The
Chaperone
The Monkees
Davy falls for a
general’s daughter. Mickey presents himself as a British colleague from
the Battle of the Bulge, no recognition, and no party for the girl without a
chaperone.
The English
cleaning lady is pressed into service with an Eliza Doolittle treatment, her
alcoholic aitches breathe a roar of flame over the candle, she passes out.
Mickey fills in
as Mrs. Arcadian. The party goes swimmingly until the general sees through the
ruse and marches everyone out. “You and your medieval attitudes,”
says his daughter. The general is stunned by this, “I’m not an
unreasonable man.”
A very fine bit
of surreal writing from Gardner & Caruso.
Guess Who’s Coming
to Rio?
It Takes a Thief
The classical
serenity achieved by Glen A. Larson in his later scripts for McCloud has the same virtuosity as in
this prime instance of his more baroque style (and Kessler, and much the same
crew).
Alex Mundy has
two days to spend with the Contessa del Mundo (Dana
Wynter), but he’s waylaid by freelance operatives trying to sell a
defector (Arlene Martel) back to Russia.
The chief of
Brazilian intelligence (Michael Ansara) wants to marry the girl,
she fears for his life and gives herself up to Mundy. The SIA think she’s
in Switzerland, their man in Rio (John Russell) tries to keep Mundy under his
thumb.
The intelligence
chief’s aide (Alejandro Rey) is directing the sale and wants to kill his
boss. The two operatives shade in as Greenstreet and Lorre.
An American
tourist (Teri Garr) on the plane has saved up to catch a husband somewhere in
the world.
Bossa nova at a penthouse nightclub, Kessler in his
unflappable comic domain, the Contessa at her “country estate in São
Paulo.”
Nitro
Mission: Impossible
The
remote-control truck filled with explosives figures in Jeremy Paul
Kagan’s The Big Fix. The Republic of Ajir
(or Azhir) has signed a peace treaty with its
neighbor Karak, whose General Zek
is greatly unhappy and plans to blow up his own King Said during a televised
speech at Government House, backed by the head of Najiid,
Ltd.
Barney
goes to this firm as a computer programmer to punch in “increased
production” for peacetime uses, but opens the explosives vault for
Rollin, who withdraws three bottles of nitroglycerine.
General
Zek has hired a saboteur, Skora,
but Rollin makes himself known as the faceless
international terrorist Col. Hakim, and then takes Skora’s
place to adopt Hakim’s plan while the former is drugged, disguised and
found “dead” as the latter.
The
essence of the IM Force plan is to make General Zek
believe that Government House has been bombed, so that he will go on the air
and “lead an aroused nation to war”.
Horse Stealing on Fifth
Avenue
Manhattan Manhunt I
McCloud
McCloud
is becoming famous thanks to press coverage. It doesn’t endear him to the
boys in blue, who have to deal with a string of drugstore holdups.
The
oblique pun never turns (at least in the shorter combined version) on heroin
but finally on Officer Shannen’s Toby, borrowed by McCloud for a quick
ride to Central Park.
“The
Marshal from Manhattan” is the title of Chris Coughlin’s feature
article in her father’s newspaper. All the hubbub about the press and all
the to-do about the Vietnam veteran robbing drugstores to support his habit
come down to the little boy’s line at the end of The Green Berets,
“I’ll try.”
This Must Be the Alamo
McCloud
“Return to
the Alamo” exactly one year and one week later carried forward the work
to the fullest McCloud potential, but even here it’s a
flabbergasting production, excruciatingly funny when it’s not exquisite,
and handled by TV veteran Kessler (I Dream of Jeannie, The Monkees)
with cool professionalism (which is to say, he misses nothing).
This peculiar
style of extenuated comedy requires the finest acting, and for television there
must be exceedingly quick takes. The model is in the range of Captain
Newman, M.D., a sequential comedy by comparison.
Kessler adopts
the classic technique for this virtuoso melding of plot strands, and is always
there at the scene for each new development, or monitoring pivotal junctures
(which are given as conversational meetings in the squad room between two or
more characters).
Obviously the
study to be made is of Walter Doniger’s adaptation of these means to the
three-ring circus of discrete simultaneous tales or facets this became.
Kessler’s treatment is the solid basis, the “irrefutable
negative.”
He has no leisure
to design shots, but none are faulty; at the same time, the features of the
comedy spell out what was required: a sure hand at registering a string of
nuances as thin as beaten gold or Stan Laurel.
The Gang That Stole
Manhattan
McCloud
McCloud is
typically saddled with more routine duties than average, to keep him out of
Chief Clifford’s hair. Here, he is sent as Director of Crowd Control to a
Thirties-style crime caper being filmed on location (The Gang That Took
Manhattan).
The film’s
star, Larry Harris (Larry Hagman), is “TV’s favorite
detective.” He horns in, to improve his image, when a body is discovered
during filming in Central Park.
The producer, Max
Cortez (Fernando Lamas), has financed the film with $1,000,000 of mob money
from Vito Gilardi (Marc Lawrence), as a front to cover a jewel heist.
An old compatriot
of Cortez’s remembers the plot from earlier discussions, tries to take a
piece of the action, and is killed. McCloud’s homicide investigation
leads to a last-minute discovery of the robbery in progress during filming of
the climactic shootout.
“Real Bonnie
and Clyde stuff—that’s what we want on that screen,” says
Cortez, though Stu Phillips’ music quotes The Sting. There is much
amusing sidelight material on the movie business, including Toni Holt’s
performance as a television entertainment reporter (Vito becomes quite cross
over all the publicity). Cortez asks Edward Binns as the director (“Wild
Bill Hickok”), “Now this sequence here—how many setups you
got?” Hickok answers, “Depends on how it goes—maybe seven,
eight—I don’t know.” So it goes on a $40,000-a-day shoot.
Earlier, Hickok rehearses an action scene with an eyepiece and silent-film
vocalizations (“You’re suspicious! Crouch down!”, etc.).
The story’s
provenance is perhaps earlier than a 1965 episode of The Andy Griffith Show
called “TV or Not TV,” about a gang of crooks who rob the bank by
pretending to be shooting a TV series (alert Andy notes the absence of lights,
cameras, etc.). In this beautiful development ten years later, the actors and
film crew don’t know the production’s a phony (and
what’s more, it might not be).
During
discussions of the robbery (timed to coincide with setups of the final
shootout), a henchman asks, “What if they do retakes?” “Too
expensive,” says Cortez.
“Everything
I know about the police,” says actress Lynne O’Connell (Leslie
Parrish), “I saw in the movies.” McCloud replies, “Well, that
about makes us even, Miss. Everything I know about
show business I saw in the movies.”
Kessler’s
location footage shows the New Amsterdam side of New York to better advantage
than anything since Theodore J. Flicker’s The Troublemaker. When
Larry Harris joins in a fire escape chase and loses his footing at the top,
Kessler has a brief wheeling POV shot with a fisheye lens for effect.
The final scene
is an effective representation of the film crew at work. McCloud rides a crane
to the second floor, standing by the camera to kick open a window and jump
inside, etc.
As Wild Bill
Hickok says, “Cut! Print! Perfect!”, the
crooks attempt their getaway in a van marked “G.A.L.
Incorporated—Motion Picture Rentals.” The assistant director
addresses the crowd: “All right, everybody, settle down. This is a
picture now.”
Shivaree on Delancy
Street
McCloud
An
epithalamion, or perhaps a dithyramb on Debussy’s observation that
“sometimes it’s necessary to spit in the censers.”
Kessler follows
Mort Fine’s meticulously constructed script point by point, mostly in
close-ups, interspersed with much fine location filming of New York and Miami.
He concludes with a complicated chase on Biscayne Bay (this looks to have been
filmed off Long Beach, Calif. with the Gerald Desmond Bridge in the background,
but appearances on McCloud can sometimes be deceiving).
At the hospital,
a nurse can be heard paging “Dr. Satlof,” and again later at the
end of the scene in the waiting room between McCloud and Sgt. Ashby of Internal
Affairs (who has a copy of Intellectual Digest on his lap). This episode
was produced by Ron Satlof.
Three Guns for New York
McCloud
The subtle and
elusive theme is paranoia. Chief Clifford tells McCloud not to sound so
paranoid, he’s getting to be a real New Yorker. Between High Noon
and the one about paranoiacs who aren’t imagining things, this is a
surreal treatment of “Butch Cassidy Rides Again”.
Great glowing
night exteriors, as McCloud and Grover (or rather Broadhurst, who lets Grover
off the hook) are on night burglary detail, which tends to interfere with your
dinner engagements. No-one wants to be on stakeout with McCloud because he will
“make waves”.
There is a
large-scale suite of movements back and forth from New York to Albuquerque,
which the script dissolves in some lightly parodistic material (McCloud in
disguise looks like Father Guido Sarducci in mufti). A flashback to the robbery
twelve years earlier is handled as if it happened “only yesterday”.
McCloud is badly
beaten by the crooks (and ruins the Broadhursts’ anniversary celebration
at the ballet), while later on he has to feign acceptance of the kidnap
demands.
The moon always
photographs smaller than it appears, so Kessler zooms out from a close-up of it
and back in to the Broadhursts’ skyscraper apartment building. His
dreamlike conclusion at the ghost town resembles Zinnemann by way of Eastwood.
McCloud deduces
that one of the crooks has hidden the loot and is trying to distract the
others. The main course of action (touched on by Bullitt) is between the
diurnal world of women and the nocturnal one of senseless violence, or is it?
Hot Ice, Cold Hearts
Quincy
This is filmed by
Kessler on Catalina Island with aplomb and bravura in brilliant sunshine that
is fairly breathtaking. Sean Baine’s teleplay is a minute construction
showing the various degrees of a large-scale caper.
Diamonds are
stolen à la Topkapi from the National Museum in Mexico City, where the
ringleader also takes on a deck hand for his yacht. The poor fellow is a
policeman, who’s dumped in Avalon Bay after being caught probing for the
gems, but first he’s injected with the poisonous spine of a stonefish,
and so is a marine biologist who knows the fish is native to the African coast
and thereabouts.
Quincy is
vacationing with Lee, it’s the Fourth of July, he’s called off his
boat to attend the sick deck hand, and stumbles upon an international auction
of the gems.
The Moscow Connection
McCloud
The central image
is Johnny Starbuck (Hoyt Axton) in a sudden access of lunacy after that last
needle, holding a broken bottle to a woman at the reception following his New
York performance (at which he sings “Bony Fingers”).
Characteristically,
the image is decorated with the second theme in dialogue. The U.S. Embassy in
Moscow has reported cases of radiation poisoning, the Soviet government is
suspected, a Red Army officer offers information in exchange for help with his
daughter, whose involvement with a drugrunning filmmaker threatens to
compromise them both with the KGB. Marshal McCloud and Chief of Detectives
Clifford go undercover with Starbuck’s band on its Russian tour.
The themes are
joined at DOM KINO or The Movie House, a semi-psychedelic Moscow
nightclub where the music is “Strangers in the Night” sung in
Russian. Yalta is where Turkish drugs are smuggled in, the deal is made, and
Starbuck gives his last show before heading to Switzerland for the cure.
In the midst of
this rather fantastic hallucination, there is a device Mark Twain had a hand in
developing. Tereshkoff (Nehemiah Persoff) of the KGB calls McCloud’s
bluff on the train to Yalta by obliging him to play that guitar. The Marshal
hems and haws a bit, then launches into a song that provides entertainment for
the passengers in the dining car. “I’m a cop in a little bitty
town,” he sings, “and I don’t get much pay.” The song
describes this peace officer’s practice of stopping out-of-state cars and
letting his friends go. It’s a lucrative profession, “this year so
far I’ve made four hundred thou... I make more’n
the President now” (with the spoken afterthought, “o’ course,
he’s honest”). The moral is—
|
If
you’re drivin’ down the road |
Britt Ekland in
her second McCloud episode is altogether a different persona as Tatiana,
with a peculiar nervousness shading the diffident ennui of her cat-burgling stewardess
in the third season. Axton sings all or part of half-a-dozen songs, and acts
the part. Persoff as a KGB man under Brezhnev is naturally subtle. His home
town was recently struck by an earthquake, a thousand lives were lost,
“but that’s a statistic,” he tells McCloud while questioning
him, “the suffering of one man is a tragedy.” Morgan Paull comes
alive in the Crimea directing a nineteenth-century battle epic. L.Q. Jones,
Rick Traeger and Arthur Malet form the background.
Kessler films on
and around the back lot with interjections of location footage and a superb
matte. The saloon fight at Dom Kino calls for a large pair of spangled
spectacles to be smashed.
In a gag from
“The Man with the Golden Hat”, a KGB man on the train to Yalta
inspects McCloud’s Stetson in his absence. McCloud introduces a couple of
new sayings among the old comrades (“I feel like I’ve been rode
hard and put away wet,” which puts KGB research to work, and “hang
tough”) before reverting to type.
McCloud Meets Dracula
McCloud
This superb
two-edged satire invokes the Hammer model at the outset and throughout,
pivoting on an interpolation established almost immediately.
Sundown in New
York. A candlelit chamber, a coffin on a bier, the lid opens, a figure in
evening dress (whose face is not seen) slowly emerges, takes a gibus and a
walking stick with a silver pomme, departs.
Another figure is
seen on a rooftop, armed with a military rifle and a nightscope. The vampire
strikes, the sniper shoots. Two dead, with more to follow.
Both appear to
strike randomly, but the vampire’s victims display a sort of pattern. One
is a “bloodsucker,” as Det. Grover describes him, which is to say
he works for a collection agency. The second is filling in on the job for her
boyfriend, who makes deliveries for a pharmacy. The third works for Con Ed
shutting off electricity.
The sniper is
not, as Chief Clifford theorizes, a crazed Vietnam vet, but a boot camp
washout.
Chris Coughlin
has received an advance to write a book about vampires, and is greedily
devouring Dracula films on television. The great actor Loren Belasco (John
Carradine), whose talents encompass
All are skeptical
regarding vampires, except Belasco (who claims to be a descendant of the
original Count), and the medical examiner (Michael Sacks), whose interest in
ancient medicine provokes this riposte from the coroner (Booth Colman), “working
in the morgue, I'm not at all sure I believe in the virtues of modern
medicine.”
McCloud captures
the sniper while chasing Belasco across the rooftops, and the ending is
correctly ambiguous.
The Rabbit Who Ate Las
Vegas
The A-Team
The script is a
typically amusing joke about a mathematics professor with a system who’s held captive in a casino by a mobster, freeing
him opens his captor to pressure from underlings.
Just before it
hypertrophied, the city is seen by Kessler as (exterior) a garden spot and
(interior) a saloon town.