The
Legacy
Mission:
Impossible
The script by
William Read Woodfield & Allan Balter transmutes four sons of
Hitler’s officers into four graves at a cemetery in Zurich, forming a
quincunx with E. Braun’s crypt at the center, which is made of solid gold
out of Der Führer’s personal fortune, and covered over to prevent
detection.
This is to be the
basis of a Fourth Reich, but Rollin takes the place of one Von Schneer, the
plan is foiled, and a shootout reveals the artifice.
O’Herlihy’s
direction particularly emphasizes, under the stolid determination of these
“disciplined” young men, their boyish nature.
The Emerald
Mission:
Impossible
It is a large
stone with a tiny piece of plastic film affixed to a facet on its underside,
containing a plan to devalue the U.S. economy.
It falls into the
possession of an arms dealer to form a matching pair. Unlike Shaw’s
Undershaft, he prides himself on emotionlessness in business.
The stone is
sought for its intelligence value by an enemy agent. Each of these men is dealt
with differently.
The action takes
place aboard the S.S. Queen of Suez during a voyage to Tangier. Cinnamon
loses at poker to drunken Phelps, almost jumps overboard when the dealer
intervenes, he will win her jewels back.
The agent engages
cardsharp Rollin to deal for the emerald. What Rollin has up his sleeve is a
winning hand.
The agent tries
to force the issue and wakes up on a sardine trawler. He orders Rollin’s
death by coded radio message before it’s revealed to him he’s on
the Queen of Suez, and then he’s sedated.
Rollin applies a
mask to the unconscious agent, who is killed and thrown overboard by his own
aide. At Tangier, the emerald divested of its microfilm is delivered to a
higher-up in the adverse party.
The Town
Mission:
Impossible
“The
Town” is related to “The Photographer” and “The
Carriers”, also Don Siegel’s Telefon and Dan Aykroyd’s
Nothing But Trouble. Woodfield, Arizona is a small town off Highway 40
whose citizens are every one a Soviet agent. It looks exactly like what it
pretends to be.
Phelps observes a
strange sight. The young couple in the pharmacy stumble
over their suitcase, opening it to reveal uniforms for the Park Regent Hotel in
Los Angeles, and setting off a blue smoke gun. A second later everyone’s
outside, the town sheriff holds a gun on Phelps.
Rollin at the
mountain lodge where the two have plans for a bit of hunting is concerned. He
drives down to Woodfield and is told that his friend has had a stroke and
cannot speak.
Rollin gradually
gets wise, the IM Force is summoned on the fly.
Totally without preparation, they secure the doctor’s office. Phelps has
been injected with curare.
A lecture
attended by the whole town has demonstrated how to use a bathtub fall as an
apparent suicide (you break a little finger, for instance, because your man has
tried to save himself). The young couple drive on to
Los Angeles past the border crossing, Needles, Essex, Barstow and San
Bernardino. The target is a defector from the Soviet space program.
Cinnamon is Mrs.
Phelps, Barney is a hired driver, Willy an unfortunate trucker who breaks down
on the road and injures himself, requiring treatment.
Rollin takes the
doctor’s place with an ad hoc mask and a remarkable performance by
Will Geer. Phelps dies on schedule and is whisked away, the young couple are arrested. Rollin holds a town meeting until the
troopers arrive.
The mask he used
is left behind, an Einsteinian image.
The Ransom
Hawaii
Five-O
It’s to be
paid at Sea Life Park between the acrobatic porpoises (“hard-working
Hawaiians”) and the crowd, a helpful man returns it, the briefcase opens,
a quarter-million is spilled.
Keen-eyed Kono
spots the culprit but is nabbed by an accomplice. He helps the kidnap victim
escape and is beaten for his trouble. The young boy’s father puts up the
money again.
An Army major
picks it up at Oahu Cemetery, where he dies in a gunfight. The henchmen run a
boat supply shop, McGarrett is doused with gasoline
but kills them both.
Kono is rescued
from an empty bait tank, bound and blindfolded and “starved”.
O’Herlihy
contrives to divide the screen into three vertical bands at a public telephone
where one of the kidnappers is in the blue center stripe.
The Reunion
Hawaii
Five-O
Paratroopers
gather twenty-five years after the war, three of them were in a Japanese prison
camp, they meet the commandant.
The wit was
broken in mind under torture, the strongest lost a leg, the ranking officer
turned traitor to save the other two (he now runs several corporations).
The cripple wants
revenge, the wit is framed for it, the businessman has
bought the commandant’s computer company to destroy him but dies in the
attempt.
Fingerprints
identify the commandant as someone else, money buys that.
Great script by
Paul Playdon, typically sharp direction by O’Herlihy. The actors are Joe
Maross, Simon Oakland, Barry Atwater, and Teru Shimada.
F.O.B. Honolulu
Hawaii Five-O
All the powers of
the world contend in Hawaii for a weapon of ultimate destruction against the
U.S., and it’s “your own Commander Nicholson” who gets hold
of it, a pair of $20 printing plates for Andrew Jacksons.
The U.S. State
Dept. will pay a sizeable amount and give amnesty, his
lady partner eliminates him on offers of more cash from the KGB and finally Wo
Fat, who forces the issue. A small-time player named Tony Madrid takes a hand
and nearly trumps them all after his fashion.
The authoritative
direction includes the elevator gag from The Pink Panther,
Nicholson’s demise filmed from the surf with a handheld camera, a temple
pond with floating thug amid carp, and Col. Misha the Bear’s POV of
McGarrett through the small round window of the cabin door on a departing jet,
“the title is purely honorary”.
Air Cargo—Dial for Murder
Hawaii
Five-O
Black marketeers hijack various items in a sustained scam. A
shipment of medicine gone astray causes the death of a hospital patient, her
husband concocts revenge.
O’Herlihy
is entirely inspired by the general layout of this, by passages such as the
system engineer eliminated from the gang and shipped back air freight (the
camera rides the freight loader on the tarmac with the coffin and finds an
Oriental perspective on McGarrett standing at his desk to handle a phone call
in the background left while Chin Ho in the foreground right and just
off-camera counts the dead man’s secret pile of money intermittently into
the frame), and by the casting of James Hong, Marion Ross and Michael Strong as
the nervous engineer, a spotter for the gang, and the husband aggrieved by the
law’s delay after his wife’s death in a simple absence of the
needed medicine, he’s in import-export and ships things out to anyplace
whatsoever “every day of the week”.
While You’re At It, Bring In
The Moon
Hawaii
Five-O
A tale of Howard
Hughes old and young, under another name. He’s out to build a steam car,
cash out everything and liquidate fourteen corporations in so doing. His top
executives bring legal action, he’s a mental
incompetent in germicidal pools and saunas, a world apart.
He shoots at them
and kills one, then escapes. The event is recorded on audiotape, as it happens.
There was not enough time for the deed to be done as presented, another weapon
was used.
A unique rifle
lobbed .45 shells on a high trajectory 250 yards for the job, bought by a
nonexistent company called Orion Enterprises out of a Geneva bank account from
an engineering firm in West Germany, Lithia Arms Co.
Any resemblance
to the JFK assassination in the form of a dramatic burlesque is probably
coincidental. The title comes from a reporter’s question to McGarrett,
“How do you bring in a billionaire? Isn’t that like bringing
in the President?”
Cloth of Gold
Hawaii
Five-O
There’s an Auguste Dupin logic in this tale of chicanery and murder,
Three partners lure homebuyers to Hawaiian Palm Estates by means of videotapes
shot with scenery from elsewhere on the island and shipped to the mainland,
suckers get “a quarter-acre of lava rock”.
They use the
camera for other things, drug a girl for acquiescence,
she dies a prostitute and addict.
Her father obtains
a job as houseboy to the three and kills them one by one with a small gastropod
whose beautiful shell gives its common name and the title.
Jay Robinson, Ray
Danton and Jason Evers are the thieves.
Follow the White Brick Road
Hawaii
Five-O
A Navy sailor is
pursued by two toughs, eludes them and collapses on a Honolulu street. They are
agents of the Naval Intelligence Service, he is a heroin mule.
Danny is placed
undercover as a corpsman on a destroyer late of Vietnam, now steaming from
Subic Bay to Pearl Harbor. He dispenses the Navy’s exemption program to
an addict, who is killed by a dealer with an overdose.
Five-O traces the
tattoo artist whose work is on the initial corpse. Madam Sung is questioned,
but all signs point to the White Horse Tattoo Parlor, whose proprietor supports
a mother in the Philippines and has no record save a 1959 ticket for
“driving too slow on the Mauna Loa Freeway.”
Che
extraordinarily has a team of lab-coated analysts at microscopes to determine
the substance under the fingernails of the mule, which must have come from the
ship.
The dealer is a
mate in damage control who hides the brick in a fire extinguisher, whence it is
extracted by a man in a hard hat “checking shore power” at Pearl.
O’Herlihy
films aboard ship at sea. A great sequence transports McGarrett by boat hoisted
to the deck.
Journey Out of Limbo
Hawaii
Five-O
Dan Williams is
deposited in a dump truck’s load of sand at a construction site,
unconscious (the image is taken from Buñuel’s Los Olvidados with a
vengeance). He wakes in a hospital, has a concussion and is unable to remember
his day off.
Five-O has the
job of providing security for an informal meeting of the Chinese commerce
minister and an American nabob, Norton Hummel, formerly a captain on General Stilwell’s
staff, aboard Hummel’s yacht.
Gradually it
comes to Williams that he stumbled on a bunker and two men loading a small boat
with high explosives amid bodies. This is a scheme to destroy the yacht in a
suicide attack, the bodies are dummies meant to wear U.S. Navy uniforms.
Hummel’s
son died at Shangjin, where Duke also fought.
Here Today, Gone Tonight
Hawaii
Five-O
The teleplay by
Jerome Coopersmith is from Malle’s Ascenseur
pour l’échafaud, a sort of translation by
way of homage.
The murder is as
before, there is a glass elevator outside the building, a massive security
apparatus leads to the company president’s office, his
new project is a road through a wilderness preserve.
The
company’s books are offered to McGarrett, fraud, corruption, everything
but the murders, for which no evidence remains.
Dan Williams is
flown in a circle over familiar lights at night, supposedly to Maui. A prefab
house duplicates the junior executive’s, he slips out for the murder.
The boss’s
wife will rub out a blackmailer on to the plan, she has the money for it, just
as her late husband would have, she says. Five-O steps in.
The Odd Lot Caper
Hawaii
Five-O
Negotiable
securities amounting to a fortune are robbed by daylight from the Honolulu
Stock Exchange and downtown brokerage firms to finance a signature building
project that island investors won’t support.
It begins with
the murder of a blackmailer, his badger game is a stock tip for wives.
The bloody robbery
takes in a bonfire of records at each venue, and computer files are seized or
destroyed, so that the certificates can’t be identified.
The developer has
a friend in Boston vouch for him, the securities are a loan.
One brokerage
employee remembers a late colleague’s first stock purchase framed on his
wall, it’s been sold with the man’s estate, a 1912 issue, she
recognizes it in the developer’s vault by the frame marks.
O’Herlihy’s
direction is dynamic and faultless.
Will the Real Mr. Winkler Please Die?
Hawaii
Five-O
The dramatic
construction is given as two intersecting lines of action, one a
straightforward tale of escape from the Iron Curtain, the other a Russian doll
with a pure abstraction at its center.
An Austrian
“Mr. Memory” quits the vaudeville circuit to work for East German
Intelligence. After six months, he escapes to the West under a new identity,
opens a souvenir shop in Hawaii and lives quietly for seven years, until a
man-in-the-street interviewer questions him on a matter of local politics. He
evades the camera, but is recognized and forcibly recruited for another
mission. The scene in the street sends him to Five-O, where at first he claims
to be a protected witness, then at a subsequent meeting admits to being a top
spy.
On a cold and
snowy night in Washington, D.C., McGarrett confers with a CIA man, no-one has
seen the spy, only one man can identify him, a defector hiding out in
“deep security”, the former head of Soviet Intelligence for Eastern
Europe. This man is brought to Hawaii and quickly determines the suspect is not
who he claims to be.
Seven years
before, the defector married a fellow agent, she reported to the spy on an
agent lured to the other side by his addiction, the spy had her arrested by
Counterintelligence and she died horribly. The suspect didn’t know of the
marriage, the spy did.
The suspect
confesses he has been forced to impersonate the spy so that the defector can be
assassinated.
McGarrett’s
plan nets the spy, saves the defector, and gives the suspect yet another
identity.
Murder Is a Taxing Affair
Hawaii
Five-O
A Federal agent
murders a tax evader en route to Hawaii but picks up the wrong bag and
has to join Five-O’s investigation, questioning each passenger. $600,000
is the prize, he’s had enough of millionaire loopholes and furnished
rooms, “from now on I take”, and is a stalking horse for the
critique along similar lines. He searches a wealthy couple’s hotel room
but takes nothing, kills a stewardess who has nothing, and is about to throw a
couple over a cliff for the bag in their possession when McGarrett puts a halt
to the caper and the agent goes over the cliff instead.
Silence ends one
act as the couple stare at their bag full of money, the camera pans across the
stewardess’s bathroom to see her face behind the shower glass as she is
strangled at the end of another. An unusual degree of finesse is in these
cadences, finally a lateral shot of cliff, sky and sea completes the picture.
Why Wait Till Uncle Kevin Dies?
Hawaii
Five-O
An ominous
parable of prodigal sons and daughters who sign away their inheritance to
Reversions, Inc. for an advance minus a percentage. The company has recently
undergone a change of management and no longer relies on actuarial tables and
long-term results but gets its money at once by murder.
A
ne’er-do-well is impersonated by a new man in John Manicote’s
office who is dressed up as a millionaire’s son. A fail-safe system
insures his life against any changes in the will.
A pile of murders
on McGarrett’s desk prompts him to act, Five-O has the final aspects of
the case well in hand before the company moves its headquarters to Zurich.
Secret Witness
Hawaii
Five-O
What he bears
witness to is a Chicago hit man liquidating a liability,
a local boss’s skimming bag man.
He drops his library
book, The Poetry of Robert Frost, where these lines can be found:
|
I do not see
why I should e’er turn back, |
The hit man tries
to bribe a librarian for the patron’s change of address. The
latter’s typewriter reveals him to Five-O (and so the theme is
Auden’s reader and rider).
O’Herlihy’s
camera work in the last scene at the witness’s home in a high-rise begins
with a walk to the louvered window for a down-angle on McGarrett’s car
pulling up in the street below, announced by siren.
Murder with a Golden Touch
Hawaii
Five-O
Old gold is made
to appear in Makapuu Bay as salvage from the clipper Boston Cloud whose
captain, says the president of Geodetic Surveys Ltd., was an opium trader in
the Far East named Jeremiah Farmer.
Actually, the
gold’s been filched from an island firm and remolded to fit the bill so
cunningly that even the U.S. Mint can’t prove it.
Five-O divides
and conquers.
Nine Dragons
Hawaii
Five-O
O’Herlihy
is called upon for this feature-length drama of Wo Fat’s amazing scheme
to take over the government of China by murdering its leaders and blaming the deed
on America, with a retaliatory strike to follow. This requires great rapidity
on location in Hong Kong, and O’Herlihy’s skill is evident in and
around the harbor.
The murder weapon
is a deadly toxin under study at the University in Honolulu. Wo Fat enlists the
Triad gang of the title, murders a professor and takes his place, purloins the
venom and waits for McGarrett, who arrives in Hong Kong and is kidnapped,
drugged, brainwashed and filmed denouncing the attack, for immediate release
after the event.
The venom is to
be introduced into the water supply at Hang Chow, where a government meeting is
scheduled. Wo Fat sits in a control room, like Gen. Scott of Seven Days in
May, ready to put McGarrett on the air at a moment’s notice, as he
monitors events in Hang Chow and stays in touch with the missile center.
Certainly this
casts Wo Fat in a light very different from his instrumental role as agent of a
hostile power. Even more amazingly, perhaps, his ultimate failure here
isn’t the end of him, somehow.
The Author
Matlock
A small-town roman
à clef hits the bestseller lists and gets compared to Peyton Place,
one of its keyhole characters is defended by Matlock when an apparent attempt
on the life of the spinster who wrote it leaves her minister dead in the living
room.
A gossipy recluse
propelled to TV fame, her secret co-author dead at her hands, there is a
succinct image closely related to Star Trek V: The Final Frontier.
O’Herlihy’s
beautifully precise and analytical technique takes the most tangible aspects of
this in stride with the least, as easily as switching the lens on a microscope
or telescope.