Journey Remembered
Bonanza

A man with experience of the Western trails waits for his partner in St. Joseph, Missouri. The wait is long, he gambles their money away and accepts a job as wagon master.

The partner follows for his money, angrily hears this, and that furthermore there’ll be no money until the wagon master is paid in Ash Hollow, where his party is to join the main wagon train. He’ll ride along, but the wagon master tries to backshoot him and is killed. The new wagon master is in a hurry for the gold fields, while the previous one was dilatory and slow. The wagon train must arrive in Ash Hollow before winter.

Indians steal their horses. The wagon master goes after them and kills a brave outright, remembering his wife and children massacred.

The Indians follow to the overland stage way station at Ash Hollow, which must be defended. The wagon master has a change of heart. The seedlin’ tree given to him as a boy by his father died for want of watering, nevertheless he tore it out of the ground and trampled it. Now he goes out to the Indians unarmed.

The party has missed the main wagon train. Nevertheless, it continues West.

Ben Cartwright, lately a sea captain, leads the wagon train from St. Jo. His Swedish wife Inger is with him, and the son of his first marriage, Adam. Hoss is born along the way, Inger dies at Ash Hollow in the battle.

The eloquent teleplay is matched by Moore’s fine direction.

The Case of the Illicit Illusion
Perry Mason

The mirror structure has a wealthy woman in New York vicariously robbed through her daughter, by an Englishwoman soliciting contributions for various political organizations, SOSOD (Society of Supporters of Disestablishmentarianism), AMMAFEP (Anti-Mau-Mau Alliance for Eternal Peace), ALTAMAW (Anticolonial League to Abolish Munitions and War), and three others, which have a nominal existence but primarily serve to keep the solicitor as “an independent gentlewoman”.

On the other side, a woman’s business secretary secretly muddles her employer’s affairs until even her doctor thinks the woman is ill. The secretary robs her blind on behalf of the husband, an investment counselor for the wealthy New Yorker who has named him in her will, not knowing he has embezzled from her account. This lady is murdered, the husband’s business partner is found dead with a suicide note, the wife is arrested for his murder, framed by the secretary.

Moore has the unusual night session before a judge to settle the husband’s extradition warrant, for atmosphere.

The Night of the Red-Eyed Madmen
The Wild Wild West

General Grimm (Martin Landau) raises a small army of martial artists and weaponry to conquer the Southwest from his headquarters (Mars, Nevada, where the other side of the tracks is plain desert).

West joins up, he’s known in Washington to a subaltern. Training and selection depend upon combat in the Test Arena (cf. Karson’s The Octagon).

Gordon’s ploy is cast back in his face, “the General has no head of intelligence,” a soldier points out, “he does everything himself.”

West’s sergeant is a comely figure at the last in her new dress. The plan is to infiltrate U.S. military bases in uniform, but they are warned. The army disbands with a sense of the General’s futility, a one-on-one gladiatorial bout between West and Grimm decides things in a matter of moments or minutes, conclusively.

The Night the Dragon Screamed
The Wild Wild West

The lucrative business of smuggling Chinese and opium into San Francisco equips a small private army to place upon the throne of Hunan the late emperor’s heiress, under the command of Col. Clive Allenby Smythe.

Princess Ching Ling doesn’t want to go, she doesn’t care for Chinese food. The emperor has withdrawn his favor from the Order of the Crimson Dragon, the throne is guarded by a new tong, the Sons of the Stalking Tiger, and the two are at odds.

Gordon is a Chinese armaments expert briefly attached to the army. The Foreign Office is to claim the venture is merely “in support of American commercial interests.”

A lobster cooker beneath the Imperial Mandarin Restaurant with seawater and steampipes serves as a deathtrap for the two agents, however Allenby Smythe dies in his own knife-pit, the princess dines out with Gordon and West at an Italian restaurant.

The Night of the Grand Emir
The Wild Wild West

Emir El-Emid, ruler of the Ottoman Empire, is attacked with an exploding garter in a posh Washington saloon, kidnapped at a dinner party and offered as “collateral”, the ultimate object being to gain control of the Suez isthmus and drain the canal builders.

The form actually works the other way around, showing how a larcenous cartel ascends out of political discontent to supersede the government.

Thus, political exile Dr. Mohammed Bey’s assassination attempts are actually foiled by the Society of Assassins, a well-heeled international group short-circuiting revolutions for financial gain (West is offered membership, “better pay, better working conditions”), the ultimate scheme is a supranational moneymaker.

The teleplay operates on several levels, with many details of interest. T. Wiggett Jones, for instance, a society columnist, is trailed to the manorial Assassins’ Club (where he heads the organization) by means of the device employed in Roy William Neill’s Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon.

Yvonne Craig as Ecstasy La Joie dances the deadly can-can, an “Egyptian” dance with decapitating tambourine, finally a harmless Spanish dance to entertain the captive Emir (“I like it here,” he says).

West is hung upside-down and straitjacketed in the violent ward of Dr. Bey’s private hospital, and later Jones confines him in “the cage”, a glass booth fitted with deadly gas canisters.

George Stevens’ Gunga Din is a basis of the structure, which anticipates Basil Dearden’s The Assassination Bureau.

The Night of the Burning Diamond
The Wild Wild West

A diamond elixir leaves the common run of humanity standing still, as it were (cf. Fellini’s “Toby Dammit”), for more robberies of more diamonds reduced to drops of the stuff. Amsterdam, London, New York, San Francisco...

Air friction is the nemesis. Kolb and Moore establish one of the great science-fiction marvels, glass cases explode, diamonds vanish, traps are sprung on nothingness, an invisible fist flattens the helpless onlooker.

West and Gordon are given a sample of the elixir, to lure them into the scheme. Nothing moves, speech is a clicking sound wave, they modulate back into reality and are caught in their own trap.

A last fight in this hypermetabolic realm spills lab alcohol on Morgan Midas, air friction burns him up.

Robert Drivas in the severe demands of the mode echoes, it might almost in a word be put so, George Chakiris in a way. Christiane Schmidtmer is at her most equivocally sublime as Lucretia.

The Night of the Raven
The Wild Wild West

Gravetown, “a giant wave to wash away the sins of man forever” and let Dr. Loveless look up no more, The Incredible Shrinking Man.

War Eagle’s daughter Wanakee is the bait. A tepee is set up for her in the drawing room, amid scenery, chained like Pound’s Abu Salammamm. A subtle something adumbrates Poe’s “The Island of the Fay”.

Di Lorenzo and Moore cite extensively from Arnold’s magnificent work. Loveless and Antoinette escape on the back of a raven in the night.

The Night of the Watery Death
The Wild Wild West

A Nemo squats upon the sea and dubs it La Mer (once known as the Pacific Ocean), a sovereign country with all ships and shipping henceforth in its domain.

Marquis Philippe de la Mer has a fortune in view. The instrument of his proclamation is the “sea dragon”, an ornamented fire-breathing torpedo anticipated by the Chinese and Leonardo. It homes in on a jewel-encrusted compact carried aboard ship by his lovely mistress Dominique, who disembarks at the last moment.

The battleship S.S. Virginia, with Admiral Farragut aboard, is the decisive target.

The Mermaid Tavern “sets sail” with West inside, imprisoned by a “disintegrating force-field” that prestidigitates the Marquis himself.

Gordon with a terrible cold prepares a speech on this torpedo as “the wave of the future” countered by things to come (airships with aerial bombs).

The Night of the Tottering Tontine
The Wild Wild West

The tontine is liquidated one by one, starting with a knife in the back at an exploding tobacco-shop.

The main action is at Grevely’s mansion, designed by the first victim to safely house “a collection of Egyptology that rivals the National Museum.”

The tontine includes a retired bounty hunter, an actress who is at least the Second Lady of the Theater, a banker, a heavyweight on the rise, an archduke in exile, a writer of murder mysteries, and an “inventor of munitions” under the protection of West and Gordon.

West is tied to an exploding rocket cart and nearly ejected from a tunnel opening in the seaside cliff under the mansion, which is equipped with a secret chamber that has an automated firing squad and descending head-chopper.

The designer’s twin brother died the death in town, the actress (who leads a crystal-ball séance) is an accomplice.

West and Gordon demonstrate her apparatus for two girls in their private railroad car, the thing clouds up and glows, the girls clutch them tightly.

The Night of the Vicious Valentine
The Wild Wild West

A wedding fantasy, it opens with the Fantaisie-impromptu, Op. 66, of Chopin, played by “extra-wealthy” Curtis Dodd (a wheat magnate, played by G. Edward McKinley) at home, he is the fourth in a series of “alphabet murders”, a small harpoon is launched from the piano and spears him, West and Gordon are too late (“that piano could be dangerous to you,” West says, and Dodd merely replies that his visitor is “an average critic”).

All of the victims are leaders of industry and have lately taken young wives. “I’d rather take on a pack of Comanches,” says the colonel, “than one of these wild-dog killers.” He is called away by his new and lovely assistant, Gates, to a Senate Sub-Committee meeting.

The next is Lambert (Henry Beckman), deliberately breaking the pattern (beef). It will now do to point out that this aspect of Leigh Chapman’s teleplay is an homage to Fritz Lang’s The 1000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse, Miss Emma Valentine (Agnes Moorehead), a leading Washington hostess, takes girls from “filthy French bistros” and prisons, dresses and trains them to marry such men, kills their husbands, blackmails the widows and thereby hopes to personally control so much of the country that Congress must bend to her wishes.

She wishes to be queen for a day, Queen Emma I, or just long enough to right “all the injustices wrought by men” and proclaim the independence of women, whereupon democracy will be instituted and she will run for president.

Emma is of an age and temper for which “the injustices of men” run to a preference for “a little ball of fluff” like Lambert’s bride-to-be, Michele (Sherry Jackson).

John Osborne’s play, The End of Me Old Cigar, has rather a similar tenor along with matronly blackmail. West uses a stereoscope to compare the printing on a funeral card from the widow (Diane McBain) and a wedding announcement from Emma, the “ems” are defective, the cards are traced to the Friendly Card Co.

Inside the dark shop, a wall decoration of a life-sized couple’s first kiss has a live eyeball in the girl’s ear, hoodlums enter (one with a maniacal laugh), Gordon is forced onto a hydraulic paper-cutter shaped like a guillotine. The proprietor is a Russian, Enos Itnelav (“probably Russian for Smith,” says West), E.N. Itnelav, in a mirror Gordon later sees it’s a reflection of Emma’s name.

Itnelav is an interesting character, derived from the paid correspondent in Sandrich’s The Gay Divorcee,

TONETTI: How do you do, I’m delightful.

EGBERT: I’m sure you are, my dear fellow.

His speech is patterned thusly (to West),

You are interesting, perhaps, in placing an order?

Emma meets West there next day and asks, “have you ever been discovered?” She needs a find each month in her circle, her last was an aristocratic polymath. “Your game,” she remarks, “is life—and death.” When he breaks into her home to do a bit of spying, she monitors his progress on a set of bells attached to strings, like those used to summon servants. West is in her private chapel, decorated for “A Marriage Made in Heaven”, cupids, etc. Her goons waylay him, he awakes amid her boudoir, held fast in a chair by feminine bejeweled arms, an insect set of six, which she is able to manipulate into squeezing him painfully.

Emma’s boudoir has a vanity table where she is earlier seen finishing a letter, and a large red bed on the edge of which she sits to lift red dumbbells.

Michele tells West her story, stole once, had to, Emma brought her here.

Gordon has been trying to delay the marriage, Lambert refuses. One of the agent’s best disguises is a last-ditch effort as a finical Jewish tailor who must make an alteration and finally tears off a sleeve to force the issue. Mrs. Dodd recognizes him, he is subdued.

West and Gordon are tied atop the stained-glass dome above the chapel, over them extends a resonating “Piano Tower” with vertical strings, operated from a keyboard below. After the ceremony, the last chord of Mendelssohn’s wedding march will shatter the glass, Lambert (posed alone for a photographic memento) will be crushed by their bodies, they might even be blamed for his death.

West frees one foot, what should he do now? Gordon replies, “Play hopscotch?” The blade of West’s footwear cuts enough of their ropes so that first Gordon, then West, fire cord-tethers up through the round opening of the tower. The final chord sounds, Lambert smiles, the glass breaks and falls, the two agents descend and fight (the maniacal laugher goes face-first into the cake). Emma has a Derringer, the bride grabs her arm and raises it toward the ceiling, the hostess escapes. Michele returns the ring, Lambert won’t hear of it.

During West’s captivity in the arm-chair of Emma’s boudoir, she demonstrated her invention, a rudimentary punch-card contraption for determining ideal mates, the Love Eternal Machine. His favorite wine is Château Rothschild 1846 at the proper temperature, he prefers blondes, brunettes and redheads, etc., his match is therefore a combination of “Aphrodite, Helen of Troy and Lola Montez.” Everyone in her regime will have a card. “Love is a weapon not intelligently used by women, up to now.”

The machine now spits out a posy,

Roses are red,

Violets are blue,

Crime does pay,

I’ll show you!

A heart-shaped red box is on the table in the railroad car, Emma Valentine is safely in custody, chocolate cherries? West flings it out the window to be sure, Gordon has to know. He brings in a smashed box of those chocolate cherries and a posy from Michele,

Roses are red,

Violets are blue,

I do love Paul J.,

We’re getting married at two.

The Night of the Deadly Bubble
The Wild Wild West

Capt. Horatio Philo’s plan “for salvation”, the sea’s revenge.

“Life began there, before pollution made it a garbage depot, butchering whales and seals, a putrefying graveyard.”

The sea shall rise, “a rude justice there.” Capt. Philo’s compressors force air into pockets beneath the sea floor which burst, causing tidal waves that inundate cities.

His engine room in the “womb of an extinct volcano” is concurrent with Blofeld’s rocket pad in Lewis Gilbert’s You Only Live Twice.

The Night of the Bubbling Death
The Wild Wild West

The founding document of the U.S. is purloined for ransom and kept amid the dungeons of a 16^th-century Conquistador castle in Panhandle Strip, a “zone of moot authority” contended for by Mexico and the U.S.

The ruler of this domain, Victor Freemantle, wants a fortune in gold and sovereignty for his country, self-proclaimed.

The document is kept in a vault, protected by a long chamber with a movable bridge over a pungent acid bath.

The Curator of the National Archives is sent with West to examine the document, then kept as a hostage. He is in cahoots with Carlotta, Freemantle’s mistress, having “decided to make history instead of recording it,” in Gordon’s words.

West deploys the array of implements in Gordon’s jacket, arduously obtains the document and finds it’s a forgery. The genuine article is “where my lady fair can stare at it for hours,” behind the glass of the mirror in her boudoir.

A fight with Freemantle’s burly minions pitches their ruler into the acid. Gordon’s “smoking jacket” covers the escape.

Silas Grigsby the Curator has a mild, bespectacled exterior, Gordon mimics him as the proprietor of a “traveling groggery” that creates a sensation on the would-be nation’s main street by offering “all you can drink for 50¢” as an inducement to trade, the national saloonkeeper raises an objection. West slips out of the horse-drawn groggery to search the palace, after Grigsby certifies the forgery.

The Night of Jack O’Diamonds
The Wild Wild West

A sequel to Dieterle’s Juarez, between Kazan’s Viva Zapata! and Young’s Red Sun. President Grant sends a horse to President Juarez, a bandit steals it, Imperial forces try to destroy it.

The Night of Montezuma’s Hordes
The Wild Wild West

A complicated work of art, decidedly artificial, in quest of pre-Columbian gold.

The Houston Museum of Archeology gets a new director (Ray Walston) by murder, there’s a map of ancient treasure (see Frost, “The Vindictives”). The expedition foreman (Jack Elam) would like to murder the Mexican government representative for it, but the thing has been committed to memory.

The desert trail, mountains, a temple opening, the ancient rite. Behind the mask of the Sun Goddess, her priceless smile.

The Night of the Circus of Death
The Wild Wild West

Every time the circus goes to town, small amounts of counterfeit currency appear, a big drop is imminent.

Mrs. Moore runs a Denver emporium, she’s supplied with paper from the Mint, the plates are by Harry “Rembrandt” Holmes. Gordon goes to Moore’s Emporium as someone else to buy a nice new dress for his wife.

West fights a lion in the circus. At a meeting with the Director of the Mint, the question is asked, “who is the ringleader?” In walks the Director’s wife to give him a pill.

A Day at the Zoo
Lost in Space

A great feast for the RADA-trained American actor Leonard Stone as the showman, a collector of homo sapiens down through the ages, some of dubious provenance (a caveman, a knight of chivalric England, a member of the Robinson family whose mid-twentieth-century habitat is erroneously provided with her mother’s 45s).

Dr. Smith tries to get into the act, make a few dollars, with the showman’s whip.

The Night of the Death-Maker
The Wild Wild West

Bad wine from a very good monastery vineyard is the clue to Brig. Gen. Cullen Dane’s whereabouts, he’s imprisoned the monks who have no other way to signal their distress.

Dane’s vengeance is directed at President Grant because of a demotion for selling off Army supplies, an attack is planned on Grant’s train heading East from San Francisco (where a stolen Gatling gun in a hurdy-gurdy fires first).

The actress Marcia Dennison, Althea in Our Country Cousins, is the adoring mistress of California’s territorial governor-to-be.

“The Ishmaelites are everywhere,” says the abbot.

The Night of the Big Blackmail
The Wild Wild West

A factitious kinetoscope projection has President Grant in some very unsavory dealings with a shady foreign power. This must be replaced in an embassy vault with a comedy article featuring Gordon as the President before an exhibition for diplomats is given at the embassy.

Grant warns, seven agents have died trying. An amusing perspective on the apparatus is a pair of revolving silhouettes (later used by Sherlock Holmes) pounced on by a cat bound for Denver by way of Gordon’s generosity.

The Night of the Janus
The Wild Wild West

An instructor at the Secret Service Academy rises to No. 2, his long-held dream of glory amounts to a sewer entrance into the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, there to run off a double suite of bills in a single night.

The clue is right in front of West and Pike all along, a temporary street sign that reads, “Work to be Completed by August 18^th”.

Still another is a tune played on a tiny brass gramophone, a cylinder.

A main entrance hand-stamp is drugged, Pike is a visiting Prussian.

“You know what you’ve got, Jim? Style, real style,” he tells West, who suffers an Academy training course made deadly in his honor.

Leopard on the Rock
Hawaii Five-O

The dictator makes a forced landing at Honolulu, brought down on his way to Geneva by the devices of the opposition in exile, and carrying a fortune out of the treasury.

McGarrett simply has an overnight stay to contend with, a matter of security, until the political machinations build to such a head he has no choice but to impound the liberated funds and arrest the joyful opposition.

Moore, hot off The Wild Wild West, takes the unit on a wild tour of the scenario that starts in the cockpit of the presidential plane on its vérité course away from the torture cells to a numberless account.

Titos Vandis as Jhakal measures the range of a cruel, absolute and pragmatic autocrat, Joe De Santis has a clever ruse beneath a professorial exterior as the opposition leader, his granddaughter the radicalized protester is played in stark abandon and vehement impatience by Cynthia Hull, Paul Stevens is the government ambassador to the U.S. in Hawaii.

Whatever happens that is filmed occurs right there at the airport or the Ilikai swimming pool or the hotel suite where Kono as decoy “could get used to living like a dictator” at the expense of “the sovereign State of Hawaii”, he thinks.