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Reviews
Call to Danger (1973)
It's like a lost Mission: Impossible episode
This TV movie was the third pilot for a series in which the feds would recruit an amateur each week to help them carry out a complex law enforcement mission. This aired partway through the seventh and final season of the original Mission: Impossible series, and plays very much like a padded episode from that show's declining years.
It's got Mission star Peter Graves as the lead, a U. S. Justice Department official tasked with rescuing an informant from the clutches of the mob and their impenetrable fortified beachfront enclave ("with the latest in electronic security," little of which we see). To penetrate it, all Graves needs is a guy with three valuable skill sets: archer, beekeeper, and stock car driver!
Thanks to an oversized 1973 computer, the government finds three men in Southern California with archery-beekeeping-stock car driving experience. The best qualified, played by Clu Gulager, has a sore arm and hasn't won a race in a long time. Is he really the right man for the job? We get a few scenes of a lovely government agent (Diana Muldaur) recruiting this poor schnook and rehearsing the mission, which includes surreptitiously shooting an arrow through a window.
Meanwhile, Peter Graves goes undercover romancing Tina Louise. (In an amusing goof, she invites him up to her room, 5-D, but we cut directly to a stock footage shot of an apartment building, which pans and zooms up to a much higher floor.) He also deals with assorted gangsters to set up the complex plot, gets involved in a car-and-foot chase through a parking garage (which must have seemed a lot fresher in '73), and does a death-defying dive into a swimming pool.
Eventually, it all leads to the utterly improbable, but entertaining, arrow shootin'-beekeepin'-stock car drivin' climax!
Writer-producer Laurence Heath was Mission: Impossible's most prolific writer, and although his scripts usually lacked the sparkle of, say, William Read Woodfield and Allan Balter, or Paul Playdon, he could generally be counted on to come up with something competent and watchable with at least one quirky facet, which is exactly what he does here. So if you enjoy late Mission's poker-faced recounting of ludicrous crime stories, this is for you.
If only it had gone to series, Peter Graves might have spent years teaming up with stockbroker-ski instructor-hog callers, barber-locksmith-stamp collectors, and acrobat-mathematician-horseshoe champions in the fight against evil.
Movin' On: Ransom (1975)
No Smokeys in the ocean
Lesser of the two episodes credited to the insanely prolific TV writer Stephen Kandel.
It's a slow-paced kidnapping story that lacks urgency. Kandel's script is very Spartan, only six characters, but with so few suspects the plot hasn't many places to go. Our truck driver heroes take forever to realize what's going on. The setting is novel enough, though, a clothing factory in San Diego. The ransom drop location seems made-to-order for the script; I wonder if Kandel was familiar with it, and "cast" it accordingly.
The series' leads are blandly likable and the writer gives them some decent dialogue, but the guest supporting actors aren't that good or even interesting; same with the direction. I got the feeling the script would have worked better if it were retooled for a crime drama series. Or maybe the plot was intended for such a series and retooled for MOVIN' ON.
But check out "Games," Kandel's other script for this program; it's warmer, with better acting and production.
Iron Horse: The Dynamite Driver (1966)
Dynamite Drive
Solid early episode of this railroad Western with a script by co-producer and co-creator Stephen Kandel, making elaborate use of stock footage for avalanches, cattle herds, explosions, stampedes, scenic views, et cetera. Says Kandel, "TV is made on a tight budget -- and you can do miracles in the editing room" with stock footage because "you got a million dollars of production value for nickels."
Interestingly, there's very little action involving the train. Bad guy Royal McClintock (well played by Malachi Throne with a fearsome Scots accent) contracts for the railroad to deliver a herd of cattle and then wrecks a bridge, forcing the good guys to drive the steers overland or else pay crippling penalties that will lose them their railway. There follows a cat-and-mouse game whereby rail owner Calhoun (played by charismatic series star Dale Robertson) constantly outwits the bad guys who try to sabotage the trip. This leads to such deathless dialogue as "That Calhoun! No matter how ya stack the deck, he keeps pullin' out aces." Some of our hero's "ace" solutions seem a little far-fetched, but this is a slightly over-the-top boys' adventure story, so I can't complain too much.
Lots of action scenes (fistfights, gunplay, horsemanship, all with terrific work by the stunt crew) punctuated by pithy dialogue exchanges between the multi-ethnic cast (not always well-acted). We get to see one of my favorite semi-regular characters, the big axe-wielding Swede Nils Torvald (played by Roger Torrey), but there's also a cringeworthy scene where a Chinese cowboy shows off his trick-riding skills that's set to some clichéd orientalist music from Dominic Frontiere.
And here's the one exchange that made me laugh out loud:
Obnoxious villain McClintock: "That's what a man does -- stands up to what the world throws at him! I lost my wife to the fever in '68. I lost both my sons in the blizzard of '75. But I'm still here!"
Dry hero Calhoun: "Then, on the other hand, who'd have ya?"
The two actors are well-matched and make this worth watching, along with the stuntwork and Kandel's typically adroit plotting.
Bearcats!: Conqueror's Gold (1971)
Conqueror's Tropes: White Savior defrosts Ice Queen
By my (probably inaccurate) count, Stephen Kandel had his name in the writing credits of at least fourteen network TV episodes during the 1971-72 season, down from about twenty-one the previous year. Most are hour-long crime dramas (two scripts each for detectives Mannix and Cannon, one for Longstreet, plus a story for Cade's County) and medical dramas (three scripts for Medical Center, one for The Bold Ones: The New Doctors). His one half-hour script this year is an interesting episode of Room 222. Of course, the IMDB may not be listing all his credits, plus Kandel was known to do script doctoring and use pen names, so he may have been even busier than he appears. Says Kandel: "I'm a very fast writer. I can write an hour show in a couple of days, no problem."
"Conqueror's Gold" is the first of the three scripts he contributed to that season's short-lived Bearcats! Adventure series, a teleplay co-written by Alexander Richards, from a story by Richards. It's one of Kandel's typically busy pulp thrillers; a "white savior" tale where the good whites (a British newspaperwoman, our two mercenary heroes, and a comic relief sidekick) rescue the good non-whites (Indians held hostage) from the bad whites (murderous gold thieves). Much of the action takes place in a spectacular location, on and around a towering mesa topped by ruins which hold the hidden gold. Along the way, we get: murders, a jail break, a mountain lion, an escape attempt, plans going awry, some sneaking around in the dark, an ingenious effort to bluff the bad guys, a car chase, fistfights; you name it.
The series' premise is enjoyably far-fetched; sort of a less campy, early 20th century version of "The Wild Wild West." Circa 1914, two handsome masculine guys (who frequently romance beautiful women, just in case anybody gets the wrong idea) drive their fancy sports car, a Stutz Bearcat, through the American southwest renting themselves out as mercenaries to anyone who will give them a (literal) blank check and having adventures that are supposed to be fun and thrilling. Naturally, it doesn't always work out that way, but series star Rod Taylor valiantly tries to save even the worst episodes with his engaging talent and charisma. The other regular, Dennis Cole, is solid and likable.
In "Gold," English actress Jane Merrow plays an uptight, bespectacled, plainly dressed journalist who loosens up and turns into a sexy "distraction" with a plunging neckline under the tutelage of our macho heroes -- an unconvincing subplot, but mostly played for laughs, so I guess we're supposed to not take it too seriously and forgive it. ("Do you know the trouble with you two? You're not used to being 'round a lady." "Don't want a lady. Want a woman.") This "Hero Defrosts the Ice Queen" trope is a favorite of Kandel's, going back to some of his earliest teleplays. Given the character's transformative arc and Merrow's broad acting, I wondered if she had ever played Eliza Doolittle in a stage production of either "Pygmalion" or "My Fair Lady"; I looked it up and, sure enough, she starred in a British "Lady" a few years earlier.
Other standouts in the cast: Kevin McCarthy as the nasty, intelligent villain; Pepper Martin as the broad comic relief sidekick who "hasn't got the brains to get out of a cardboard box if the ends were open"; Tom Nardini as an heroic padre who does what he can to minimize the bloodshed.
Richard Donner directs, still a few years away from his big movie hits, "The Omen" and "Superman," and there's some interesting camerawork: striking helicopter shots and other views of the mesa, a couple of unobtrusive tracking shots with no cuts that run longer than a minute, and a car chase that's surprisingly exciting given that they probably couldn't afford to wreck their expensive replicas of vintage autos. Fine work by the stunt crew throughout.
Dimension X: The Lost Race (1950)
A streamlined Forbidden Planet
Here's a review of this episode that I contributed anonymously to a no-longer-updated website, The OTR Plot Spot:
Did the makers of the 1956 film "Forbidden Planet" knowingly borrow from this tale? It's a very similar premise, except that the goofier aspects of the movie -- the talking robot, the virginal heroine, the Id monster, the comic relief cook -- are absent: a spaceship crew with a no-nonsense captain decelerates from faster-than-light speed to find itself on a planet seemingly haunted by a long-dead alien race that invented a device for visualizing thoughts before mysteriously committing mass suicide. This crisp, fast-moving adaptation ratchets up the tension of the original short story with a few smart changes, like adding the threat of the crew's being stranded on the planet permanently. If you found "Forbidden Planet" cheesy and boring, you might prefer this.
Vega$: Murder by Mirrors (1981)
"Mirrors" with "A View"
I'm slowly working my way through the output of Stephen Kandel, versatile and prolific writer of episodic television. The IMDB doesn't list all of his many credits, but covers most of his career from the '50s into the late '80s. I'm not watching them in chronological order, so it's interesting to see his favorite tropes pop up in each decade with fresh twists. Hard-working genre artists are always trying to put a fresh coat of paint on their pet clichés. Kandel, with his quirky sensibilities, certainly writes a lot of great "guilty pleasure" episodes for a wide variety of TV series. Unfortunately, "Murder by Mirrors" isn't one of them. Mind you, it's perfectly entertaining, but I wouldn't rank it among his best, perhaps because Kandel only has a co-write credit on the story with Herman Groves, who wrote the teleplay.
I happened to watch this early '80s Vega$ episode back-to-back with Kandel's late '60s Mannix episode, "A View of Nowhere." Both open with very similar teasers: a character in an aircraft witnesses what looks like a murder being committed and, by the time they land and rush to the scene of the crime, the bad guys have covered up the evidence and proceed to convince the cops that the witness is either mistaken or crazy. The witness then spends the rest of the episode doggedly trying to solve the puzzle of what exactly happened. It's a classic mystery trope; if this were Agatha Christie, the witness would be on a passenger train or something. But this is late-century network TV, so vacationing detective Mannix is riding in a helicopter and Vega$'s Bea is landing a single-engine plane.
When I saw the Mannix teaser just after finishing the Vega$ ep, my first thought was, "I hope I'm not about to watch the same script twice." Fortunately both plots play out very differently. And both are worth your time, though the Mannix is definitely the better of the two. And you might actually enjoy watching them consecutively as I did, just to enjoy the chefs' skill at turning the same eggs into different omelettes.
Sea Hunt: The Aquanettes (1961)
"The ship was tossing with trouble -- woman trouble."
With ratings declining, the fourth season of this series scrapes the bottom of the water barrel. So leave it to writer Stephen Kandel to give us:
1. An inexpensive cast of five: series hero Mike Nelson (played by Lloyd Bridges), and a lady doctor, who train three women for a flight to Venus by giving them underwater tests.
2. Endless clipped narration from tough guy Mike: "She was a hot pilot and a PhD in cybernetics -- one-half pixie; the other half expert rocketeer."
3. A gratuitous catfight between two swimsuit-clad "astronettes." Yeah, that's what they're calling these female astronaut trainees. Not "aquanettes" as in the episode title, but "astronettes." The hero, in swim trunks, breaks up the fight (while the other two ladies do nothing to help; thanks, girls!) and unceremoniously dumps them overboard.
4. The dumbest possible characters and dialogue. When the stereotypical Southern belle flirts with Mike ("Why, what would poor little ol' me do without big strong you-all!"), he turns to the others and says: "Hang on to your Confederate money, gals. The South will rise again."
5. A deathless plot: Brunette has panic attack underwater and is ready to quit; arrogant blonde gives her hell for it; catfight ensues; brunette stupidly goes back in the water alone ("I think she was trying to prove something -- to herself"); tables turn in third act when blonde panics ("Stainless-steel heroine with the nylon hair fell apart like wet cardboard") and brunette saves the day. Everyone learns their lesson and grows as a person. The doc tells the blonde: "Now I have high hopes that you'll relax and turn into a human being."
6. An unusually crafty shark: "This killer must have hunted men before. He kept sizing me up from various angles, considering attack patterns, gradually working his way into position for the deadliest possible pass." Dude, you're projecting; sharks aren't that smart.
All in all, a very funny half-hour drama that will make you cringe every minute on the minute.
Iron Horse: Decision at Sundown (1967)
Ploys and counterploys
Typically busy and entertaining script by series co-creator/co-producer Stephen Kandel (pronounced kan-DELL) from a story by Berne Giler.
The titular train, supposedly carrying $140,000 in bearer bonds, is stopped by a colorful gang of outlaws. When he can't find the valuable securities on board, the clever, ruthless leader (well played by Victor French) begins to improvise. The passengers and crew, led by the railroad's co-owner Dan (series regular Gary Collins, Master of Blandness), are hijacked and taken to a remote telegraph station. You naturally expect the railroad's other owner, Calhoun (charismatic series star Dale Robertson), to show up any minute and save the day. But this is a Kandel script, so anything can happen.
The mystery of the bonds' whereabouts, and the uncertainty of whether and when help will arrive, keep the pot boiling. Some of the characters bluff, con, and try to outwit one another; not everything and everyone is quite what they seem. Others succumb to the tension and constantly threaten to explode into violence. The plot veers into ploys and counterploys, double-crosses, fights, an escape, gunplay, a couple of romances, redemption, an unexpectedly humorous ending, et cetera.
And genre clichés! It's got (some of) what you want in a railroad Western. Cut telegraph lines! Wrecked train tracks! Two drunken gang members humiliating a cowardly traveling corset salesman at gunpoint! A climactic brawl atop a gushing water tower!
There's juicy bits and/or character arcs for practically the whole cast. Series semi-regular Nils Torvald (played by Roger Torrey), the big Swede, gets to pick on someone his own size. Series regular Barnabas (Bob Random) gets a romance and a little of his backstory filled in. Besides Victor French, the best of the guest actors includes Joan Huntington as a sexy duplicitous moll, an excellent Russ Tamblyn as a dangerously psycho gunman, Celia Kaye (very far from the _Island of Blue Dolphins_) as the ingenue, Mickey Morton as Nils' giant nemesis who's especially fun when drunk, and Sam Reese as the timid salesman. I wasn't as crazy about Helen Kleeb, as a God-fearin' eye-poppin' cartoon old maid right out of a Mae West movie, or Gus Trikonis, who later switched from acting to directing, as one of the gang, but they add needed texture.
Herb Wallerstein's direction is okay, with some great intense close-ups of Tamblyn, and the stunt crew more than earns its paycheck. Pace is sometimes sluggish, but that's the case with a lot of mid-'60s TV episodes, even good ones like this.
State Trooper: Love on the Rocks (1959)
"Love on the Rocks" Rocks
I'm on a Kandel kick (pronounced kan-DELL), so I was pleased to discover this solid early script by the prolific Stephen Kandel who would go on to be "one of the more lunatic scriveners in Clown Town," according to fellow crazy TV writer Harlan Ellison. I dunno about that description; Ellison might have been projecting a little, but--
Kandel is frequently responsible for the most interesting script(s) of whatever series he happens to be working on. Not necessarily the *best* scripts, mind you, but the quirkiest -- often an odd mix of genre clichés and outré envelope-pushing, with an impish sense of humor behind his choices. His plots almost always have a few holes in them if you think about them too much, but at least he'll give you other things to chew on as well.
He has a background in the classics and occasionally draws on them for his muse. This "Romeo and Juliet" rewrite opens with the series' star, in character, seated at a desk with a small bust facing him: "Oh, hello. I'm Rod Blake, chief investigator for the Nevada State Troopers." He turns the statue around so we can see it: "And this is William Shakespeare. You know, it's not often I get a chance to reread some of the Bard's great plays, but recently we had a case that made me recall one of his greatest ... The only difference is that our Romeo wore jeans and Juliet had a ponytail." Actually, there's another difference: the kids don't commit double suicide.
In Kandel Land, Nevada cops read Shakespeare -- and the tragedy of "Romeo and Juliet" ends happily. (See, for example, the author's bonkers 1977 MAN FROM ATLANTIS script, "The Naked Montague," for another take on R & J.)
Nobody in the story makes much of it, but the murder weapon turns out to be the bust of the Bard. I smile at this, because Kandel likes unusual murder weapons; one of his last teleplays, from 1989, opens with a guy killed by the engine exhaust from a space shuttle.
The star, Rod Cameron, seems like the sort of guy you'd enjoy having a beer with -- while you discussed sports maybe, not Elizabethan drama. The actors playing the local sheriff and the town bum are pretty good and give the least wooden performances. The bum, Romeo's father, gets some of the best lines: "I just got one regret; nobody asked me to come and do a jig at her funeral!"
The shrewish murder victim is played, perhaps too broadly, by Virginia Christine, an actress better known for her role as kindly Mrs. Olson, the Folger's Coffee Lady, in a 1960s-'70s ad campaign. So if you ever desired to see her laid out by a conk on the head from Shakespeare, here's your chance.
The plot starts slowly, and doesn't always hang together (at one point, the police trust a nervous civilian with a rifle as if they were in an Old West posse), but builds to an exciting shootout climax in and around a novel location, a rocky cave by a waterfall (hence the punning title, "Love on the Rocks"), which is the episode's highlight and well worth waiting for with its series of rapid reversals and revelations, and one great gunshot through a windshield.