Charlie X
Star Trek
The powers that be on the planet Thasus
descend upon a shipwrecked infant Earthling and endow him with their powers for
his survival. Fourteen years later, the boy is rescued and transferred to the Enterprise, where in confusion and
ignorance he plies them wantonly and assumes command.
This is presented casually and straightforwardly as a study of
adolescence, until the real solution is drawn forth out of the universe and
manifested in a green glow on the bridge.
Robert Walker, Jr. has the role, with Abraham Sofaer in a cameo
as one of the powers, on a theme from Rod Serling (“It’s a Good
Life”, dir. James Sheldon for The Twilight Zone) worked out to this
level by D.C. Fontana.
The
Exhibit A Raid
The Rat Patrol
Col. Beckmann, “the Beast”, a notorious torturer of
prisoners, whom Sgt. Troy himself saw ”boot to face”, hits upon a
spur-of-the-moment plan to evade trial. He shoots his
own aide, trades uniforms with him, and claims that Troy has murdered Beckmann
in cold blood.
It goes to court-martial. The only proof of Beckmann’s
identity is at German division headquarters or in Berlin. The patrol resolve to
get it.
They liberate Beckmann’s staff car from the motor pool,
drive to the conference still in session where he is awaited, and after a
fruitless search through files, find a dossier with his photo on a desk. A
firefight as they exit is briskly left behind.
The
Night of the Amnesiac
The Wild Wild West
Backstage at the State Theater, Crotty’s
Genocide Club plans an America devoid of all but “machines and me”.
They purloin a shipment of smallpox vaccine to ransom the boss
from prison, then renege and keep it.
The booby-trapped scale is from Combat! (“The
Enemy”, dir. John Peyser).
A
Trout in the Milk
The Streets of San
Francisco
“Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you
find a trout in the milk.” This is Thoreau in his Journal, cited by
Robert Malcolm Young. The extremely cautious formulation of this aperçu
allows for a thorough sifting of red herrings, which is what this is from first
to last, and that requires a certain skill in not spilling the beans, which is
what Dobkin displays.
An artist is hit on the head and thrown out his second-story
window. Either bodily insult may have killed him, says the report. His model
(Brenda Sykes) is suspected when her earring is found in his studio. Her
father, the poet Yale Courtland Dancy (Roscoe Lee Browne) takes the rap for
her. She is under the impression that he committed the murder, as he
strenuously opposed her association with the painter. A street artist attests
to the victim’s bad moral character and many conquests. The killer is
found to have been a judge’s wife who was taken with the painter and
became jealous over the model.
These are the bare bones of the mystery as finally stated,
except that there is one more trout in the milk, namely the artist, who is
never seen (and neither is his work). What might be a beautiful puzzle whose
key is Bye Bye Braverman
(dir. Sidney Lumet) is seemingly spoiled by the killer’s defense that she
was being blackmailed, but that is only hearsay related by Lt. Stone. And there it ends, cp. Kill
Me Tomorrow (dir. Terence Fisher).
Dobkin opens on Dancy reciting his verse
at a local nightspot. “I dreamed a beautiful
city last night” is the incipit of this Beat ode full of
witticisms and antinomies. Later, interviewed at the bar, he lights up a
hand-rolled cigarette in front of the detectives, and Inspector Keller is
surprised when Lt. Stone doesn’t arrest him for marijuana possession.
“What, arrest him for smoking oregano for his image?”
A man of letters arrested thirty-odd times for drunk and
disorderly, Dancy. “This is where I used to find your mother after
I’d given her a hard time,” he says upon meeting his daughter at
the Japanese Tea Garden, where she’s gone to reflect on these matters. In
the interrogation room, Dancy’s tale of sudden passion won’t fly
with Lt. Stone, and so he fishes about for a bigger lure. He and the artist
were lovers, he says most solemnly and tragically, ashamed to have hidden the
fact, and then he sets the hook by threatening to kill the detectives if his
daughter ever hears of this.
Inspector Keller is landed (he is still a rookie), but Lt. Stone
does a little bit of research and finds Dancy to be “a Lothario”
and not “a queen”. Inspector Keller also has a great deal of
trouble with the daughter. He interviews her at a modeling job in a large
department store, and she charms him so effortlessly that he loses her in no
time. Brenda Sykes is required to be entrancingly beautiful and intelligent,
which is what she does.
The killer, a Cassandra who goes by the nickname on her
personalized license plate, is apprehended on the verge of jumping into the
Bay, destroyed by guilt. Lt. Stone and Inspector Keller chat in the epilog
about keeping an open mind for cultural pursuits.
Roscoe Lee Browne takes to Dancy like the proverbial trout to
milk (very strong). The burden of imagination is dissolved in his second poem
as a calling card,
|
We all met at the summit |
...and becomes in the interrogation room an instrument at the
service of a noble cause.
Angels
Go Truckin’
Charlie’s
Angels
There is a subtle development of a theme for Perry Mason,
“The Case of the Sausalito Sunrise” (dir. Jesse Hibbs). Big rigs are rifled of their goods, truckers find
themselves delivering sandbags somehow. Joanne Linville portrays the head of
the firm.
In fact, no cargo is taken at all, the entire trailer is
switched at a truck stop with the aid of a diversion. Two old friends pummel
each other in the parking lot, one stretch of highway is blocked by an
accident, the other has a spilled load. The angels are robbed during lunch.
Kelly gets the whole story working behind the counter. The boss
realizes her mistake, if she had a man investigating, he’d still be out
chasing his own tail.