Hawaii Five-O: King Of The Hill

An unexampled view of guilt, the Marine Corps hero “let the VC through”, he’s beaned in Honolulu on a Little League diamond and passes into a retribution, besieged by the enemy.

Yaphet Kotto has the blistering role in two dimensions, the Castle Memorial Hospital (Oahu) and Vietnam’s backcountry. Jeff Corey is the doctor on duty.

the monitors

The one about the Monitors, “We… Are… Here… to Serve.…… Hu… MAN… ity”, and S.C.R.A.G., “Secret Counter-Retaliatory Group, against the Monitors.”

A brilliant film on the theme of a victorious Star Trek episode with a slightly different key, a response to Godard’s Alphaville (and Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451) with a difficult MacGuffin from Menzies’ Things to Come, and ultimately remodeled as Michael Anderson’s Logan’s Run.

One of the best independent productions of the time, close to Kaufman’s Fearless Frank and Flicker’s The Troublemaker, a highly original masterpiece whose peculiar artistic position may be judged by a gag involving subtle distinctions between “Bach—Karl Philipp, not Johann Sebastian” and “Scarlatti—Domenico, not Alessandro.”

With quotes from The Battleship Potemkin and Night of the Living Dead, a bit of Méliès, an incomparable score (including Avery Schreiber’s folksong sendup, “from my native Yiz-ROEL—The Swamp-Draining Song”), and a very dry wit.

“Last one in’s a subversive!”

They’re loved by young and old (hooray),

They’ve cured the common cold (oh boy),

We hope they always stay (bravo),

And that is why we pray,

Dear God, bless each one of them,

The Mon-itors!

Howard Thompson of the New York Times took a dim view.