Friday, 26 June 2020

The Saint in Europe, and on TV

The Saint - The Covetous Headsman
This is another instalment in my project of comparing episodes of classic 1950s-1970s TV series with their literary sources. In this case I’m going to look at the stories from the 1953 Leslie Charteris collection The Saint in Europe.

Charteris’s Saint stories fall into several distinct phases with Simon Templar evolving by stages from the incredibly brash cocky hero of the 1930s to the more thoughtful, slightly wiser and just so ever so slightly sadder but more sophisticated Templar of the 1950s. So these stories all feature that final version of the Saint.

While the Saint might be older and wiser he still has a very flexible attitude towards the law. Stealing is of course wrong and the Saint would never do such a thing. But stealing from other thieves - that’s not really stealing is it? And he continues to derive a great deal of harmless amusement from causing annoyance to policemen.

Unfortunately the Saint’s larcenous tendencies had to be erased for the TV series, which makes the character slightly less interesting. That’s especially so in a couple of the stories  I’ll be discussing here - it takes away just a tiny bit of the zest from them.

The Covetous Headsman takes place in Paris. Quite by accident Simon hears of a gruesome but fascinating murder. The victim was decapitated but the head was found beside the body so it wasn’t an attempt to disguise the victim’s identity. So why cut off his head? Maybe it was the act of a madman, but Simon has to consider the possibility that there was a very good reason for it. Of course it’s none of his business but the victim’s sister is a young pretty American girl named Valerie North and pretty girls are always Simon’s business.

Discovering the identity of the murderer is not too difficult but that’s not the main problem. It’s the motive that matters. Valerie’s life may depend on the answer to that question. And the answer may lie in the past.

The Saint - The Latin Touch
The Covetous Headsman was adapted as the fourth episode of the first season of ITC’s The Saint TV series, going to air in late 1962. The source was a short story it was necessary to expand it a little to fit a one-hour time slot but apart from that the plot follows Charteris’s story remarkable faithfully. Since Charteris’s plot is pretty good, it works. Having the wonderful Barbara Shelley as Valerie also helps (in the TV version she is English rather than American).

The title caused a bit of a problem. It doesn’t mean the same thing in the TV version that it meant in the short story but I guess they thought it was too good a title to change.

The Latin Touch takes Simon Templar to Rome where gets to do something he always enjoys - saving a damsel in distress. If the damsel is young and pretty so much the better. The damsel is the daughter of a high-ranking US State Department official. She’s been kidnapped and the ransom terms cannot possibly be met. Simon doesn’t have a clue where the girl is being held but he uses his ignorance to his advantage in a very clever manner.

It’s a situation in which Simon must depend entirely on his wits - he has no objection to fisticuffs or gunplay but they’re just not going to be of any use this time. Fortunately he did pay attention to his Latin lessons at school.

It’s a neat little story.

The TV adaptation was the second episode of the first season of The Saint. There are some minor changes. The girl’s father is now the Governor of an American state rather than being with the State Department. Several minor characters are added including a comic relief Italian taxi driver (played with hammy relish by Warren Mitchell). But despite the TV version manages to retain Charteris’s core plot in its entirety. Even more so than in The Covetous Headsman every single one of Charteris’s clever plot twists is preserved. Even the Latin touch which gave the story its title is there.

The Saint - The Loaded Tourist
Which must have pleased Leslie Charteris quite a bit - he liked faithful adaptations of his stories.

These two adaptations are not just faithful, they’re delightfully entertaining.

The Loaded Tourist takes place in Switzerland. In Lucerne, to be precise. Simon witnesses a robbery. The object of the robbery was a briefcase. The briefcase is now nowhere to be found, or at least that’s the assumption of the police. The Saint however knows where it might be found, and finds it. The contents of the briefcase are none of his business but that’s never stopped him before and it doesn’t stop him mow. The contents are most intriguing and rather puzzling.

If there’s one thing guaranteed to arouse Simon Templar’s interest it’s someone telling him obvious lies and that’s what happens here. He simply has to get to the bottom of such a mystery.

This is a pretty lightweight story, not quite as clever as The Covetous Headsman or The Latin Touch, but it’s enjoyable enough.

The adaptation of The Loaded Tourist was the fifth first season episode of The Saint.

A few changes were made and a couple of additional characters added. The robbery victim now has a teenage son as well as a wife and his junior business partner now plays a key rôle. The basic plot is however mostly intact. If there’s a slight weakness in the TV version it’s that a little bit too much information is given away too early. On the other hand there is an extra plot twist at the end. On the whole it works pretty successfully.

What impresses me about these three adaptations is that whole the short stories had to be padded out the passing was done skilfully and without damaging the integrity of the essential plot, and without losing the flavour of the originals.

The Saint - The Spanish Cow
A seaside resort in the south of France provides the setting for The Spanish Cow. A very large middle-aged American widow has become the butt of everyone’s jokes due to her habit of rising to the bait every single time. What interests Simon Templar about her however is that she possesses some astonishingly valuable jewels. The Saint has no doubt that he could put such wealth to far better use. How does one go about separating a middle-aged woman from her jewels? The answer of course is Romance. The Saint’s larcenous intentions are scarcely honourable but when all is said and done he is after all a thief.

This is a very slight story with a twist that you’re probably going to see coming. It may be that the purpose of this story is to remind the reader that while the Saint is very often on the side of justice he really is a criminal. A criminal with a conscience perhaps, a criminal with a sense of honour perhaps, but a criminal nonetheless.

The Spanish Cow was adapted as the eighth episode of the fourth season. It want to air in 1965. Adapting this one posed a real challenge. Since they’d decided that the TV Saint could not ever be seen to be guilty of stealing the story was just not going to make any sense at all. Screenwriter Michael Cramoy solved the problem by throwing away Charteris’s story in its entirety and writing a completely original screenplay with the same title. In this version the American widow becomes the widow of a South American dictator. The Saint has no designs whatsoever on her jewels, but there are two groups of people who most certainly want to steal them. One group is the government which overthrew the dictator, the other is the late dictator’s brother who wants to use the jewels to finance a counter-revolution.

The dictator’s widow is given a gorgeous young female companion because every episode must feature at least one beautiful woman. Some bumbling French policemen are also added. The result bears not the slightest similarity to Charteris’s story. That’s not to say that the TV episode isn’t fun in its own way. It is. In fact it’s rather clever. But it’s a totally new story.

It’s interesting that the three season one episodes I’ve talked about here are all fairly faithful adaptations while the season four episode abandons any pretence of being faithful to the original. Does this indicate a change of policy on the part of the producers? I’ll have to do a few more short story-TV episode comparisons before committing myself on that question.

The Saint - The Rhine Maiden
TheAnd, as it happens, that crooked company promoter just happens to be on the same train. It seems highly likely that he has on his person a large part of the money he has swindled. It seems like a situation in which any adventurer worth his salt ought to do something. Rhine Maidens should not have their dreams taken away from them.

This is another story in which we see the various side of Simon’s character. He is himself on the train with him certain property which was not exactly honestly come by. He is after all a thief. But he is also a romantic. A very ruthless romantic. It’s a neat little story, and I do love mystery thriller stories set on trains.

The Rhine Maiden was episode sixteen of the third season of The Saint TV series. And it’s another story which was going to pose some problems. And the same solution was adopted as in The Spanish Cow - the TV script (by Brian Degas) has only the most tenuous connection to the original story. There is a crooked company promoter but he’s from London, not Ohio. The only Rhine Maiden here is a train called the Rhine Maiden Express. It provides the setting for a thrilling action climax but it’s not quite the same as a real live Rhine Maiden. The girl in the TV version is an English girl and she’s the daughter of the company promoter’s father.

A whole new (and admittedly quite ingenious) plot has been fashioned, based on a mysterious death and a creepy doctor with a very shady past.

If you don’t mind that it’s actually an entirely different story then it’s quite an enjoyable one.

So a pattern does seem to be emerging, with the later adaptations retaining very little of Charteris’s stories apart from the titles.

The Golden Journey is a whimsical little tale. Belinda Deane is an American girl. She is very pretty, very rich and very spoilt. It is obvious to Simon Templar that she is going to make her fiancé’s life miserable, and her own as well. Unless something is done. The Saint knows what Belinda needs. She needs to join him in a week-long walking tour across the Alps where she can learn to enjoy the simple pleasures of life, and the pleasures of roughing it and having to actually do some chores. Of course Belinda would rather die than going off tramping through the woods but Simon knows how how he can persuade her. The first step is to steal her handbag.

The Saint - The Golden Journey
Thus begins Belinda’s worst nightmare. Simon even forces her to do the washing up. Simon insists that they cannot afford to stay in guest houses and they must actually sleep in the open which of course is the last straw for Belinda.  And when she misbehaves she gets a spanking. By the end of the week she will have learnt something or perhaps she will have murdered Simon.

There’s a bit too much of the back to nature stuff in this story for my liking. I’m afraid my feelings about the great outdoors are pretty much in line with Belinda’s. But the point of the story is the Simon intends to destroy the old spoilt Belinda and create a new one. Needless to say this is the sort of story that a writer could not possibly get away with today. It’s one of those Battle of the Sexes stories that were rather popular in the ’50s. But although it’s very lightweight in the plot department it does have its amusing moments and it’s difficult not to enjoy seeing a spoilt rich brat brought face to face with some real life.

This one was adapted as the tenth episode of the first season of the TV series.

The scene of the action is shifted to Spain but the story remains completely unchanged. Simon still steals all of Belinda’s money but it was obviously felt that they could get away with this - he is after all doing it for her own good. Pretty much every incident of the short story is preserved. Belinda even gets her spanking. Erica Rogers is very good as Belinda. She’s amazingly obnoxious and petulant at first, and enraged by the fact that there’s no way out for her - she either does what Simon tells her to do or she won’t eat.

The TV version is if anything slightly more amusing than the original story.

The final story in The Saint in Europe is The Angel’s Eye. Unfortunately the TV adaptation was one of the colour episodes which are much more difficult to get hold of than the black-and-white episodes and I don’t have access to a copy. The story itself begins with a man asking Simon’s help in regard to a very valuable diamond. The man works for a jeweller and has taken the stone to Amsterdam to be recut but the diamond cutter not only refuses to return it, he denies having ever seen it. Which of course intrigues the Saint. The twist in this story is really not all that dazzling but the story is enjoyable enough.

So I’ve looked at six adaptations - four very faithful adaptations from the first season and two from later seasons that bear no resemblance at all to the source stories. Interesting.

Tuesday, 16 June 2020

Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer season 2 (1959)

In the late 1940s Mickey Spillane revolutionised the private eye novel by massively increasing the amount of sex and violence and adding a dash of sadism for good measure. Critics were aghast but readers loved Spillane’s Mike Hammer crime thrillers which went on to sell several hundred million copies.

Bringing Mike Hammer to the small screen in the late 1950s was always going to be quite a challenge. The sex and violence wold have to be dialled way way down. The danger was that Hammer would end up being just another generic television private eye. The syndicated Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer TV series (which debuted in 1958 and lasted for 78 episodes) somehow managed to solve this insoluble problem. It retains at least some of the flavour of Spillane’s novels and it’s astonishingly violent for its time. It adds some humour to make things a bit more palatable but it’s still pretty hard-edged.

As played by Darren McGavin Mike Hammer is not just tougher, more ruthless, more sadistic and more violent than other TV private eyes of the era, he’s tougher, more ruthless, more sadistic and more violent than any American TV private eye I can think from the 60s and 70s as well. McGavin’s Hammer handles things like extracting information from reluctant sources pretty much the way the Hammer of the novels does - by a judicious mixture of extreme violence and intimidation.

The awkward part of course is that Mike Hammer is the hero and we have to like him. Somehow McGavin contrives to pull off that trick as well. Hammer can be brutal and sadistic but he can also be charming and sensitive. We just can’t help liking this guy. That’s actually not too far removed from Spillane’s original creation either - Spillane’s Hammer divides people into good people and bad people. He’ll do anything for good people but he shows no mercy to bad people. Spillane’s Hammer also divides women into two categories. Ladies and nice girls get treated with a great deal of respect. Bad girls just exist to be used for sex. In the TV series this latter aspect is obviously toned down a little but it’s still pretty clear that Hammer does see women as filling into those two categories.

Like most crime series of its era this one was made within very tight budgetary limits and with very tight shooting schedules. The best crime series of this period (like M Squad) made that liability into an asset and had extraordinary energy and urgency. And that’s certainly true of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer.

I still think it’s a pity that Velda, Mike’s gun-toting secretary in the books, doesn’t appear in the series but I can understand why she was left out. The half-hour format demands very tight scripts with no room for sub-plots or distractions and her presence might have slowed down the action. And Darren McGavin has more than enough charisma to carry the series on his own.

The first season was successful enough to justify a second which followed in 1959 and the second season (of 39 episodes) is the formula as before and it’s just as good.

The complete series has been released in Region 1 in a DVD boxed set and it looks pretty good for a 1950s television series.

Episode Guide

Evidence on the Record is a fun episode with Mike getting mixed up with crooked dealings in the jukebox industry.

The Commodore is a lesser episode but it manages to be a feelgood story without resorting to too much sentimentality. An old man is being fired into an old folks’ home by his niece’s husband. It’s all to do with some money (obtained by less than honest means) which has gone missing and that leads to murder. The police have their suspect and he’s certainly a very obvious one but while he’s no angel he might not necessarily be a murderer. Darren McGavin does a good job in showing us Hammer's sensitive side without making the viewer cringe.

Pen Pals sees Mike trying to help out a reformed ex-con named Marty who needs help desperately but won’t admit it. Mike is going to give him the help whether he wants it or not. A couple of hoods Marty shared a prison cell with are forcing him to be an accomplice in a series of store robberies, one of the stores being Marty’s. They kidnap Marty’s wife in order to persuade him to play ball but that’s a mistake because it makes Hammer really angry. It’s fun to see Mike Connors, later to become an ionic private eye himself as Mannix, guest starring as Marty.

In Now Die in It Mike has to look for the sister-in-law of an old friend. The girl is seventeen and she’s got herself into trouble, as they used to say in the 50s, but she won’t say who the guy is. And it might be too late anyway. It’s the sort of job Mike really hates. There is some fun though, in the scenes in the Dewdrop Club, with Mike demonstrating his ability to get reluctant witnesses to talk. A pretty good episode.

Groomed to Kill seems like it’s just a small-time shakedown. A guy about to be married is being blackmailed over a picture taken with a girl. The girl only wants a hundred bucks. It’s no big deal. Except that it leads to murder. A fairly solid episode with three quite convincing suspects.

A floating crap game is the background to Slay Upon Delivery. Bruce and Doris Green run the game and the game is not exactly honest. A thuggish ex-private detective named Murphy collects their bad debts for them. One of their customers who’s lost a lot of money is being difficult about paying up. The customer disappears and that’s where Hammer comes in. Hammer uses his customary methods (his fists) to get the information to solve the case. It’s a nicely seedy and very effectively hard-boiled little episode.

In Doll Trouble Mike decides to take a vacation so he heads off to Brussels to see the World’s Fair. And immediately finds himself with a case. A rich American woman thinks she’s located her sister’s daughter who apparently survived a concentration camp. But Mrs Putnam is no fool. She’s being asked for a lot of money and she suspects a con. Mike suspects that as well.

Now I’m quite sure that the producers didn’t come up with the money to send Darren McGavin to Belgium to film this episode but there is definitely plenty of location shooting that was done somewhere. Even if it was shot on the backlot it still manages to do a surprisingly good job of convincing us that it’s taking place in Brussels. This one has an expansive feel that is very very unusual for 50s American crime dramas. And it’s a reasonably good story with a fight sequence that is excellent even by the high standards of this series (no real surprises there since the episode was directed by William Witney who was incredibly good at that sort of thing).

Sometimes it’s better to leave the past well enough alone but that’s not how Oliver Bates sees things in I Remember Sally. He’s an old man and he’s dying and he wants to find Sally, a sweet young thing from Salt City South Dakota. But that was fifteen years ago and Hammer isn’t at all sure that Sally is the same sweet young girl that Oliver remembers. But Oliver Bates is determined to find her. Hammer finds her, but his suspicions about her were tragically correct. A good episode.

Wedding Mourning is an unexpected episode. Mike Hammer has fallen in love. That’s unusual enough. But he wants to get married. That’s very unusual. So unusual that the local bookies are offering odds on whether the wedding goes ahead or not. A good episode but very dark for network TV in 1959.

In Merchant of Menace a cheap hood named Gus Donovan, just out of the slammer, is making death threats against Hammer, which just happen to coincide with Hammer being out of town for a week. This leads to rumours that Mike is running scared and in his business he can’t afford that. So he has to find Donovan. This one has a plot with a neat twist. It’s good stuff.

In A Mugging Evening a businessman is set up by a girl in Central Park and his briefcase stolen. He can’t go to the police because he’s a married man, so he hires Hammer. All he wants is the briefcase back but the case takes a nasty turn. On the other hand Hammer does get to learn how to skate, with an attractive blonde as his teacher, so it’s not all bad. A good episode.

In Slab Happy broken-down prize-fighter Kid Dakota gets convinced that his ex-wife Julie’s new husband Mitch is beating her up. It’s a dangerous idea to put into the mind of a guy whose fists are lethal weapons, but who put that idea into his head and why? A pretty decent episode and it’s one of the rare occasions that Hammer finds himself in a fist-fight he can’t win.

Aces and Eights starts with Mike persuading a storekeeper not to prosecute a woman for shoplifting. She spins Mike a sob story which he swallows, and it turns out to be true. Her husband is being fleeced by card sharks but the mystery is how the crooks expect to collect their money from as guy who doesn’t have any. The explanation turns out to be rather sinister. A good solid episode. There’s a nice Mike Hammer moment were Mike administers a totally gratuitous but very amusing head-kicking to a bad guy.

Mike’s old buddy Emmett Gates has indulged in one too many extra-marital dalliances and now he’s being blackmailed in Swing Low, Sweet Harriet. And he could end up in much bigger trouble than that. A decent episode.

In Requiem for a Sucker a piano player is in debt to a loan shark and the loan shark is killed. The police draw the obvious conclusion, but maybe it’s the wrong one. Not a bad mystery in this one.

Mike is hired by a woman to investigate the death of her father in The Big Drop. He was an experienced window-cleaner and the daughter believes he could not possible have fallen to his death accidentally, therefore it must have been murder. It seems to have something to with a crooked investment scheme but maybe it’s a lot more complicated than that. A good episode in which Mike discovers he doesn’t like heights or breaking and entering or glamorous blondes who are a bit too coöperative.

Siamese Twinge is a story of true love running into a few obstacles. Gary Milford cute Thai singer-dancer Sondi are in love and want to marry. His mother is determined to wreck that and there’s someone else who is an even bigger threat to their wedding plans. Murder might be yet another obstacle. It’s none of Mike’s business but that never stops him. A pretty good episode with Mike’s distinctive technique for interviewing witnesses (involving extreme physical violence) proving to be as effective as ever.

In Goodbye, Al a two-bit gambler named Al Sparks wants Mike to get him off the hook for a gambling debt but Mike knows Al too well and he declines to help. Two weeks later Al is arrested for murder in a small lakeside town and Mike feels bad about it so now he has to help. This is going to lead to a confrontation with Todd Stryker who pretty much owns the town. A fairly routine episode.

Final Thoughts

Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer is one of the great private eye TV series and it stands up today remarkably well. It offers the perfect blend of energy, hardboiled mayhem and wry humour. Very highly recommended.

I've also reviewed season one.

Sunday, 7 June 2020

Harry O - the pilot episodes (1973 and 1974)

The Fugitive made David Janssen a very big star. His career was a bit up-and-down after that. In 1973 he starred in a feature-length pilot for a proposed private eye series called Harry O. The pilot was Such Dust As Dreams Are Made On and it failed and the series was not picked up. A year later a second pilot, Smile Jenny, You're Dead, was made and this time Harry O was picked up by ABC.

The series was however destined to have a troubled history. The first 13 episodes were set in San Diego. Ratings were not all that great and the network decided the series was too unconventional. They demanded that it be transformed into a much more orthodox  private eye series, to be set in Los Angeles. So the second half of the first season was almost a different series. It was renewed for a second season, ratings were reasonable but ABC felt the series was still too intelligent and had worrying traces of originality. Harry O was cancelled in favour of Charlie’s Angels, a series dumb enough that even TV network executives could understand it.

It’s not difficult to see why Such Dust As Dreams Are Made On did not please the networks. It’s not so much that it’s rather dark. It’s more the character of Harry O (he’s actually Harry Orwell). He’s about as cheerful as you would expect a guy to be with a bullet lodged in his spine because when he was a cop some punk shot him during a robbery and now he’s in constant pain. And he’s  a very fallible private detective. He makes mistakes that put people in danger and he makes one really big, and costly, mistake. He chases women but most of the time he’s barely civil with his girlfriends. His sense of humour, such as it is, is pretty bleak. Harry Orwell isn’t loveable. He’s cynical. He doesn’t lack guts but he has no great interest in being a conventional hero. He’s not a white knight who rescues damsels in distress or helps out widows and orphans. He isn’t overly fond of people. He’s the sort of lead character who would make a network executive very nervous.

That’s not to say that he lacks charisma. It’s just that it’s a weird downbeat charisma. He’s actually a fascinating character. You want to find out more about him. But he’s not a conventional hero and network television likes conventional heroes.

I intensely disliked The Fugitive but that had nothing to do with David Janssen. I hated the concept of the Fugitive and I hated the scripts. Harry Orwell is a much more interesting character and David Janssen is perfect in the rôle. He gives a very low-key performance, in fact almost minimalist, but he doesn’t make Harry bland. Not at all. A really good actor in the right rôle can be low-key but still make a character fascinating and that’s what Janssen does.

Harry O - Such Dust As Dreams Are Made On
The plot has an intriguing premise. A guy breaks into his house and at gunpoint tries to force Harry to accept a large amount of money. The guy is Harlan Garrison (Martin Sheen) and he explains that he’s the guy who shot Harry four years ago. Now he wants Harry's help because the other guy involved in that robbery is trying to kill him.

Such Dust As Dreams Are Made On is smart and quirky and fascinating. No wonder the network executives hated it.

Now my guess is that Harry O creator Howard Rodman, who had been around the TV industry for a long time, knew that his idea for a slightly offbeat private eye series about a very offbeat private eye was a very good idea. But words like unconventional and offbeat make network executives break out in a cold sweat. So he decided that the only way to sell his idea to a network was to give the impression that Harry O was going to be an utterly conventional private eye series. Once he had persuaded a network to pick up the series he could always do his best to make it the offbeat series he’d always intended it to be. So when he wrote the script for the second pilot, Smile Jenny, You're Dead, he made it absolutely conventional. Five minutes into it you not only know every single thing that is going to happen, you know how it is going to happen. And sure enough that’s exactly how it happens.

It starts off with a model named Jennifer who wants a divorce so she can marry her new boyfriend. But there’s this photographer guy who’s obsessed with Jennifer and he decides he has to kill any man that Jennifer is involved with.

Harry of course falls for Jennifer. It’s difficult to understand why anyone would want anything to do with Jennifer - even by the standards of airhead fashion models she’s selfish, shallow and not very bright. But the detective has to fall in love with the woman who’s in danger. Anything else would be vaguely original and Smile Jenny, You're Dead avoids originality like poison.

Not surprisingly the ABC network executives absolutely loved it and Harry O was picked up as a series.

David Janssen and Jodie Foster in Smile Jenny, You're Dead
It’s soul-crushingly unoriginal but it is well-made, Harry Orwell is a good character and David Janssen is very good. Of course Harry Orwell was a much more interesting character, and David Janssen’s performance was much better, in the first pilot. The first pilot was also much less afflicted by sentimentality.

The sub-plot with Jodie Foster is quite amusing but like everything else about Smile Jenny, You're Dead it was a wasted opportunity - both Jodie Foster and David Janssen were capable of doing a lot more with that sub-plot.

It’s perfectly understandable that Smile Jenny, You're Dead is the way it is. There is nothing that warms the heart of a TV network executive more than that combination of predictability, maudlin sentimentality and unoriginality. If you want to get to make a TV series you have to make the network execs think that you’re going to give them something absolutely safe. Once you’ve persuaded them to give you the green light you can try to make your actual series witty and intelligent and original. You might even get away with it for the first season. That seems to have been the trajectory followed by Harry O - a quirky and incredibly interesting first two-thirds of season one before the network lowered the boom and insisted on the removal of disturbing original ideas.

Even with the network pushing the series in the direction of risk-averse conventionality the first season of Harry O is still surprisingly good and I’ll be having much more to say about it in the near future.

In the meantime Such Dust As Dreams Are Made On (which is included in the season one boxed set) is very highly recommended while Smile Jenny, You're Dead (released separately) is reasonably entertaining.

Monday, 1 June 2020

Hammer House of Horror (1980), part two

Hammer House of Horror is a 1980 horror anthology television series that represented a desperate tempt to revive the failing fortunes of Hammer Films. They had made their final horror film, To the Devil…a Daughter, in 1976. With both the company and the British film industry languishing television seemed like it might be a lifeline. As things transpired, after one further attempt at a television series, the company proved to be doomed anyway

My review of the fist half-dozen episodes can be found here.

Watching the remaining episodes confirms my favourable initial impression - Hammer House of Horror is actually an extremely good series. Television proved to be an ideal medium for the company.

Despite their financial woes Hammer managed to assemble some remarkably good casts, and some fine directors. Production values are fairly high. If the company was going to be saved the series was going to have to do well in the U.S. market so it had to look polished and slick and obviously had to be shot on 35mm. The aim was to get as much of a cinematic look as possible and that aim is reasonably well achieved.

Obviously for television Hammer had to tone down the gore and the nudity compared to their early 70s movies. There’s still a small amount of gore and occasional glimpses of nudity.

Hammer decided to go for contemporary settings which of course had the advantage of keeping budgets within reasonable limits. They had not however abandoned gothic horror. They had merely moved gothic horror into the world of 1980 (and gothic horror in contemporary settings was something they’d experimented with in some of their early 70s movies). They also elected to go for a slightly ambiguous approach to the supernatural. There’s still plenty of supernatural horror but at times the stories deal with very human non-supernatural evil and when they do deal with supernatural themes the episodes often lead the viewer to believe that the events may turn out to have perfectly natural explanations.

As with all anthology series there’s some unevenness but overall the standard is quite impressive.

This series continued Hammer’s run of bad luck. It was successful, the ratings were good and ITC (who’d backed it) wanted a second batch of thirteen episodes which might well have been enough to put the company back on its feet. But somehow the deal fell through and it took Hammer several years to find the backing for their final last-ditch attempt at salvation, the much less successful Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense.

Episode Guide

The Carpathian Eagle opens with a man picking up a sexy hitch-hiker. He takes her to his little love nest hideaway (which he assures her his wife knows nothing about) but he gets more than they bargained for. In fact he gets his heart cut out. Literally.

When a second murder following the exact same pattern occurs Detective Inspector Clifford (Anthony Valentine) starts to get really worried.

He has a lead but it’s a really crazy lead. These killings cannot possibly have anything to do with a notorious seventeenth century countess who killed 107 men, and yet there are some striking parallels and he doesn’t have any other leads so he has to follow it up.

The audience is going to know the killer’s identity from the start but Inspector Clifford doesn’t know so the red herrings that are introduced serve to throw Clifford rather than the viewer off the track.

The killer sees her victims as men who prey on women. In fact while they’re a bit sleazy they all do assume that the women they pick up are more than willing. It’s the killer who is a woman who preys on men.

This episode has several major strengths. Firstly there’s the cast. Anthony Valentine was always reliable. He plays Clifford as a good experienced cop but one with very human weaknesses. Siân Phillips (who remarkably is still today a busy working actress in her late 80s) is memorable as the last living descendant of that infamous 17th century countess. And then there’s Suzanne Danielle whose performance is strange, subtle, incredibly sexy and very very effective. You’ll also see Pierce Brosnan in a very small very early rôle.

Mostly The Carpathian Eagle works because it has all the classic Hammer ingredients. It has imaginative production design and it has style. It oozes an atmosphere of death, sex and violence without actually having to show too much. And mostly it demonstrates that ability Hammer had to to gothic horror in a contemporary setting and make it work.

We’re in the realm of black magic in Guardian of the Abyss (directed by Don Sharp). Antiques dealer Laura picks up a worthless mirror at an auction, only it’s not a mirror it’s a scrying glass and it may have belonged to notorious Elizabethan occultist and magician Dr John Dee. The scrying glass can be used in rituals to summon demons and a local occult group led by the sinister Charles Randolph (John Carson) is planning to summon a particularly powerful demon indeed.

Meanwhile Laura’s friend Michael (Ray Lonnen) has become involved with the gorgeous Allison (Rosalyn Landor) and Allison is on the run from that occult group. It seems they intend to sacrifice her but Michael doesn’t want to lose his sexy new girlfriend. He’s going to have to keep her and the scrying glass away from Randolph.

This one is very such in the style of The Devil Rides Out, one of the very best of the Hammer films. It’s all totally outrageous and if you think about it too much you might even conclude that it’s a bit silly but it has so much style and energy that if you just go with it you’ll find yourself thoroughly enjoying it. John Carson is delightfully evil and megalomaniacal, Paul Darrow is very good as one of his chief acolytes, Ray Lonnen makes a fine hero who does his best but is hopelessly out of his depth and Rosalyn Landor is the kind of girl you’d happily sacrifice your soul for.

There are some genuinely creepy and scary moments, the special effects are adequate and it looks great. Like The Carpathian Eagle it successfully combines a contemporary setting with lots of gothic atmosphere.

Visitor from the Grave is a Peter Sasdy-directed episode with a script by long-time Hammer producer and writer Anthony Hinds.

Penny (Kathryn Leigh Scott) lives in an isolated cottage in the countryside. A man breaks into her house and tries to rape her so she shoots him. The problem, as her boyfriend Harry (Simon MacCorkindale) explains to her, is that this is likely to get her sent back to the mental hospital. But Harry will take care of everything. No-one will ever know.

And Charlie (the man who tried to rape her) is dead. He can’t come back. Dead people don’t come back. They don’t, do they?

The problem with this one is that it’s a bit too obvious what’s going on. That still leaves the question of how it's going to resolved but unfortunately the ending is also rather obvious. It’s also very over-the-top with Kathryn Leigh Scott, Simon MacCorkindale, Mia Nadasi (as a crazy psychic) and Gareth Thomas (as the swami called in to help) all frantically chewing the scenery. A disappointing episode.

The Mark of Satan begins with a man dying on the operating table, crying out to someone to leave his soul alone. It seems that the unfortunate Mr Holt thought that Satan had taken possession of his body (or his soul). Mr Holt had then taken an electric drill to his own head.

Mortuary attendant Edwyn Rord (Peter McEnery) is a decent enough chap but seems to be a bit preoccupied with odd things, like the number nine which he sees everywhere. He’s the kind of guy who obsesses over such things and the fact that Mr Holt’s body is stored in drawer number nine in the freezer disturbs him. He starts to brood rather too much and starts showing some definite signs of paranoia. He thinks he may be infected with evil the way poor Mr Holt was. He also broods about his mother and about his lodger, a young single mother named Stella. Edwyn’s mental state is starting to become highly unstable, with very unfortunate consequences.

Here’s a bit more gore in this one than in most episodes, and there are some marked touches of black comedy. It’s quite an ambitious story with plenty of deliberate ambiguity. Edwyn’s obsessions are obviously crazy, or are they? None of the events he witnesses are possible, unless of course evil really is loose in the world. There’s a good hallucinatory scene which may be a glimpse into the depths of Edwyn’s paranoia or may be a glimpse into the truth. The black comedy enhances the sense of weirdness and uncertainty. The Mark of Satan is a bold attempt to persuade the viewer to doubt everything that he sees and it succeeds surprisingly well.

The House That Bled to Death is pretty obviously going to be some sort of haunted house story. William and Emma Peters with their little girl Sophie have just bought the house in question, at 42 Colman Road. Some years earlier a horrible murder had been committed in the house but they don’t know that. They will find out when the house turns against them.

This might seem like a very conventional story but stick with it because it isn’t conventional at all. There are twists, and very satisfying ones. David Lloyd’s screenplay is a clever one and director Tom Clegg provides some real scares.

This episode ups the ante in the gore department. It’s not excessive but there’s more than you expect in TV of this era. There’s also a topless scene so Hammer were going all out with this one.

It all pays off. One of the strongest episodes in the series.

In Children of the Full Moon Sarah and Tom have a very frightening episode with their car. Fortunately there’s a house nearby. Mrs Ardoy (Diana Dors) welcomes them and she seems like such a jolly soul. And the house sounds like it’s full of children. It’s all very reassuring, even if Mrs Ardoy seems rather vague about the children. The viewer already knows, from the pre-credits sequence, that these may be rather disturbing children. Given the title and the pre-credits sequence I don’t think I’m giving anything away by telling you that there are going to be werewolves.

Hammer House of Horror - The Two Faces of Evil
The script is, alas, rather predictable. You’re not going to have any problems at any stage guessing what’s going to happen next. On the plus side it’s all very well executed and it has its creepy gothic moments and some scares. It also has an excellent cast with Diana Dors walking away with the acting honours (as she usually did). At this late stage of her career she was just so good at being sweet and sinister at the same time. Not a terrible episode but badly lacking in original twists.

The Two Faces of Evil establishes a nicely creepy mood right from the start. Janet and Martin and their son David are driving on a quiet country road when they are caught in a torrential downpour. They pick up a hitch-hiker who immediately viciously attacks Martin and the car crashes. All this takes place in the pre-credits sequence.

Janet wakes up in hospital. She is relieved to hear that her husband and son also survived the crash but there’s something disturbing going on. Both the surgeon and the ward sister behave very oddly towards her. Even the police constable who interviews Janet seems to act just a little bit strangely about the accident. But at least her husband and son are alive so for Janet the nightmare is over. Or is it?

As you watch this one you’ll figure out that there are several alternative explanations for what is going on but there’s just no way to be sure. And so the creepiness builds. This is a very fine episode.

Final Thoughts

Most of the thirteen episodes are at least very good and several are excellent. Even the few that are a bit weaker are still quite watchable. The overall standard is remarkably high for an anthology series. Hammer really were on a potential winner here and it’s a tragedy that they weren’t able to capitalise on this success.

Hammer House of Horror is very highly recommended.

Monday, 25 May 2020

a very brief look at Hart to Hart season 1 (1979)

When you look at the credits for Hart to Hart and you see names like Sidney Sheldon (who created it) and Aaron Spelling (who acted as executive producer) you can be fairly sure this is not exactly going to be high art. You can also be fairly confident it’s going to be glamorous and somewhat on the trashy side. On the other hand it’s also likely to be pretty entertaining. And that’s more or less how Hart to Hart pans out. It’s all empty calories and it’s loaded with sugar but it’s enjoyable enough televisual junk food.

Jonathan Hart (Robert Wagner) is a fabulously rich good-looking tycoon who has discovered that he is so rich that he longer needs to work at it. The money will just keep on accumulating. His wife Jennifer (Stefanie Powers) is a famous good-looking writer. The Harts have only one problem. Being rich and famous and gorgeous leaves them with a lot of spare time. They fill in that spare time by playing at being amateur detectives. Luckily it turns out that rich good-looking famous people seem to have a natural talent for crime-solving.

It’s a series that doesn’t exactly place heavy demands on the acting talents of the two leads. All they’re really required to do is to look fabulous and sexy, wear expensive clothes and trade wisecracks. And of course they have to have charisma and likeability - no television series can hope to succeed unless the leads have those qualities. Wagner and Powers have no difficulty whatsoever in meeting these requirements.

Robert Wagner was already a big star on both television and the big screen and with It Takes a Thief (1968-70) he already had a hit TV series under his belt. Stefanie Powers was less of an established name although her previous credits did include the starring rôle in the ill-fated but arguably slightly underrated The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. back in 1966.

The pilot episode establishes the tone. This is not a series that we’re supposed to take very seriously. Jonathan is playing poker (which is clearly one of his passions) when he gets the news that his buddy Sam Roberts has been killed in a car crash on his way home from a health farm. Jonathan starts to get suspicious when he finds out that Sam had been seeing a psychiatrist. He becomes convinced that this was murder. He decides to check in to the health farm himself. On the way there he has a highway encounter (which ends with Jonathan’s Ferrari slamming into a police car) with an unknown woman. This woman is at the health farm as well and she and Jonathan seem to hate each other. Of course it’s no great surprise when we discover that the woman is actually Jennifer Hart and the feud between them is part of their cover story.

It’s also no surprise that the health farm turns out to be a rather unhealthy place to be. It’s run by Dr Peterson (Roddy McDowall) and Dr Fleming (Stella Stevens) and they’re both clearly sinister and slightly deranged. They’re obviously up to evilness. Naturally there will be attempts to kill both Jonathan and Jennifer, but by then the Harts are starting to figure out what’s going on. What’s going on has been pretty obvious to the audience from the start.

The main problem is that there’s not enough plot for a movie-length pilot. What plot there is is also somewhat lacking in originality and imagination. It’s carried by the star power of the two leads and by the wonderfully dotty performances of Roddy McDowall and Stella Stevens. It’s not fantastic television but it’s a harmless time-waster.

In Hit Jennifer Hart Jonathan has uncovered a racket on the waterfront and now the racketeers want to warn him off by taking out a contract on Jennifer. The send a hitman who looks and acts like the kind of guy who would have been kicked out of hitman school for being completely unsuitable material. The plot starts out being fairly predictable and then becomes wildly unconvincing as well. Not a very successful episode.

Passport to Murder is much better. Jonathan and Jennifer get mixed up in dope smuggling in Mexico. They’re trying to get an old friend out of a jam, and as a result they get arrested, chased by helicopters and hunted down by crooked cops.  This one is much better paced than the earlier episodes and the script has some decent twists and turns. The climactic action scene is well executed and exciting. This is a very good episode.

You Made Me Kill You is a very good episode. A young woman who works for Jonathan becomes obsessed with him. She is jealous of Jennifer Hart, and then decides she wants to be Jennifer Hart.

The Man with the Jade Eyes is one of those adventures in Chinatown/Mysterious Orient kind of stories which I’m actually quite fond of. A wooden box containing a stature is left in the back of the Harts’ car by a dying Chinese man. Before he dies he says about something about returning the man with the jade eyes to the temple. Maybe he means the statue. But the state doesn’t have jade eyes. It doesn’t seem valuable either but it soon becomes evident that here are people who will kill to get their hands on it. A fun episode.

Color Jennifer Dead concerns a painter who has just completed a portrait of Jennifer Hart. The painter then promptly dies. From the start it looks mildly suspicious - he was supposed drunk and crashed his car but he wasn’t a drinker and he was a notoriously careful driver. Then a few more odd things turn up. This is typical Hart to Hart. The plot is very thin but there’s plenty of glitz and glamour. It’s an OK episode.

It is a dark and stormy night when the Harts go to a dinner party at the haunted house their friends Fred and Amanda have just bought. Thus begins Night Horrors which, as you might have gathered, is even more lightweight ad tongue-in-cheek than most Hart to Hart episodes. There’s a hunt for hidden treasure, secret passageways, the lights keep going down, the telephone lines are cut. And of course there’s murder. If you love the Old Dark House movies of the 30s and 40s you might like this one. It reproduces the feel of those movies quite well. It’s fun if you’re in the mood.

Hart to Hart reminds me just a little of McMillan and Wife. Both deal with husband-and-wife crime-fighting teams. OK, Sally McMillan isn’t really even an amateur detective but she does manage to find herself in the centre of just about every major crime in San Francisco. In both cases you have scripts that are serviceable but not exactly dazzlingly original. Both series rely for their appeal on glamour and romance as much as on the mystery plots. Both series feature a loveable comic relief servant. And both rely to an extreme degree on the charisma of the two leads and on the chemistry between them. Personally I think McMillan and Wife was the better series but it’s a formula that will always work if you have the right leads (and it’s a formula that has gone on working since The Thin Man back in 1934).

I’m not sure how much further I’m going to go with this series. It’s hardly fair to judge it on just a handful of episodes but there are so many other TV series and movies that I have lined up in my viewing queue that it may be a while before I revisit Hart to Hart. So far it seems very lightweight, which is fine. It hasn’t really grabbed me.

Monday, 18 May 2020

Sheena Queen of the Jungle (1955)

Sheena Queen of the Jungle was a 26-episode syndicated television series dating from 1955. It was based on the adventures of the popular comic book heroine (who made her first appearance in 1937).

Sheena is pretty much a female Tarzan. Raised in the jungle and speaking only halting English, able to communicate with the wild animals and proficient in Tarzan-like skills such as swinging through the trees.

The biggest claim to fame of the series is probably its star, the stunningly beautiful Irish McCalla. McCalla was a popular pin-up model. She admits that she got the part not because she could act but because she really could do stuff like singing from tree to tree. I imagine that her tall athletic curvacious body may have helped her a little in landing the rôle as well. In the early episodes she did all her own stunts.

I can imagine that Sheena must have been a popular lust object for teenage boys back in the ’50s. If that skirt had been half an inch shorter she’d have been arrested for public indecency.

McCalla may have been right about her lack of acting talent but she’s still awesome and she looks exactly the way a jungle girl should look. She manages to look glamorous while still looking like she’s at home in the jungle. She remains the best of the actresses to play the rôle. She might not be an actress you’d cast in a more demanding rôle but in a series like this she’s more than adequate and she has the necessary presence to make it convincing that the locals respect her.

Between Sheena and her modelling work for legendary pin-up artist Alberto Vargas McCalla became something of a cult figure.

The jungle adventure genre was well established in American television by this time, with Ramar of the Jungle in the early years of the decade and then Jungle Jim (wih comet Tarzan Johnny Weismuller). With the use of plenty of stock footage they were cheap and easy to make.

While the series was made in 1955 it gives the impression of taking place in a slightly earlier era. In fact it would be more accurate to say that this is the Africa of the imagination, the Africa of late 19th century adventure tales. On the other hand, like Ramar of the Jungle, it is very sympathetic to the locals and it’s probably fair to say that it’s tying to be respectful towards them. Of course by today’s standards it would still be considered to be very politically incorrect. If you judge it, as I believe you should, by the standards of its own time it’s quite enlightened.

If you compare this series to Ramar of the Jungle then the main thing that makes Sheena Queen of the Jungle superior is that Irish McCalla is much easier on the eyes than Jon Hall. They’re both harmless fun.

Sheena gets helps in her battles against bad guys from her friend the hunter and safe leader Bob Rayburn (Christian Drake). The nature of their relationship was not spelt out. In the comic I believe he’s her boyfriend but in the TV series they seem to be just friends, albeit fairly affectionate friends. Not very plausible perhaps but it was 1955 and since they’re obviously not married they can’t be anything but friends. Sheena gets some help from her pet chimpanzee Chim as well.

There have been several other attempts to bring Sheena to the screen, including the very expensive 1984 flop Sheena. Which is nowhere near as bad as its reputation would suggest (and while Tanya Roberts is not as good as Irish McCalla she’s also not as bad as some would have you believe). It was just a very rash move to spend so much money on a movie that was only ever going to attract a cult audience.

Episode Guide

In The Ganyika Kid a crooked fight promoter named Regan is confronted by an African, Towando, he had plucked out of the jungle and taught every dirty trick of the fight game. Regan made lots of money out of Towando until Towando headed back to the jungle but now Towando wants revenge. Sheena and her buddy Bob don’t like Regan at all but they can’t let Towando kill him.

In The Lash Sheena stops a brutal trader from whipping a native. This is not the last she’ll see of the Whip Man. He’s actually Bull Kendall and to say he’s up to no good would be an understatement. He has a devious scheme and only Sheena can stop him. A fine episode. With a memorable and truly menacing villain. When someone tries to take a whip to Sheena that someone is likely to regret it.

The Magic Bag is a bit thin. Bob and Sheena rescue a young runaway African named Nugu and a Swiss doctor named Becker. The doctor is looking for the secret of a native drug while Nugu has his own agenda - he wants to steal White Man’s magic so he can become a witch doctor. So Nugu and Dr Becker each have something the other wants. That sounds like the basis of a mutually advantageous trade but things get complicated. There are no actual villains in this story, just a series of misunderstandings. It’s an OK episode.

In The Renegades Sheena comes up against diamond thieves and a renegade tribe. The diamond thieves meet their match in Chim. Another OK episode.

The Rival Queen starts with two guys escaping from a prison camp in Tanganyika. One is Bull Kendall, a former carnival strongman, while the other is a former carnival magician. Kendall wants to start a war between two neighbouring tribes to further a scheme he’s cooked up. He needs his wife’s help but she’s not likely to give it so the magician hypnotises her into thinking she’s The Queen of the Spirit World. The tribes will listen to her and Bull Kendall will get his war. He thinks his plan is foolproof, especially when he has Sheena captive and bound. But has he underestimated Sheena? This episode is quite a bit of fun.

Eyes of the Idol is the cleverest episode I’ve seen so far. A local tribe, usually peaceful and law-abiding, has been committing robberies. It has to do with the recently established cult of a strange idol. The nature of this idol is a very cool idea, and the witch doctor’s method of trying to eliminate Bob is ingenious. A very good episode.

In Forbidden Cargo gunrunners are supplying rifles to a rebellious tribe but they may be spreading typhoid as well as guns. Sheena and Bob must stop them from doing both these things. It’s lucky that Chim understands English so well so Sheena can send him to tell the doctor that he’s needed. He’s a very smart chimpanzee. This was the time of the Mau Mau rebellion so at the time it would have been quite topical. An entertaining enough episode.

In Forbidden Land Sheena and Bob have to lead a documentary film crew into the jungle to film a tribe that has never been filmed before. Sheena assures everyone that while the  tribesmen are a bit cautious about strangers they’re basically very peaceful and friendly. Of course things go wrong, there’s a murder but who was the guilty party? Another fairly enjoyable episode. And we find out that anyone who thinks that tying Sheena up renders her helpless had better think again. It just makes her annoyed.

Secret of the Temple concerns the ageing American Dr Heller looking for the secret of eternal life. He has heard the legend of the Elders of the Temple, hidden deep within the jungle, who know this secret. Rather unwisely he’s hired a scoundrel named Lewis as a guide to take him there. Sheena and Bob will have to find Dr Heller before he gets himself into real trouble. An enjoyable episode.

The Leopard Men begins with the Africans employed as bearers by a prospector being strangely terrified by leopard footprints. Then one of the Africans is killed. Not by a leopard, but by Leopard Men. Everyone assumed the Leopard Men were a myth, but perhaps everyone was wrong. The trouble is that the prospector blames Sheena and accuses her of being a Leopard Woman. Sheena and Bob will have to find out abut these Leopard Men. This is a pretty good Sheena in Danger episode incorporating one of the major themes that have already become familiar in this series - greed driving men to do evil.

Final Thoughts

Sheena Queen of the Jungle is a kids’ adventure series. As such it’s light undemanding entertainment. And for males of just about any age it offers Irish McCalla to drool over. And who doesn’t love jungle girls? I certainly enjoyed the ten episodes I've managed to see so far. Recommended for jungle adventure fans.


Monday, 11 May 2020

McCloud season 2

McCloud, which was made by Universal Television and ran on NBC from 1970 to 1977, is a good example of the sort of thing that American television did well at that time. It’s a relatively lightweight but quite stylish cop series with its own distinctive flavour. It’s light on violence and sleaze but strong on solid old-fashioned entertainment.

McCloud had a slightly odd early history. The first season comprised one-hour episodes but for syndication two episodes would be combined, not always smoothly, into a two-hour TV movie format with some cuts made in order to squeeze in even more commercials. The Australian DVD release preserved the original formats while the US release offered the syndicated versions. By season two the series had settled into the same TV-movie format as series such as Columbo and McMillan and Wife (with which it was rotated in NBC’s Mystery Movie wheel series).

The second season went to air in late 1971 and early 1972. It's mostly the formula as before although as the series progressed it apparently became more overtly comedic.

McCloud has a feel that is very reminiscent of classic 1930s Hollywood B-movies - it has a likeable hero, decent murder mystery plots, some comic relief and a generally fairly light-hearted tone. It’s not wildly dissimilar in tone to the Charlie Chan movies.

And like the Charlie Chan movies it features a fish-out-of-water detective hero, in this case a country bumpkin rural deputy marshal from Taos, New Mexico who finds himself working with the New York Police Department. And like Charlie Chan Sam McCloud is  easy-going and good-natured and criminals tend to underrate his abilities. In fact he has a subtle and devious mind and he’s remorseless when he’s on the trail of a wrong-doer.

Marshal Sam McCloud might be an unconventional character in some ways but he’s a pretty straightforward hero although he does make the occasional mistake. He is very much an uncomplicated good guy. He’s an engaging enough character (and Dennis Weaver’s performance is entertaining enough) to make even the lesser episodes quite watchable.

J.D. Cannon plays McCloud’s boss, Captain Clifford. Weaver and Cannon are a perfect pairing, their verbal sparring being sometimes friendly but with just enough of an edge to make things interesting. Diana Muldaur is a semi-regular as McCloud’s girlfriend Chris and she and Weaver have the right chemistry.

If you like your cop shows dark and gritty and with a very serious tone then forget McCloud. It mixes in a fair amount of humour, and in some episodes a very great deal of humour. This is not a series that expects to be, or wants to be, taken too seriously.

The second season is perhaps a bit more uneven than the first. It gives the impression that  the producers weren’t quite sure how far they wanted to push the lighthearted tone. And occasionally they perhaps push it a little bit too far.

Episode Guide


Kidnapping stories are a cop show staple and it’s not easy to keep coming up with fresh twists on the theme but Peter Allan Fields’ script for Encounter with Aries manages to do so. The wife of a wealthy astrologer is kidnapped. The police don’t have to look for the kidnapper. He comes to them. But that doesn’t help them because he has the means to have the victim killed automatically.

The very strong supporting cast helps a great deal. Sebastian Cabot is great as the manic astrologer whose erratic behaviour goers the police extra headaches. Susan Strasberg as the ditzy girlfriend of the kidnapper and Louise Latham as the astrologer’s wife (just as ditzy but in a different way) add to the enjoyment. Dennis Weaver is in good form, with Sam McCloud doing the Columbo thing extremely well (you’ll understand what I mean when you watch it). As always the sparring between McCloud and Chief Clifford (J.D. Cannon) is delightful. 

There’s a terrific early scene with McCloud having to deal with a crazy old guy worried about aliens bombarding him with gamma rays (the other cops always pass on the most annoying complainants to McCloud). McCloud handles the situation beautifully. The bonus is that the old guy is played by the always wonderful Elisha Cook Jr.

Top of the World, Ma! is the story of Bubba White (Bo Svenson), a broken-down never-was football player who’s been working for a collection agency in Dayton Ohio. He’s got the idea fixed in his head that a man named Faraday owes him money so he’s arrived in New York to get that money. Bubba’s a nice enough guy really but he’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer and he has no idea that going after a big-time criminal like Faraday might be a seriously bad idea.

McCloud gets involved in the case because he’s on the stolen car detail and Bubba is accused of stealing a car. McCloud figures that there’s a whole lot more going on here and since Chief Clifford is anxious to nail this Faraday character he decides to dig a bit deeper. A cheap photographer’s model named Jackie Dawn (Stefanie Powers) who has befriended Bubba seems like a good place to start. It’s obvious that Bubba is likely to get himself in very deep trouble and McCloud has promised Bubba’s Mom (played by Joan Blondell) that he’ll stop that from happening.

The story is routine enough but the fine supporting performances (especially by Powers and Blondell) help a good deal and Dennis Weaver is in fine form so it all works rather well.

Somebody's Out to Get Jennie gets McCloud entangled with a very crazy girl. Jennie’s boss (with whom she seems to have been in love) was killed in a helicopter crash. Jennie has this idea that he’s still alive. But Jennie is crazy so no-one is going to listen to her. McCloud has been given the thankless task of reviewing the case of the helicopter accident but the case is already all but closed. McCloud probably wouldn’t have bothered much with the case either but Jennie is so confused and frightened and McCloud is a sucker for birds with broken wings and she just gets drawn in. And McCloud has this habit of not jumping to conclusions. If a crazy girl comes up with a crazy story it might be nothing but her madness, but on the other hand even crazy people are sometimes right.

McCloud also gets a crash course in art appreciation and has a lucky escape from an over-sexed lady art critic who just loves anything western. Especially men.

The plot isn’t startling but an engagingly over-the-top performance by Julie Sommars as Jennie helps and McCloud is just so amusing and likeable you can’t help enjoying this one.

In The Disposal Man McCloud gets a tip-off that there’s a contract out on tycoon Arthur Yerby. McCloud figures that if you have to catch a hit-man (a disposal man) it would be helpful to talk to another hit-man, to find out out how they operate. So he does. And he picks up one extremely interesting pointer.

Of course it also helps to know who would be likely to hire someone to kill Arthur Yerby. Yerby is the kind of man who isn’t well liked and the more people know him the less they like him, so it seems possible that the killer could have been hired by someone very close to him.

It’s a serviceable plot with some reasonably effective suspense. The art gallery action finale is done well. And it provides another opportunity for mocking modernist art and that’s always good to see.

A Little Plot at Tranquil Valley maybe tries too hard to be whimsical and tongue-in-cheek. McCloud happens to be on the scene shortly after an armed robbery at a pharmaceutical supplies warehouse and he captures the world’s most incompetent armed robber. He later manages to get himself captured by slightly less incompetent robbers. The actual plot is very routine. This episode tries to compensate for this with some colourful and bizarre moments, and partially succeeds. The scenes in the Tranquil Valley Funeral Home are amusing (you gotta love that a funeral home not only has conducted tours but has a sexy tour guide) and the two eccentric thugs who capture McCloud have their funny moments. The bumbling robber Ralphie is a bit overdone. Burgess Meredith goes a bit overboard also as the funeral home director who is also a criminal mastermind.

It’s just generally a bit too silly.

In Fifth Man in a String Quartet McCloud arrests a young violinist suspected of murdering his teacher, a famed violin virtuoso. What worries McCloud is that the young man loves his violin more than anything in the world, so why would he take it with him to commit a murder? To McCloud it doesn’t add up. So who did kill the maestro? Unfortunately we already know the answer and so plot-wise it’s all a bit predictable. It’s redeemed by Neville Brand’s performance as a gangster turned politician. His whole little ménage is delightfully amusing, with his collection of girlfriends and hookers and particularly his maid in her ridiculously sexy uniform which leaves few of her charms to the imagination. The action scenes are also well done. It demonstrates that a barely adequate story can be extremely entertaining if it’s sufficiently well executed.

In Give My Regrets to Broadway McCloud swaps shifts with another detective, Charlie Harrington. Harrington gets gunned down working McCloud’s shift and McCloud naturally blames himself. The question is, did the killer just pick a random cop to shoot or was he deliberately targeting Charlie or maybe deliberately targeting McCloud? Sam gets curious about the fact that Charlie’s singer-actress daughter has just landed a major rôle in a big Broadway production. It seems like she doesn’t have anywhere near enough experience to land such a plum rôle. Of course he’s still not sure that Charlie really was deliberately targeted but odd little things like this get under Sam’s skin. He might be just a rural marshal but he has all the instincts of a born detective and he notices trivial details.

This one does feel a bit padded. We get no less than three musical numbers (and not just snippets but whole songs). Two are Broadway big production numbers, while the third is a country song and it’s sung by Dennis Weaver.

The plot here is less than dazzling but there are compensations. There’s some very amusing (and at times rather risqué) dialogue. There’s Milton Berle as a Broadway producer, playing it very straight and doing a very fine job of it (although his rant at the theatre to his incompetent cast is clever and amusing). There’s some delightful banter between McCloud and the wealthy middle-aged but glamorous and definitely man-eating Louise Blanchard (played by Barbara Rush). So the episode still manages plenty of entertainment value.

Final Thoughts

Season two of McCloud gets off to a great start and then falters a little but it’s still thoroughly enjoyable. And it has undeniable charm. Recommended.