render a snarky judgment of 1974's The Death Squad by writing "The Cliché Squad" in the summary box. I was going to ridicule this cheapo TV movie as an inevitable rip-off of Magnum Force. I was going to point out the pablum-level plotting, the cardboard characterizations, the neon sign pointing at Melvyn Douglas as the Hal Holbrook character in Magnum Force.
In other words, I was going to dismiss The Death Squad as the typical junk put out by ABC for its "Movie of the Week" series way back when.
Then it dawned on me that I didn't know who all was involved in supporting the vigilante cops. I started thinking how this may have made a passable series (c'mon, every other episode of The Movie of the Week was a pilot or some sort of pitch to the network suits). I found myself feeling comfortable with Claude Akins, Ken Tobey, and Mark Goddard. I wanted to see more of a very young, very charming Michelle Phillips.
The Death Squad was junk, but the sort of junk you want to browse through at a garage sale.
And then there was Robert Forster, an actor with a reputation of doing journeyman work portraying the lead with an earnestness that I found admirable.
So, my prejudice against this sort of Spelling-Goldberg trash may have had legitimate roots (right, Starsky and Hutch?), but after The Death Squad was over, I found myself a smidgen sad. This was the stuff I grew up on in the 70s. The movie was just about as good as NBC's Police Story.
Not a complete waste of 70 minutes.
In other words, I was going to dismiss The Death Squad as the typical junk put out by ABC for its "Movie of the Week" series way back when.
Then it dawned on me that I didn't know who all was involved in supporting the vigilante cops. I started thinking how this may have made a passable series (c'mon, every other episode of The Movie of the Week was a pilot or some sort of pitch to the network suits). I found myself feeling comfortable with Claude Akins, Ken Tobey, and Mark Goddard. I wanted to see more of a very young, very charming Michelle Phillips.
The Death Squad was junk, but the sort of junk you want to browse through at a garage sale.
And then there was Robert Forster, an actor with a reputation of doing journeyman work portraying the lead with an earnestness that I found admirable.
So, my prejudice against this sort of Spelling-Goldberg trash may have had legitimate roots (right, Starsky and Hutch?), but after The Death Squad was over, I found myself a smidgen sad. This was the stuff I grew up on in the 70s. The movie was just about as good as NBC's Police Story.
Not a complete waste of 70 minutes.