The Only Way to Die
Get Smart

KAOS sends a man each year to blow up Government buildings, McClutsky and his 6000 union men build them again in a night (Washington Monument, National Archives). The target this year is the IRS.

Antonio Carlos Carioca is the name, aboard his yacht El Amador. 86 feigns his own death and is ensconced in an abandoned building while 99 unwittingly dines aboard the yacht, its whistle has an inaudible frequency as destructive as a bomb.

When the case is solved, Smart demonstrates the mechanism.

The Collector General
Hogan’s Heroes

Frankenheimer’s The Train is now among the honorees at Stalag 13, joining Wilder, Lubitsch and John Sturges. “Does that mean saving gold snuffboxes?”, Newkirk asks. The patrimony of France.

The dummies from The Longest Day are parachuted in, Carter leaves one with a “V” salute. The Germans fight them and each other.

The cave’s steel door is blown, the paintings and other treasures are swiftly on their way to Amsterdam. Arms and ammunition for the Third Reich, General Metzger called them, “top secret, Führer’s orders.”

The Young Assassins
Hawaii Five-O

Hawaii’s tourists and citizens are random targets of a gang called the People’s Attack Group. Dan-O and a terrorism expert are taken as hostages to exchange for two arrested PAG members (whose calling card is a pog).

The expert is among other things an analyst on the psychology of the type, they are for instance incompetent at love, they kidnap him to boast.

Curiously, the gang holes up in the disused fortifications on Diamond Head.

Bilson’s direction is effortless and brilliant.

Small Witness, Large Crime
Hawaii Five-O

The image of a junkyard is taken from Los Olvidados. An executive assistant colludes in a stock swindle, bearer bonds in trust accounts are replaced with stock certificates stolen on the mainland. The head of the firm is assassinated.

An urchin witnesses the killing and is placed in protective custody, an unwitting public defender gets him out.

The murder is a feat accomplished by one of a handful of Army snipers capable of it, shooting half a mile from an elevated pillbox at the target on a moving yacht, “like hitting a fly across a banquet room,” McGarrett says.

Legacy of Terror
Hawaii Five-O

The open or mixed structure presents WWII in Asia and the Pacific somewhat after the manner of Becker’s Touchez pas au grisbi and Hodges’ Get Carter. A million in gold bullion at the Tokyo Imperial Bank (Honolulu) is said to have been hidden at the outset of the war by “the director of Japanese espionage in the islands”. The surreal imagery begins with an elderly gentleman in Japanese attire making his will, an American lawyer handling the matter locks him in and starts a fire.

The son arrives to collect. The lawyer determines to fence the gold to Malaysia or Singapore through a Chinese mobster for half its value. Chin Ho is assigned to put a protective tail on the son, Kazuo.

A girl in the old man’s office, Kim, knows about the gold and wants in on the action. Kazuo kills her and lays the blame on the Chinese mobster’s “muscle boys”. He arranges to meet the lawyer and surprises him at his office by pushing him out the window to his death.

The gold is under the floorboards of a rustic cabin. Five-O surround the place, Kazuo holds Chin Ho at gunpoint but is captured.

The old man is Tahashi, the master spy. He and Commander Blackwell of U.S. Naval Intelligence were “deadly enemies”, Blackwell arrested him hours after Pearl Harbor, the lawyer (a Navy legal officer) defended Tahashi on treason charges and won an acquittal. Blackwell and Tahashi have long since been fast friends, after the war they spent the gold on charitable work for Japanese-Americans through the Friendship Foundation, the cabin is bare.

The lawyer is well-known to McGarrett for his career in civilian life successfully defending “killers and syndicate bosses” with courtroom theatrics, intimidation of witnesses and “outright perjury”. The scene in which the Chinese mobster discusses a split with the lawyer while playing a round of golf takes place at a hilltop course said to have been played by Adm. Kimmel. “Pearl Harbor,” the mobster says, “a name that blazes in American history.”