Freedom Comes
High
A tricky little
thing to put together, with a climax of night action in the Pacific, made up of
documentary footage, combat re-creations, and a Stateside drama in a familiar
set.
The device of
representing the fallen as a ghostly double exposure (as in The Fighting
Sullivans) is employed to establish an understanding of war widows’ grief.
A notable film for its quickness and sureness, with an impressionistic slowing
of some night gun footage (which might have been seen as too abrupt otherwise),
and a silent part for Cecil Kellaway as the father-in-law.
The Uninvited
A London music
critic (he lives with his sister) takes a house on the Atlantic coast to write
music, and thereby hangs a ghost story justly famous for its wit and insight
and the commanding presence of the director.
Crowther in the New York Times for once candidly
admitted he couldn’t tell what was done, and with which, and to whom.
Desert Justice
Bonanza
A magnificent exposition
on a grand theme merely serves to point up one little scene during a stagecoach
journey from Virginia City to Los Angeles, whence a
U.S. Marshal comes to the Ponderosa after a year-long search for a wanted
murderer.
The suspect is a
friend of the Cartwrights who is clubbed down before their eyes and then badly
beaten overnight in jail. Ben wires a thousand dollars to a Los Angeles
attorney, Adam and Hoss take the stage with the marshal and his prisoner,
joined by Dr. Strasser and his daughter, both visiting from abroad.
The victim was
the marshal’s wife, coaxed into releasing the suspect and then thrust into her
husband’s line of fire, allegedly. The suspect is manacled and shackled, the
Cartwrights fear for his life.
At a desert
station, an accomplice stampedes the horses, badly injuring the marshal, and is
killed. Adam is forcibly deputized to bring the prisoner in. While he ponders
what to do, the girl is cozened into releasing the suspect, who marches off to
kill the marshal. Adam nearly beats the man to a pulp until the marshal, out of
bed with a shotgun, sees the error of his ways.
The stationmaster
is asked by Dr. Strasser for private accommodations on their arrival. “Mister,
the only thing private out here is the hole in the ground you’re buried in, and
even that’s liable to be stolen out from under you by a thievin’
Apache. Breakfast at sunup, supper at sundown. If you’re late, you don’t eat.”
Dark Star
Bonanza
Gypsies roll
across the Ponderosa, thieving and rascally, their leader “could charm hisself out of a Comanche scalpin’,”
declares Hoss admiringly. A daughter of the band has
detached and is there before them. Hoss and Little Joe found her while tracking
a “lobo wolf”.
The title is a
maleficent aspect, her own explanation for her present state, she is a witch,
she could be a fish if she wanted to (it was her dream as a child—Little Joe
wanted to be a grizzly).
Her fellow
gypsies want nothing to do with her, the old bruja
has expelled her but can be mollified with Metaxa,
says an admirer.
Little Joe is
fascinated by the wench, who repels her gypsy suitor and wakes up in her bed at
the Ponderosa with blood on her hands and paw prints beside her. It’s said she
became a wolf and slaughtered chickens.
She is staked to
the ground while the bruja performs an
exorcism, bidding Asmodeus depart, etc. Little Joe tries to stop it, the suitor
attacks him and is killed.
Afterward, the
spirited girl is reinstated to the fold, happy with her lot. She won’t marry
Little Joe, but moves on with the gypsies.
An inspired,
literary script by Anthony Lawrence gets up a bit of magic effectively handled
by Allen. Susan Harrison is the fiery and mysterious girl who dances to a gypsy
tune, Hugo Haas the ingratiating leader, Arthur Batanides the hot-tempered
suitor.
Showdown
Bonanza
In the dead of
night, robbers blow the safe in Tom McClure’s bank, remarking how soundly
people sleep in Virginia City. One of the gang is dispatched to the Ponderosa
as a lookout while the rest hide out, anticipating a search.
The Cartwrights’
new hired hand is useful at breaking horses and pleasant enough, but isn’t very
sociable. McClure brings in soldiers from Fort McKay, the hand reports this to
the gang. A run on the bank is feared.
Little Joe has
his suspicions, so has the sheriff. Otherwise, the hired hand is treated with
great cordiality, invited to a picnic, loaned a vest to cover his whip-scarred
back after a fight with Little Joe tears his shirt.
The story is told
of a stepfather who lashed the boy after his mother’s funeral to inculcate a
new regime, and was killed by him a few years later. The boy served eight years
and received a pardon. The Cartwrights regard the matter as closed.
Little Joe goes
to apologize, follows the hand to his gang and is captured. The last straw comes
when Adam tells the Ponderosa spy what his brother had in mind. The spy saves
Little Joe from killing, both subdue the gang and bring them in. And so, the
ironic title refers to “heaping coals on an enemy’s head.”
The Blood Line
Bonanza
Ben is positively
obliged to kill an abusive drunk when the railing varmint draws to vent his
dislike of all Cartwrights. His widow is an eyewitness and still aggrieved at
the deed, and the man’s son arrives in town ready to kill Ben.
They have an
awfully high opinion of the deceased, which leads the widow to hire a
gunslinger for vengeance when he offers his services. The son steals a
six-shooter and shells, even after Ben installs him on the Ponderosa as a
hand-in-training. There’s no dealing with them, until Ben narrowly escapes a
shot in the back from the gunslinger by hitting the floor and returning fire,
whereupon he breaks the bitter truth to widow and son, their idol was “a
no-good drunk”. The son is still infuriated, but the widow is obliged to
acknowledge the truth of this, and calms him. Her love is undiminished, just
the same.
The Fugitive
Bonanza
The Third Man set in Mexico, where the son of an old Ponderosa
foreman has died in jail during an escape, shot in the face. Adam goes to investigate,
finds the man alive and plotting to rob the Copa de
Plata mine with two Mexican henchmen, one his wife’s brother.
The fugitive has
killed fifty men and inculcated on the chief of police a great dislike of
gringos. The chief’s own deputy is in on the scheme. Adam is captured by the
gang, the wife threatens exposure if he is killed, her brother is ordered to
shoot her. He refuses, the henchmen kill each other. Adam seizes a gun against
the leader.
The body is
returned to Virginia City, where the old foreman hears of his son’s death by
misadventure and the pretty girl he married, nothing more.
The Case of the Violent Vest
Perry Mason
An
extraordinary composition in which the mainspring of the murder is named but
does not appear, and the victim is a schnook.
The opening scene
is an excoriating divorce case in the making, which gradually leads to a
kaleidoscopic view of the advertising industry as a realm of predation and
falsity.
An ad exec sends
his partner up the river, snookers a subordinate into taking a bullet for him,
and the rap is pinned on the married young spokeswoman for Miss Debutante
Cosmetics.
The title refers
to a jazzy vestment borrowed for the nonce by the victim, from his boss.
The Trial
Mission: Impossible
A double agent’s
wife is the prosecutor’s mistress, Briggs’ car in Victory Square is full of
explosives from the government’s own factory. Rollin is the defense counsel.
He foils an
assassination plot against his witness with a Sherlock Holmes maneuver and
brings him into court disguised as a janitor (Billion Dollar Brain) and
then as defense counsel calling himself to the stand.
TOD-5
Mission: Impossible
The canister is
handily obtained by the IM Force, the scientist is arrested. A harmless
substitute is placed in the hands of Alpha’s buyer, he is then given to
understand that it has leaked into the small town where the purchase is made,
and that he is among the victims.
Mimi is the “one
in ten thousand” immune, her watch emits a tracking signal, she is his only
hope, they head for the Alpha laboratory.
A second man is
sent by Alpha to oversee the first, he plans to go into business for himself.
The watch is damaged in a fight, a shorter version of the plan forces the
location of Alpha out of him.
The
Puppet
Mission: Impossible
The wounded
brother is seemingly recovered sufficiently to lie in bed with his face wrapped
in bandages and serve as moral authority for the new ventures. Hank (Richard
Devon) suitably masked takes his place to spoil things, and Casey observes of
the captured original, “Jim was right, he’s a puppet.” And so,
Mission: Impossible touches on Franju’s Les Yeux Sans Visage.
Barney takes a
job as chef to this establishment. “Pre- or post-Revolution?”, he asks when
asked if he knows Russian cuisine. A liquid concoction serving as dinner is
doctored for the patient to simulate a heart attack and effect the switch
(Willy as physician), but Barney is obliged to taste it afterwards, and barely
has time for the antidote.
Allen’s best
recourse in all the clear facets of this is a close-up study of McDowall while
the bandages are removed. “You were never half as smart as your brother, kid,”
says John Larch injecting a note from Hamlet as a rival gangster when
the police catch everybody in the sub-basement.
The Pendulum
Mission: Impossible
Against them, the
IM Force invents a global concern called World Resources Ltd., arms
manufacturers, commodity dealers, gold speculators. This bunch wants to subsume
Pendulum (forcing its leaders to divulge their plan).
And there you
have it, a general understanding of the military-industrial complex. The script
by Calvin Clements, Jr. (out of his Western habits) is uncompromisingly
explicit in detailing the cold crassness of mass murder to incite war and force
arms purchases on the participants, as well as of calculations on famine to
nurture sales (and this is World Resources Ltd., the bogus operation whose logo
is a ringed globe with a lightning bolt emanating from its South Pole).
It’s
headquartered in a remarkable building which is a fine coup by Allen. There is
a curious aspect of Pendulum’s plan, called Project Nightfall, in its
resemblance to Colonel von Stauffenberg’s plot to kill Hitler with a
briefcase-bomb at a staff meeting, but here the targets are top military brass
at the home of a general (chairman of Joint Services Intelligence) who has been
killed and replaced with a double. The homage to Eisenhower in this type of OSS
or MI6 operation mutatis mutandis, characteristic of the entire series,
is a fitting summation.
“The Pendulum”
was the antepenultimate episode broadcast, though by some accounts the last one
filmed. Allen’s exceptionally cool handling of the material is nonetheless a
feature of Mission: Impossible as a whole. The very sangfroid of
his interiors is as expressive in its quotidian blitheness and normality as any
Ken Adam design could be. It’s what transpires (or appears to) in these bland,
fashionable spaces that is the main point. I would add a curious resemblance to
The Sting in the manifestation of the ploy (a room full of
“speculators”, “screens”, observed from a back room), which as one has pointed
out first appeared on radio among The Adventures of Harry Lime
(“Horseplay”).