User Reviews

Pretty good emotional drama. Little Linda has inherited a big hotel from her dead parents, and now lives with her uncle Mike (Duryea). Trouble is Mike's an alcoholic who's frittering away Linda's inheritance. Now the lawyer-executor (Taylor) wants to dump the irresponsible uncle and place Linda with caring adoptive parents. However, Linda enlists Buzz and Tod to help keep her and her beloved uncle together. But can they or, more importantly, should they.

Little Linda's supposed to be 10 but acts like she's 30. Still, it's an endearing performance without getting sappy. Great photography of a modernistic San Diego as backdrop. Duryea gets to show his acting chops, apart from those iconic noir roles of the 1940's. His Uncle Mike looks and acts like he's at the bottom of an emotional barrel. In my little book, there's been nobody quite like this wonderful actor who specialized in dislikable characters, apparently a long way from his real personality (IMDB). Tod and Buzz are Tod and Buzz, the rocks of help that little Linda needs, but they can't be sure just what will help. No romantic entanglements here despite the Gidget-like opening. All in all, it's an engaging episode, well conceived, acted, and photographed.

Don't Count Stars is one of my two favorites of the Route 66 series. The final scene with two of the greatest actors George Maharis and Dan Duryea made this episode a classic. Martin Milner and Susan Melvin do some incredible work setting up the suspense for the final scene. The great character actor, Vaughn Taylor was very convincing as the apparent villainous banker who had to hurt the young girl to save her. With her parents gone, Melvin plays out what many children go through. Many children are abandoned and hurt by adults who avoid their responsibilities. Don't Count Stars portrays this reality exceptionally well.

This one combines "Lost Weekend" and a Shirley Temple movie. Young Susan Melvin plays the heir of a couple that died in a plane crash. She now owns a hotel in San Diego but is the ward of her drunken Uncle, (the always excellent Dan Duryea), who 'runs' it for her by giving his buddies the run of the place. A representative of the bank who runs the trust the inheritance is part of, (Vaughn Taylor) wants Duryea out and has lined up, (an unseen), 'nice' couple to take care of her. The young girl loves her Uncle but doesn't love the bank. Tod and the girl try to collect the money the uncle's friends owe to the hotel while Buz, in scenes that anticipate season 2's "Birdcage on my Foot", tries to sober the old sot up.

It's a very sentimental story but comes off as more sappy than moving. One thing that bothered me: Stirling Silliphant's script has the boys working at a missile plant, where Buz is in the factory assembling the missiles and Tod is up on the gantry where test missiles are fired off. The girl has enough clout to walk into the headquarters of the missile company and get Tod and Buz assigned to her personal use, (she met them when they fished Uncle Mike out of the bay after he drunkenly fell into it.) How do these two wanderers get what must be fairly technical jobs like that? And how does the girl get the head of the company to give her two of his employees like that? Why not just make T & D employees of the hotel to begin with? I guess they just wanted some shots of the missile plant, (and they are spectacular). I just like things to make sense.

Stirling Silliphant breathes new life into the type of story popular way back during the Silent Movie era: a cute youngster with a ne'er-do-well uncle who is facing being taken away from him to live with a "loving family". Audience sympathies are clearly with Uncle Mike, played broadly by Dan Duryea right from the git go.

M & M are working in San Diego at an extremely photogenic General Dynamics aerospace plant, and their carefree off time is interrupted when they save drunken Duryea from drowning as he falls off a ship. The kid comes to them for help, and they've never turned down such a request on "Route 66". Susan Melvin as Linda is no Shirley Temple, but she does a fine job in a role, as owner of the Sands Hotel, that would have fit the greatest child star of all time to a T. (Silliphant even has everyone call Linda "the little princess", an obvious homage to one of Temple's hits from the 1930s.)

Silliphant's script comes up with an ingenious solution to her problem, again a throwback to sentimental storytelling, and the climax of a powerhouse confrontation on self-respect and duty between Maharis and Duryea has a revelation that makes the entire story work. This episode really packs a punch and delivers tried and true entertainment value that Hollywood is known for. If it had been a movie rather than just a TV episode, you could figure there wouldn't be a dry eye in the house.