Matlock: Nowhere to Turn
Matlock, who is a
member of the Bar in several states, flies to California to defend a man whose
Fifth Amendment right is denied by a judge. The plane is delayed,
Matlock’s suitcase is lost, his hotel reservation is canceled, and he
arrives late at the hearing. A heated exchange with the judge lands him in jail
on a contempt charge. Later, he finds the judge dead in his chambers, and is
then knocked out and drugged, thrown out of a bar, mugged, left unconscious in
an alley Downtown, arrested and charged with the murder. This all takes about
half an hour, which is about twice as fast as the going rate on television, and
I left out the opening scene where a jogger on the Sepulveda Dam acquires a
truckload of arms.
Later still, Matlock is knocked out and drugged a second time, but he
isn’t dumped in a dark alley. The CHP finds him dazedly roaming the San
Diego Freeway at high noon. He decides to take the case himself.
Four Green Berets in Vietnam, now an attorney, a psychiatrist, an FBI agent,
and the late judge, have set themselves to spreading democracy by selling arms
for drugs for cash, first in Central America and then against a
“religious dictatorship” in the Middle East. Seeing their ventures
come to nothing inspires them to keep the cash, but the judge objects, on
principle. Ergo, he is eliminated.
Many fine location shots enliven this telefilm, which is noteworthy among other
things for its portrait of the attorney in his beach house, wearing a pink polo
shirt and baggy beige trousers, surrounded by etched glass and serving crab
salad and Chardonnay to distract a visitor (Nancy Stafford as Michelle Thomas)
while her hotel room is being searched.
Matlock: The Outcast
Matlock forgets
his client’s name, decides it’s time to retire. He drives away to
the country to fish.
The small town
he’s chosen has a racket going. Illegal immigrants die and are shipped
back home in caskets full of drugs. This is nicely taken from Jack Smight’s
“A Little Plot at
Morgan Woodward
has a good turn as an honest farmer, and Doug McClure heads the ring round the
town.
Matlock: The Final Affair
“The Final
Affair” is a bracing dissection of certain contemporary phenomena. For
the purpose, a two-pronged approach is taken. The major premise is a football
coach arrested for fixing games, then losing his case because his lawyer is
having an affair with his wife, though she denies it. Finally, the coach dies
under suspicious circumstances.
The minor premise
is a homeless man arrested as a peeping tom. His case is the usual syndrome, verbatim:
drinking, abandonment, “out of society”.
This story of an
amazingly destroyed man (there is only one) turns beautifully on a mob plot to
ace the coach out of the ministry of his church, so as to use the charity food
program to ship drugs out of the country (the homeless man is merely concerned
for a widow’s maltreatment of her dog).
Matlock: The Murder Game
A résumé of three
episodes (“The Critic”, “The Con Game”, and “The
Talk Show”) told as anecdotes by Matlock in the course of a police
investigation into the murder of a fabulously wealthy maker of electronic
games, owner of an amusement park, etc. It takes place under the same
circumstances as Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians, without any
characterizations among the suspects but with these three facets of murder to
be considered.
Matlock: The Scam
A tale of other
people’s money, downsizing, etc., from a Gogolian vantage point with Matlock
working out to fit back into his collegiate barber shop quartet costume.
In a variation on
Chinatown, an insurance company sells fictitious policies to another,
and uses fictitious death certificates to reap the benefits.