and they develop sexual feelings towards each other and Dolls are not supposed to be capable of such things.

The imprinting process starts to develop glitches. At the end of each Engagement the imprinted personality is supposed to be wiped completely but that’s no longer happening reliably. The Dolls start to retain traces of imprinted personalities. Echo ends up with lots of different personalities imprinted simultaneously and it’s no longer possible to wipe these imprints.

By 2009 of course every TV series had to have character development and had to have extended story arcs. As a result Dollhouse has several story arcs and it has a long story arc extending over both seasons. This is why we get the Dolls starting to behave like real people.

Unfortunately this undermines the original concept and that original concept was the series’ biggest strength. The idea was that a person could start out as a young woman named Caroline, have that personality erased, have a new personality (Echo) that is child-like and innocent, then be given other totally different personalities and then have them wiped and Echo would then have no memory at all of anything these other personalities had done. It raised provocative moral questions. If she (in the guise of one of these imprinted personalities) kills someone in the course of an Engagement does Echo bear any responsibility for this? She has no idea that it happened.

Most of the Engagements are in effect high-class prostitution jobs. In the course of a year she might have a hundred different sexual partners, but since Echo has no memory of any of this and has no sexual urges and no knowledge of sex you could argue that Echo is in fact a virgin. And is Adelle DeWitt actually running a high-price call-girl operation if the girls have no knowledge of having had sex with clients? Are you a prostitute if you don’t know that you’ve done it? And if one of the Actives commits a crime on an Engagement is she guilty of a crime?

These fascinating moral dimensions are less evident in season two, which is a pity.

There are however plenty of good things about season two. As Echo develops self-awareness other questions are raised. Her body was originally inhabited by a young woman named Caroline. Does Caroline still exist? And is Echo a real person? Was she a real person when she was little more than a cheerful zombie? And now that she has self-awareness and emotions, has she become a real person? The series gets interesting when Echo learns about Caroline. Caroline was a psycho bitch terrorist who got people killed. She was a nasty fanatic. Echo isn’t keen on one day giving up her own existence so that that bitch Caroline can have her body back.

The downside to season two is that Echo ends up with forty simultaneous implanted personalities, all of them experts in some field such as firearms and unarmed combat. As a result she becomes more of a generic comic-book kickass action heroine with super-powers. The series becomes more of a routine sci-fi action story rather than the provocative slightly cerebral serious science fiction series of the first season. There’s too much blowing stuff up and endless endless fight scenes.

From comments made by Whedon in an interview it seems that he was under immense pressure from the network to dumb the show down as much as possible. He was also forced to reduce the amount of sexual subject matter - he had hoped to explore the emotional and sexual ramifications of the technology much more fully.

And then there’s the major story arc and I found it disappointingly obvious, too much like countless science fiction movies of the past half century. To be fair the series was made with the threat of cancellation always hanging over it so some of the ideas may have developed more satisfactorily had Whedon not been forced to hurry things along.

Both seasons of Dollhouse are visually impressive with a much more coherent aesthetic than Whedon’s earlier Firefly.

One of Whedon’s great strengths was his ability to create interesting female characters and then develop them in complex ways and Adelle DeWitt in Dollhouse is one of the best examples of this.

The first season of Dollhouse is excellent and while this second season doesn’t work quite as well it’s still superior science fiction television and it’s highly recommended.

The Blu-Ray release includes both seasons and looks lovely.

Dollhouse (2009) season 1

The cyberpunk TV series Dollhouse, created by Joss Whedon, ran on the Fox Network in 2009 and 2010. Whedon’s career was up and down at the time. The Firefly TV series in 2002 was a disaster and was cancelled before the end of the first season although it later built a cult following. There was general surprise when Dollhouse was renewed for a second season. The ratings were mediocre but it did well with the demographics that advertisers cared about. To some extent that had been the case with Buffy as well.

The key concept behind Dollhouse, personality uploads and downloads, had been tinkered with by various science fiction writers, notably William Gibson. But as someone famous once said, if a story is good it probably isn’t new and if it’s new it probably isn’t good. That certainly applies to science fiction ideas. And Dollhouse is based on an idea that is definitely a good one.

Digital personality uploads are of course total scientific nonsense but Joss Whedon was the guy behind a long-running series about a high school girl who battles vampires so he clearly feels that the coolness of an idea is much more important than its plausibility. And he’s right. And in this case it’s an idea that has links to pop culture obsessions going back to the 1950s such as brainwashing.

It has affinities with movies like A Clockwork Orange and Blade Runner and Ghost in the Shell which deal with questions such as artificial interference in the workings of the mind, the blurring of the line between reality and fantasy, the possibility of artificially created realities and what it means to be human. And what it means to have choices. And how choices are nowhere near as simple as they seem. In Dollhouse there are free choices and choices made under duress, or sometimes it’s just a choice between two bad options.

Echo (Eliza Dushku) has been created by the Dollhouse. The Dollhouse is run by Adelle DeWitt (Olivia Williams) although it seems certain that there is someone (or some organisation) much more powerful behind her. We are given no idea at all who or what is behind the Dollhouse and what its true purpose is. Is it a private corporation? Is it run by organised crime? Is it a government covert operation? This series deals in multiple levels of ambiguity and paranoia. Maybe nothing is as it seems to be.

For each case a Dollhouse agent has a different personality uploaded, tailored to the mission. In between missions Echo has her Echo personality restored. That’s not her original personality. She had been a girl named Caroline who had landed herself in very serious legal trouble. There is a suggestion that her original Caroline personality has been permanently erased. Now she is merely Echo, who has no memory of any of the personalities that have been uploaded to her brain. She seems to have no memories of anything before she arrived at the Dollhouse.

When imprinted with a suitable personality the agents are referred to as Actives. Between missions they are Dolls. The Dolls are very child-like, very passive, with no emotions and no sex drive and no desires of any kind. They are very obedient.

One inherent weakness in this series, or at least one aspect that probably hurt its ratings, is that Eliza Dushku is effectively playing an entirely different character in each episode and between missions she’s playing Echo who has no actual personality. This means the audience has no actual heroine with whom to identify, or for whom to develop an affection. This would have alienated some viewers although it does of course provide Eliza Dushku with an exciting acting challenge and if you stick with it it makes this an extremely interesting series.

While the Actives are given various missions (including security jobs and even secret agent-type jobs) It becomes very obvious very early that on most of those missions they are acting as at best, courtesans and at worst, high-class call girls. Even worse, Adelle DeWitt knowingly sends girls like Echo out on prostitution jobs knowing that the jobs are very high-risk. Worst of all, DeWitt doesn’t even bother finding out the true nature of the risks. As long as the client pays it doesn’t matter. Even the Mob has higher ethical standards. While that is presumably not its true function in practice The Dollhouse is a whorehouse.

But the twist is that the Dolls do not know they have been used as prostitutes. In their hazy dream-state they don’t know about the missions and wouldn’t understand if they were told. Are you a prostitute if you don’t know about it? Is Miss DeWitt a madam if she sends the girls out on prostitution assignments but the girls will have no memory of it And if a mission requires engaging in criminal activities (and some do) are they criminals? Is it our memories that make us who we are (a question addressed memorably in Blade Runner)? If the Dolls have no memories are they human?

And it seems that if someone is deemed to be a risk then the Dollhouse will take precautions. Possibly very drastic precautions.

The Girlpower! thing does get overdone. Petite women easily beating up huge tough guys. It’s a problem because the silliness of this does at times undermine the serious tone.

This is a long way from the teen angst of Buffy and it’s clearly aimed at an older audience. This series gets into X-Files levels of paranoia and then pushes the paranoia even further. This is serious conspiracy theory stuff. And the cyberpunk elements become more and more apparent.

There are fascinating relationships between the characters. Does Miss DeWitt have maternal feelings towards Echo? Does Echo see her handler Boyd Langton as a father figure? Does he see himself this way? And there are explicitly romantic and sexual relationships involving several key characters but what happens if you’re in a relationship with someone who doesn’t actually exist?

Episode Guide

In the first episode Echo is uploaded with the personality of a top-flight hostage negotiator. This episode launches the series on its way very successfully. It also introduces a couple of what are obviously going to be extended story arcs. There’s an FBI agent named Ballard investigating the Dollhouse although he’s been told to drop the matter because the Dollhouse doesn’t exist.

In episode 2, Time Target, the main story in intercut with multiple flashbacks. Non-linear narratives will be a major feature of this series.

We get some slight backstory on Echo’s handler, Langton. We find out that something went very badly wrong three months earlier and that those events may be continuing to exert an influence. We get hints that the Dollhouse people make mistakes. And we start to get an edge of paranoia creeping in. We also find out that when a guy wants to take a girl on a camping trip she should always decline. It will end in tears. Good episode.

In episode 3, Stage Fright, Echo’s job is to act as a bodyguard to a pop singer. The problem is that the singer is not just a diva but a psycho bitch and to avoid arousing her wrath Echo has to be a bodyguard without being aware that she’s a bodyguard. Someone is trying to kill the singer but there are very twisted complications.

In episode 4, Gray Hour, the mission is an art heist and it’s an armed robbery. Eliza Dushku really shines this one, getting a chance to explore the Echo persona.

In episode 5, True Believer, Echo goes undercover for the Feds. Her cover will be perfect since with an implanted personality she will believe her own cover story completely. It’s an investigation of a religious cult with obvious parallels to the 1993 Waco disaster.

In episode 6, Man on the Street, Echo is again a whore, this time entertaining a tech tycoon. I love the way this doesn’t develop in anything like the direction you’re going to be expecting.

In episode 7, Echoes, an experimental drug has infected a college campus. And some of the Dolls have been exposed as well.

In episode 8, Needs, things start to go awry in the Dollhouse. The Dolls are doing things they shouldn’t do. But Miss DeWitt has no doubt that she will get things under control again.

In episode 9, A Spy in the House of Love, the extended story arcs start to develop a lot more fully. As the title suggests the Dollhouse is under threat from within. And we see a very surprising side of Miss DeWitt.

In Episode 10, Haunted, the Dollhouse has a new client and she’s a bit unusual, given that she’s dead. And she thinks she was murdered.

Episodes 11 and 12, Briar Rose and Omega, make up a two-part story which explores interesting ramifications of the technology.

The season finale, Epitaph One, was made on the assumption that the series was not not going to be renewed for a second season and never went to air. Do not watch this episode until after watching season 2!

Final Thoughts

Dollhouse season one is moderately cerebral, provocative and willing to engage with slightly controversial subject matter. It’s a lot better than I expected and it’s highly recommended.

I've also reviewed Dollhouse season 2 and Whedon's earlier Firefly.

Tales of the Gold Monkey (1982-83)

Tales of the Gold Monkey is a U.S. action/adventure TV series which ran for a single season from 1982 to 1983. It was created by Donald P. Bellisario who was also responsible for such cool 80s TV classics as Magnum, P,I. and Airwolf. The cancellation of the series was not due to poor ratings. The show was a huge hit. It was network politics that killed it.

Although you could certainly be forgiven for assuming that Tales of the Gold Monkey was clearly hoping to capitalise on the recent success of Raiders of the Lost Ark (it does belong to the same “rugged individualistic adventurer in exotic locales” genre) in fact Bellisario pitched the series to the network a year before Spielberg’s movie was released. His inspiration was the classic 1939 Howard Hawks movie Only Angels Have Wings.

The setting is the fictional South Pacific island Bora Gora, a French colonial possession.

Jake Cutter (Stephen Collins) is an American airman with a small air cargo operation using a Grumman Goose amphibian (which happens to be my favourite aircraft of all time). He has an offsider named Corky (Jeff MacKay), a genius mechanic but with a chronically poor memory due to over-indulgence in alcoholic beverages. He also has a bad-tempered one-eyed dog named Jack.

Jake has a habit of trying to rescue damsels in distress but in the pilot episode his latest attempt, involving cute red-headed chanteuse Sarah Stickney White (Caitlin O’Heaney), gets him into all kinds of trouble. Sarah will become a regular character. There’s something very important about Sarah that Jake doesn’t know. She’s a spy.

Another regular character is Bon Chance Louie. He owns the Monkey Bar which is the island’s social hub and he’s the local representative of the French Government. He has the reputation of being lucky. He did after all survive the guillotine. In the pilot he is played by Ron Moody but Roddy McDowall takes over the role in the series.

Another regular is German missionary Willie Tenboom (John Calvin). We know from the start that he’s a German spy but he’s a sympathetic character and a nice guy. He is devoted to his parishioners who seem to be entirely attractive young women. One of them acts as his personal assistant. If she’s a good girl he gives her a blessing. She looks forward to that. There’s nothing a girl likes more than a good blessing. The Reverend believes that young women need to be blessed as often as possible.

And then there Princess Koji (Marta DuBois). She’s a Japanese princess involved in various ventures of dubious legality. She has a private samurai army. She’s a sexy bad girl, but not really evil.

Jake is also in trouble with Jack, having lost the dog’s false eye (which is a sapphire mounted in an opal) in a poker game.

There are monkey-men, venomous snakes and samurai warriors. And the island of Baku is an active volcano. A very active volcano.

There are spies everywhere on Bora Gora, from various nations. There are German, American and Japanese spies and possibly some freelancers. The German spies are in search of the legendary gold monkey of the island of Baku.

You have to remember that this is 1938. Japan was at peace with the U.S. and France. Germany was at peace with the U.S. and France. Princess Koji does not have the slightest dislike for the French or the Americans. She’s a businesswoman. Louis has no issues with her as long as she doesn’t break any French laws within French territory (which she never does). She’s oddly fond of Jake and would rather like to get him into bed. The Reverend Willie Tenboom is an agent of German military intelligence but he’s not Gestapo and he’s a seriously nice guy. Everyone likes him and he likes everyone. Sarah is an American agent but it’s peacetime so her job is just to gather information. All the recurring characters are in fact good guys. They all get along pretty well.

Episode Guide

In the first episode there are spies and double agents everywhere and a plot to build a super-bomb. In the second episode, Shanghaied, Corky is shanghaied by a disreputable sea captain who needs his ship repaired. The captain is involved in an illicit and very nasty trade.

In the third episode, Black Pearl, a flying buddy of Jake’s from the old days in China shows up. He’s a bit disreputable but mostly he’s just an irresponsible dreamer, forever chasing after imaginary treasures or lost cities. Now he’s hooked up with a Watusi tribe who live on a nearby island. It’s crazy. What is a Watusi tribe doing on a Pacific island? Jake’s buddy is sure it has something to do with King Solomon’s Mines.

In the fourth episode, Escape from Death Island, Jake and Corky fly a visitor to a French penal island and find themselves imprisoned.

In Trunk from the Past a trunk is sent to Sarah containing relics collected by her late archaeologist father. He devoted his life to finding the tomb of a certain Egyptian Pharaoh and came up with a crazy theory that the tomb was located on an island in the South Pacific.

In episode six another old flying buddy of Jake’s turns up. And Randall McGraw (Lance LeGault) is always trouble. His cargo plane has gone down and it was carrying something that simply must be retrieved.

In Honor Thy Brother a Japanese fighter pilot wants revenge, Corky gets a wife he doesn’t want and Jack gets his eye back. Next up Jake crash lands on an island within the Japanese Mandate and it’s inhabited by Amish. And a tiger. And a Japanese officer obsessed with cowboy movies. In the next episode something very bad has happened to Sarah on a mission to Manila. It has something to do with General Macarthur.

In the next episode a baseball star visiting the island lands himself in very big trouble involving a local girl. Trouble that could get him lynched. In the following episode Jake, Corky and Sarah crash land on an island inhabited by apes, and they find an ape-boy. In High Stakes Lady Jake is tempted by high stakes poker and a glamorous blonde and of course he falls for her. But the stakes are more than just money.

In Force of Habit Jake discovers that nuns can be pretty dangerous.

In Last Chance Louie it’s Louie who finds that the past cannot be escaped. A new guest arrives on the island and Louis immediately shoots him. It seems that Louis is embarked on a course of self-destruction but he refuses to explain his strange behaviour.

In the next-to-last episode the trouble starts with an eclipse and then a politico-religious cut leader decides that Sarah must be punished for offending the gods. And then things get explosive. Literally.

In the final episode Princess Koji hires Jake as his bodyguard. It’s a very dangerous occupation.

Final Thoughts

There’s plenty of cheesiness but it’s undoubtedly deliberate and it’s combined with a considerable amount of coolness which for me is an intoxicating mix. The cast is uniformly excellent.

For my money Tales of the Gold Monkey is the best action-adventure series of the 80s. There’s just enough humour and romance, the plots are delightfully implausible but fun, the entire cast is excellent and it looks like a very very expensive series (which it was) in which the money was well spent. Very highly recommended.

The DVD release is still in print and extras include a very good “making of” documentary.

Peter Gunn season 1 (1958)

Peter Gunn belongs to the first golden age of American private eye TV series. In the closing years of the 50s 77 Sunset Strip, Hawaiian Eye and Richard Diamond, Private Detective all hit the airwaves. And, more interestingly, there was at the same time a crop of decidedly hardboiled TV private eyes - Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer, Johnny Staccato and Peter Gunn. These three series were all heavily influenced by the great American private eye movies of the 40s and early 50s and by the style that later came to be known as film noir.

This was no coincidence. The classic American B-movie had been largely destroyed by the advent of television but there was still an audience for slightly gritty crime thrillers. The TV private eye series more or less took over the audience of the crime B-picture. Of all these series Peter Gunn was probably the biggest commercial success.

Peter Gunn was created by Blake Edwards who wrote many of the episodes and directed several.

I reviewed the second season of Peter Gunn a while back (at that time the first season was unobtainable on DVD) and I was somewhat underwhelmed. Compared to Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer and Johnny Staccato it seemed rather tame and rather conventional and even a bit strait-laced. It seemed a bit too sanitised. A reader left a comment on that review suggesting that the first season might be much more to my taste. The suggestion was that Peter Gunn, like so many American TV series, started very promisingly in its first season and then in subsequent seasons fell victim to the perennial timidity of network executives.

Apart from Craig Stevens who is very good as the title character there are three other recurring characters. Lieutenant Jacoby (Herschel Bernardi) is Gunn’s patient long-suffering cop pal who is usually willing to cut Gunn some slack, sometimes against his better judgmeent. Mother runs the night-club that is more or less Gunn’s second home. Edie (Lola Albright) is Gunn’s cute chanteuse girlfriend who can’t quite get him to commit to her although she has no intention of giving up.

Selected Episodes

The opening episode, The Kill, was written and directed by Blake Edwards. It opens with the murder of a gangster. The new gangland boss who takes his place seems likely to be even nastier and more unpleasant. This episode has a definite film noir look and fell. It establishes Gunn as a guy who stocks by his friends and also as a tough guy who can be ruthless when necessary. There’s a bit on an edge to the character which was missing in the second season.

Streetcar Jones is a jazz musician suspected of murder but he doesn’t strike Gunn as the murdering type. Somebody wants to stop Gunn from proving Streetcar’s innocence. An OK episode.

In The Vicious Dog Pete has to see a man about a dog. A journalist believes that a dog attack was an attempt to intimidate him, and Pete agrees. The dog angle makes this a bit more interesting than most stories of this type.

In The Blind Pianist there’s only one witness to a murder and he’s blind. He can’t identity the killer. Or can he? And if he can, will he?The audience knows the identity of the killer so the interest is in Gunn’s attempt to prove a case with only a blind witness. Not a bad story.

The Frog is a small-fry gangster who wants to talk with with Pete but when Pete gets to the meet all he finds is the Frog’s hat floating on the water. The Frog’s boss, mobster Swink, obviously had him killed but why did he have the Frog’s apartment searched afterwards? A routine plot but fairly hard-edged by the standards of this series. It works pretty well.

In The Chinese Hangman Pete is hired by a religious cult leader to find a woman who stole $200,000 from him. Pete tracks her down but with unexpected consequences. A much darker episode and a very good one.

In Lynn's Blues Edie is worried about an old friend, a night-club-singer named Lynn. Pete goes to see her and it’s obvious she’s seriously scared. She’s got a gangster boyfriend, she wants out and he doesn’t see it that way. A fairly routine episode but still very enjoyable.

In Rough Buck a very promising boxer, Tony Triano, is shot and it looks like a professional hit. But everybody liked Tony. Nobody had a motive to kill him.

In Image of Sally Si Robbin, just out of prison, kills a guy. The man he killed was a professional killer. It was self-defence but he can’t prove that so he’s charged with murder. Si hires Gunn, not to beat the murder rap but to find his girl Sally. At least she used to be his girl. Now she’s Joe Nord’s girl and Joe Nord is a big-time criminal and a nasty piece of work. Pete gets some help from some beatniks (who look the way middle-aged men who’ve never seen a beatnik imagine beatniks to look). It’s another noirish episode with Si being not such a bad guy but he’s got himself into deep trouble, and Sally certainly has some femme fatale qualities.

The Man with the Scar is a very good episode. A young man is with his girlfriend when a man with a scar interrupts them, there’s a fight and the man with the scar is killed. The girl tells him not to worry, that it will be taken care of, but actually he has very good reason to worry.

The Torch is a case of arson and murder. The widow of the man killed in the fire is a suspect. She hires Pete to prove her innocence. It’s a fairly straightforward story but well executed.

The Jockey is an impossible crime story. The girlfriend of a successful jockey is a night-club singer. In between sets she goes up onto the roof. This time she fell through the skylight and was killed. There was nobody up there with her and nobody could have been up there with her, so it was accident. But the jockey thinks she was murdered. Pete doesn’t know if it was murder or not but he’s been given a case so he’ll do some digging. And he digs up something that really interests him. Not a bad story, but just a tad predictable.

In Sisters of the Friendless a young man is facing a murder charge. He has an alibi but there’s a problem. The one person who can confirm his alibi cannot do so for rather unusual reasons. A low-key story, pretty lightweight.

The Leaper is about a man who jumps to his death from a tall building. Except he didn’t jump. Pete doesn’t know that yet but he’s looking into the case for the widow. The curious thing is that the leaper was a professional carnival performer, a human fly. It’s Lieutenant Jacoby who makes the vital connection this time.  A good episode.

The Fuse is a very film noir episode. Honest union boss Carlo Matzi is murdered. Everyone knows that crooked union boss Jake Lynch was behind the murder. So why is Pete working for Lynch? He has his reasons. A solid story that isn’t dazzlingly original but it’s executed with a lot of style. Another very good episode.

Let's Kill Timothy tries to be whimsical but misfires. We get a couple of awful songs, we get Pete hired as bodyguard to a seal and some excruciating comic relief from a beatnik artist.

In The Missing Night Watchman (written by Blake Edwards) Pete is hired to investigate a robbery. Valuable jewels were stolen from a shop and the owner doesn’t want the police involved. He’s afraid of losing his best customer, the irascible Mr Lansdown (a wonderful performance by Murray Matheson). There’s also the matter of the missing night watchman and what’s going on with Mr Lansdown’s Buddha? An enjoyable romp.

Murder on the Midway is a carnival story and I just love murder mysteries with a carnival setting. The magician is doing his usual trick, making his glamorous lady assistant disappear, only she winds up dead. Pete thinks Rowena, who does the girly show, knows something. Rowena is one of those dangerous blondes, the type that men should avoid but they never do. A pretty decent plot with several plausible suspects. A very good episode.

Pecos Pete takes Pete to Texas. A rich cattleman wants to find his brother’s murderer. Pete has to do the cowboy thing, and it’s a fun if rather slight story.

Scuba has a great opening sequence and the plot revolves around scuba diving. There is murder as well, of course. A fine episode.

The title of Edie Finds a Corpse is totally accurate. She does find a corpse. In her bathroom. She is not happy about it. Pete isn’t happy about it either.

The Dirty Word has a nice slightly off-kilter atmosphere. A low-rent crooked private eye named Sam Hayes is framed for the murder of a rich guy named Sinclair. Pete doesn’t approve of Sam but he owes him a favour. Sinclair was surrounded by oddballs and there were things about him that didn’t add up. A good taut plot and good atmosphere.

The Ugly Frame begins with a nice old guy who runs a delicatessen getting murdered. Murdered for fourteen dollars. Lieutenant Jacoby had known the old guy for years. Jacoby wants the killer really badly. But maybe the case is not as straightforward as it looks. Jacoby ends up in an awkward situation. Maybe Pete can get him out of it. A solid episode.

The Lederer Story begins when a rich lady yacht owner, Mrs Lederer, drops dead in Mother’s. Before expiring she had asked to speak to Peter Gunn. Pete figures he’s more or less morally obliged to find her killer. Yes, her killer. The lady died from poison. Pete is convinced that the answer to the puzzle will be found on Mrs Lederer’s yacht. But he finds that boats can be dangerous places. A good solid episode although the mystery isn’t that hard to figure out.

In Keep Smiling a guy from out of town winds up dead. That’s Lieutenant Jacoby’s problem. Pete’s problem is a client in town for a bowling conclave who’s fallen victim to a blackmail racket. Since the dead guy was also in town for the bowling conclave Pete figures that his problem and Jacoby’s problem are probably the same problem. All Pete has to do is set himself up as an obvious blackmail victim. A fairly straightforward episode but enjoyable enough.

Breakout begins with a prison break. Then a guy hires Pete to find somebody but Pete is pretty suspicious. And Frank Norbert doesn’t want to be found. A solid film noirish episode with double-crosses and betrayal, and a father who can’t figure out what went wrong with his boy.

Final Thoughts

I enjoyed the first season more than the first. It has a bit more of an edge. It’s a bit more noir. Not as good as Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer or Johnny Staccato but still entertaining. Recommended.

Naked City season 2 (1960)

Having watched and written about selected episodes in the second season of Naked City (which originally went to air on ABC from late 1960 to mid-1961) I’m now filling in the blanks. The more I see of this series the more I love it. Everything about it is unconventional, offbeat and original. Even the outrageous episode titles.

It’s not unconventional just for the sake of being unconventional. These are complex literate scripts that are concerned with exploring the psychological underpinnings of crimes. Why do some people go off the rails so spectacularly? The scripts are also concerned with another question - if we understand why people do bizarre and anti-social things does this actually help the police in dealing with these issues? Does it help society in dealing with damaged and dangerous people? The series rarely offers easy or comforting answers. Sometimes it’s even difficult to tell good from evil.

Naked City takes a very different approach compared to a series like Dragnet. Dragnet aimed for everyday realism - ordinary cops investigating ordinary crimes, the sorts of crimes that are committed every day in a big city. And they’re solved by following established procedures. Joe Friday relies on legwork, not sudden flashes of insight, to solve crimes.

In Naked City the cops are very much ordinary cops but the crimes they investigate are cases that are a little bit out of the ordinary. The aim of the series is to get inside the minds of the criminals and sometimes that’s easier if the crimes are spectacular or unusual. The crimes don’t have to be realistic. In reality the police do encounter bizarre crimes but in Naked City most of the cases have a touch of the bizarre. The bizarre nature of the cases is used to illuminate some dark recesses of the human psyche.

Of course a series that takes a deliberately offbeat approach is going to have its share of failures, of episodes that just don’t quite work. The amazing this is that this series has so few misfires. And even the misfires are interesting.

There have been other fine cop shows since Naked City but none has ever been able to equal this great series. It remains a uniquely brilliant achievement.

With some fine location shooting it also provides a wonderful glimpse of early 1960s New York City.

Episode Guide

The Pedigree Sheet begins with two dead bodies in a crashed car. And a live 17-year-old girl who was also in the car. One of the dead men is the foreman of the jury in a major criminal case. The other dead guy is a hit-man. And nobody knows who the girl is but the police are pretty sure she’s the key to solving the case. That’s what the story seems to be about, but it isn’t really. It’s actually about the girl, a good girl gone bad, and her father, once a famous lawyer and now a drunken bum, and how they got to be that way.

So it’s a pretty good mystery story and a psychological study. Trying to combine the two is the sort of ambitious thing that Naked City would do throughout its run and what’s truly remarkable is how often they did it successfully. And this story is definitely one of those successes.

A Succession of Heartbeats is a whodunit. Millionaire playboy Ben Harlow is shot to death along with his latest girlfriend, a married woman. Harlow has lots of girlfriends. The list of people who would have liked to kill him is practically endless. There are at least three people who could have done so. Some of the clues point to one of the suspects, some at others. But this is Naked City so it’s not just a solid mystery story but a character study as well. Can you put a life back together again once it’s been broken? And guilt can destroy the innocent as well as the guilty. A very fine episode penned by Stirling Siliphant.

In Down the Long Night Norman Garry tells the detectives at the 65th Precinct that a man named Max Evar is going to kill him. A year earlier Garry's printing factory burnt to the ground. Max Evar’s house, which was next door, was destroyed as well with Evar's life and child being killed in the blaze. Evar is convinced that Garry was responsible for the fire. Since Evar hasn’t committed an actual crime there’s nothing the cops can do but Adam Flint has a bad feeling about it and decides to look into it anyway. Evar runs a carnival funhouse and his family has for generations specialised in illusion, magic and the manufacture of terror for entertainment. He’s the kind of guy who would certainly know how to use fear as a weapon and that’s what he seems to be doing.

This is another intriguing psychological study, in this case a study of two men. And the funhouse climax is extremely good. A very fine episode.

To Walk in Silence is a reluctant witness story. A very respectable man, a Mr Weston, witnesses a murder in an illegal betting establishment. In fact he himself suffers a minor gunshot wound in the course of the murder. He’s not willing to talk to the police since it might threaten his professional and social position. What he fails to understand is that he might not have a choice. It features a good performance by Clause Rains as Weston. As a character study its interesting although the plot is rather predictable. An OK episode.

In Killer with a Kiss a psycho killer is stalking cops. He’s killed one and almost killed another. In the latest attempt he pretended to be a blind man. And he kisses his victims on the hand. The breakthrough in the case comes when Adam discovers the headless toy soldier. This episode is another attempt to grapple with psychological disturbance. It works quite well.

The Human Trap is the story of a murder among the rich and fashionable. Playboy Tobias Bennington Tennant III is dead with an icepick in him. Dress designer Walda Price claims she killed him in self-defence after he tried to maul her teenaged daughter Jessica. Adam Flint thinks the story doesn’t quite add up, and his boss Lieutenant Mike Parker doesn’t think so either, but neither woman will change her story. Jack Lord gives a great guest starring performance as Jessica’s devoted mobster father. A very good episode.

In Bullets Cost Too Much Adam Flint is in a bar when an armed robbery takes place and a man is killed. Adam thought about drawing his gun but decided that it would have put too many people at risk. Now the press is after his blood. And a young doctor has to make a choice between his brother and one of the hold-up men who was shot in the robbery. It’s a typical Naked City story, with the emphasis on the effects of crime on people’s lives rather than on the solving of the crime. And it’s an extremely good story.

Landscape with Dead Figures is another wonderfully offbeat episode. Famous dead artist Albert Blakely escapes from a mental hospital. He doesn’t know he’s famous and he doesn’t know he’s dead. But he’s worth a lot of money. In fact he was worth more dead than when he was alive. Everybody assumes he’s just a mental patient. Everyone but Adam. Adam thanks there’s something screwy about the story of the escaped mental patient who suddenly starts defying paintings. His obsession nearly gets him kicked off the force. The vital clues are in pictures done by Blakely - a doll without a face, two men in front of a pile of rocks. Wildly offbeat yes, but a fascinating story. Great stuff.

The Well-Dressed Termite starts with the accidental death of a telephone linesman. Only the guy was no telephone linesman. So what was he doing in a phoney telephone company truck and who was his partner doing with the telephone lines? And there’s a woman, who is currently divorcing her husband. He’s a rich businessman but a social nobody. Now she’s found a new man who is rich and a social somebody. But how does this relate to the dead guy tampering with telephone lines? A typically ingenious episode with a jigsaw puzzle that has to be pieced together but the cops have no idea what the final picture is supposed to look like. Great stuff.

The Day It Rained Mink involves the theft of a million dollars’ worth of fur coats. It’s a clever plan but the focus of the story its on the motivations behind the crime rather the crime itself. Thwarted ambitions, greed and lust are pretty good motivations. And a million dollars is a big payoff, but easy money isn’t always the solution. Lust in particular is a dangerous motivation.  In Naked City the biggest danger to criminals is not necessarily getting caught.

The Deadly Guinea Pig is another of the countless stories about Nazis that were such an obsessive feature of American TV at this time. Unfortunately they tend to be rather predictable and this one is no exception.

The Fault in Our Stars is the story of an actor named Donny Benton Donny’s career is going nowhere and he’s broke so he turns to murder. He’s so self-absorbed that he just assumes that his career is more important than the lives of a few dumb schmucks of cab drivers. Tracking him down proves to be surprisingly difficult and finding evidence that would stand up in court is even more of a problem. Typically for this series the story takes some very dark turns, much much darker than you’d expect from network TV in 1961.

The story also offers some fascinating insights into the strange unreal world of the theatre and the even stronger psychology of actors. A bravura performance by Roddy McDowall as Donny makes this another exceptional episode.

Tombstone for a Derelict is another Nazi episode. Or is it? A homeless person is brutally murdered by four young men. Three other murders follow in quick succession. The only clues are Nazi stickers posted on the wall near two of the victims. And an odd letter to the editor of a daily newspaper, and an even odder complain to the police by a concerned citizen. It seems they are dealing with rampaging Nazis. But it’s not that simple. Nowhere near that simple. This story seems like it’s going to one of the rare misfires but it ends up making sense, in a nonsensical way. So it’s an interesting episode.

A Memory of Crying is another attempt to deal with psychological abnormality. Willard Manson is a man with no human feelings, until he marries his fifth wife Jessica. He still doesn’t know he has emotions until she dies in childbirth. He then refuses to accept her death and cracks up, but he cracks up in a dangerous way. He convinces himself he needs money to pay for the hospital and he will go to any lengths to get that money. This one is perhaps not entirely convincing but at least it’s an interesting attempt. When an episode of this series doesn’t quite work it’s usually because it’s been too ambitious and the ambition at least has to be respected. And Luther Adler’s performance almost makes it work.

A Very Cautious Boy is a hitman (played by Peter Falk of all people) who kills with his bare hands. He is a karate expert. His latest target is a lawyer who is causing problems for an elderly restaurateur and ex-racketeer. Along the way he kills an ill-tempered bouncer and that’s what initially attracts the attention of the police. Adam Flint only appears briefly in this episode so it’s left to Frank and Lieutenant Parker to solve this one. And it’s a story will some cool twists.

Economy of Death is not as obvious as you think it’s going to be. Lazslo Lubasz escaped from Hungary in 1956 and has been paying Miklos Konya to find his missing granddaughter. Then Lazslo finds that Miklos has been lying to him, Lazslo’s wife dies of grief and Lazslo blames Miklos. But then there are a number of plot twists to make things more interesting. This is one of those episodes in which we discover that evil deeds are not always committed by evil men. Sometimes they’re committed by good men. And justice is a complicated thing. A very good episode despite a hammy performance by Sam Jaffe as Lazslo.

Final Thoughts

Naked City is one of the all-time great TV cop shows, very character-driven rather than plot-driven. Must-see TV.

The Time Tunnel by Murray Leinster

The Time Tunnel is a TV tie-in novel written by Murray Leinster. Quite a few well-known very good authors ended up writing such books as their usual markets started to dry up.

TV tie-in novels sometimes had a feel that was subtly different from the series. It was not unusual for the first tie-in novel associated with a series to be written before the series actually went to air, with the author having seen only the scripts and perhaps one or two episodes before they aired. That may be the case here. The novel is copyrighted 1966 and the series was first screened in September 1966. It does however capture the feel of the series fairly closely.

The Time Tunnel was a hugely entertaining TV series produced by Irwin Allen that was a bit cleverer than it seemed to be. The big problems with time travel stories are that there is no way to deal satisfactorily with time paradoxes and there’s the danger of extreme silliness. Various science fiction authors have tried to solve the time paradox problem but it’s a problem that can’t ever really be solved in a totally satisfying way.

The Time Tunnel TV series took an approach that was as good as any and better than most. You can try to change the past but no matter how hard you try you will fail and events end up playing out exactly as they did historically. The novel develops this approach in a slightly more complex way which is rather interesting.

The subject is an ultra top secret US Government project to develop a time travel device. The level of secrecy has backfired. The chairman of a senate committee that should have been informed about the project but wasn’t has found out about it and he’s hopping mad. He thinks it’s not just a waste of money but dangerous insanity and he intends to shut it down. I have to say that the senator’s objections make a lot of sense - the idea behind the project really is reckless to the point of madness.

To forestall the cancellation of the project one of the scientists, Dr Tony Newman, decides to use himself as a guinea pig. Everyone on the project is confident they can send a man into another time period. They’re not so confident they can bring him back.

Tony and another scientist, Dr Doug Phillips, end up marooned in time. In fact they’re marooned in various times. There is no way to predict where and when they will end up, and seemingly no way for them to get back to the present day.

Tony’s urgent problem is that he’s in 1889 and he’s about to be a witness to a horrific dam collapse (the famous Johnstown Flood disaster) which historically killed thousands of people. His scientific instincts tell him he must not interfere. His human instincts tell him that he must at least try to avert the disaster. This leads to a very unexpected consequence.

The dangers are not over for Tony and Doug. Having escaped one time period they find themselves potentially in the middle of a massacre in another.

One could object that an ethical scientist with a proper sense of responsibility would not behave the way Tony behaves, but who ever heard of an ethical scientist with a proper sense of responsibility? History is littered with examples of scientists giving no thought at all to the consequences of their scientific discoveries and technological breakthroughs.

And Tony is human. Give what seems to be a chance to be a hero and a benefactor he succumbs to temptation, and probably any man (or woman) would succumb to such a temptation.

The challenge for the writer is that we know what is going to happen. We know that the disastrous Johnstown Flood is going to happen. Somehow the writer still has to create an atmosphere of suspense. Leinster does this pretty well. Leinster was in fact a very fine science fiction writer.

This is an enjoyable read that has most of the strengths of the TV series. The characterisation is not exactly deep but it does at least hint at a few ethical issues. Highly recommended.

Murray Leinster wrote a number of these TV tie-in novels including The Invaders, based on the excellent series of the same name. He wrote some superb short stories - I highly recommend the collection The Best of Murray Leinster.

I’ve reviewed The Time Tunnel TV series, in a two-part review. The first part is here, the second here.

Mike Hammer - Murder Me, Murder You (TV-movie, 1983)

Murder Me, Murder You is one of two Mike Hammer TV-movies which served as pilots for projected TV series. Murder Me, Murder You screened on CBS in April 1983 and the response was positive. The series went ahead and was quite successful, running from 1984 to 1987. Stacy Keach plays Hammer in both the TV-movies and the series.

This was a TV-movie so there was no way the budget was going to stretch to a period setting. This is New York in the early 80s but it has a grimy scuzzy slightly sleazy 70s vibe. There’s no 80s glamour. Mike Hammer fits right into this environment.

Mike Hammer looks like he’s dressing the same way he’s dressed for twenty years. He wears a hat, which definitely adds a slight retro hint. The women wear dresses that also have just a very slight retro feel. The women’s hairstyles are not too 80s. This is not really New York in 1983. This is Mickey Spillane’s New York. This is Mike Hammer’s New York. It has its own reality. The visual style works, with nods to classic film noir and 70s grittiness.

Hammer is pressured by the DA to offer protection to an important witness. Chris Jameson (Michelle Phillips) runs an all female courier agency that specialises in delivering very sensitive documents. One of their couriers has been killed. It may have some connection to a crooked aerospace company. A briefcase disappeared from the murder scene. A briefcase worth killing for.

Mike soon finds himself with a personal stake in the case (which is a standard feature in most of Spillane’s Mike Hammer novels). Chris is an old flame. And Mike discovers he has a family member he didn’t know about, one who is mixed up in this case in some mysterious way. Mike has some personal stuff from the past that he will have to deal with.

There has been a murder. It’s very likely that there have been two murders. And as the story progresses, three murders.

As usual Hammer has clashes with the police and the DA. He’s used to that, but someone is taking pot shots at him and that annoys him. Some people he liked are dead. Someone he likes very much could soon be dead. When things like that happen Mike starts playing hardball.

You couldn’t get too sleazy on network TV in 1983 but Murder Me, Murder You gives it the old college try. There’s an astounding quantity of cleavage on display. There’s no naked flesh but there is a nicely squalid atmosphere. A key suspect is involved in the adult movie business. And there’s a balance between life in the gutter and life for the rich, and the rich people in this story are the sleaziest of all.

There’s an effectively twisty screenplay by Bill Stratton and most importantly it feels like a Mike Hammer story. There’s a bizarre twist at the end which you might find bewildering if you haven’t read Spillane. But it is a real Spillane touch.

And Stacy Keach is a splendid Hammer, always ready to start throwing punches and shoot people.

And this is the real Velda. If you’ve read the books you know that Velda has a private investigator’s licence of her own and a gun licence and she has no qualms about shooting people if she has to. I think Tanya Roberts is pretty good in the role. Velda has to be beautiful and glamorous and Tanya Roberts fits the bill perfectly. It’s a pity she wasn’t available for the series.

I have a few qualms about the ending. I’m not sure it rings true emotionally. Obviously I can’t say any more without risking spoilers.

The two TV-movies Murder Me, Murder You and More than Murder are available in a two disc DVD set. Murder Me, Murder You gets a perfectly acceptable transfer. Sadly the TV series seems to be long out of print on DVD. Blu-Ray releases would certainly be welcome!

I enjoyed Murder Me, Murder You quite a bit. Highly recommended.

As much as I like Stacy Keach here I do think that Darren McGavin in the 1958-1960 Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer TV series was a slightly better Hammer. And, oddly enough, a slightly tougher Hammer.