Vendetta for the Saint (1969)

Wrapping up our look at this great old series, perhaps unsurprisingly we watched the famous two-part adventure. There’s actually another two-parter, but it’s not as famous as “Vendetta for the Saint,” which, in 1964, became the first “Leslie Charteris” Saint novel to be published in many, many years. Charteris didn’t actually write it, it turned out. It was ghosted by the great Harry Harrison, but it somehow seemed to be the one that every bookstore used to have in multiple editions.

Our son was really happy with the second half, but thought the first was long and he wasn’t too involved. Since part two is a giant cat-and-mouse game with Simon Templar being hunted all over Sicily by gunmen, there’s a lot for a kid to chew on, and he said that it was really exciting. Good; I think you can see a little bit of both For Your Eyes Only and Octopussy in the last twenty minutes of this. It’s a template of what was to come, and since I plan to introduce him to James Bond next year, I think he’ll like what he’ll be seeing.

For a long time, “Vendetta for the Saint” was the only color installment of the series that I saw. When I first started watching the series in high school, WATL-36 only had the black and white episodes available. Fortunately, I was long in the habit of reading the weekly TV listings very carefully to spot any monster movies or schedule changes, because some time after WATL moved on from the series, WTBS – you may have got it on cable, but it was channel 17 in Atlanta – showed this movie one Saturday afternoon.

You sometimes see essays about The Saint that call “Vendetta” and the other film, “The Fiction Makers,” examples of the way syndicators used to repackage two-part episodes as movies for foreign markets and American syndication. That isn’t true. They were both made as features and then edited into two parts for broadcast in the UK as part of the sixth season. It was partially filmed in Malta – perhaps they had such a good experience that ITC decided to come back and film Mister Jerico here the next year? – and features Templar at war with the Mafia, represented by Ian Hendry as a villain who’s trading on a false identity and gets very angry when people deduce who he really is. The Lovely Aimi MacDonald is a damsel in distress, George Pastell gets to play a hero for a change, and Fulton Mackay and Alex Scott both appear, briefly.

The kid really enjoyed this because Simon is actually fighting for his life for whacking great chunks of the story, but what I like best is that this is a fight the Saint does not need to pick, and he does it anyway. Even when he realizes that this villain, Dino Cartelli, is a little more connected and a lot more dangerous than the average Saint bad guy, Templar finds the guy’s sore spot and jabs it, repeatedly. But Cartelli gets under our hero’s skin, too. Templar drops the façade in the second half and threatens to kill his opponent. That’s how high the stakes get. It’s a great story, and such fun to revisit.

That’s all for our look at The Saint, but we’ll sample another classic ITC series next weekend. Stay tuned!

The Saint 5.20 – The Counterfeit Countess

Well, I absolutely had to pick this one, didn’t I? It’s got the red Renault going over the cliff, it’s got another appearance by Ivor Dean as Inspector Teal, and it’s got both Alexandra Bastedo and Kate O’Mara. By a weird coincidence, my copy of the Doctor Who season 24 Blu-ray set arrived earlier today. I watched the Behind the Sofa for “Time and the Rani” and all of the participants had such nice things to say about Kate. The two actresses would appear onscreen together about a year later in an episode of “The Champions”.

This was a pretty good one that we all enjoyed a bit, despite a few hiccups. I was amazed they got Roger Moore actually out on location in the middle of a field this time instead of doubling him like they often did in the color stories, but I did wonder exactly why he got so unusually righteous about a counterfeiting operation and determined to bust heads across Europe to shut it down. But credit where it’s due: it’s a good story by Philip Broadley, about whom I’ve expressed some lack of enthusiasm in these pages previously. I couldn’t help but notice that he’d do a Department S about two years later with some men in turtlenecks doing some counterfeiting in a similar wine cellar though. Probably the same big engraving machine prop, I bet.

Speaking of the same, Philip Madoc’s villain has a silver-haired (usually called white) Persian, and I joked to myself that the cat was saying how his agent had promised him the role of henchcat to Donald Pleasance and he ended up at Elstree instead. Then I started thinking about it…

You know, that could be the same cat. The one that Donald Pleasance adored in You Only Live Twice was apparently played by a cat called Chico. Twice seems to have been filmed at Pinewood in February and March 1967; this Saint episode may have been made in the fall of 1966. I’m sure some Bond aficionado knows for certain, but I can’t confirm it. What do you think?

The Saint 5.19 – To Kill a Saint

Foiled again! I selected “To Kill a Saint,” which was first shown in February 1967, because I thought it just possible that our son might recognize two actors from their very familiar voice work on the Gerry Anderson shows that our son has enjoyed so much: Peter Dynely, who was Jeff Tracy in Thunderbirds, and Francis Matthews, who was Captain Scarlet. But the joke was on me: the episode is set in Paris, and they’re speaking with French accents, so even with a great big hint, of course the kid didn’t recognize them.

It did mean we got one last glimpse of the bumbling Parisian police contacts Quercy and Luduc, played by John Serret and Robert Cawdron. This was the sixth and last appearance of these characters. We actually saw Serret briefly in another role in the last episode we watched, “The Queen’s Ransom”. Our kid really enjoyed this one. It’s full of twists and mistaken identities and somebody trying to kill Templar and frame a crime boss, and somebody else trying to kill the crime boss and frame Templar. At one point, someone breaks into Simon’s hotel room to trash it and make him think the crime boss ordered it. As Simon, knowing he was going to catch somebody up to something and having left Luduc behind*, stomped down the corridor, eyebrow raised, our son just howled with laughter.

But I can’t help but be amused by our son just not paying any attention to actresses. I told him up front that he wouldn’t recognize Pamela Ann Davy, as he really only knows her as a cartoon version in “The Power of the Daleks”, and he certainly wouldn’t recognize Valerie Leon, who has just a tiny cameo, but this is the third of seven Saint episodes we’ve watched with Annette Andre, and she’s just another pretty girl to him. I think I’ll make a “you’ve seen her before” sign and point it at the screen. I’ll get to do that twice Sunday night…

*Simon really does owe Luduc a nice lunch once all the paperwork on this one gets finished. He did give the poor sergeant his word of honor…

The Saint 5.1 – The Queen’s Ransom

In the spring of 1966, ITC started production of The Saint and, briefly, Danger Man, in color. The result here looks a little threadbare, doesn’t it? Maybe it’s overdue for a really nice restoration, because The Prisoner began filming a few months after this and has always looked so colorful and gorgeous. I’m not sure in which order these were actually made, but they started with a block of 30 episodes and the first 27 of them became “season five,” led by “The Queen’s Ransom” in most of the ITV regions. I remember reading that it was also chosen to launch the first season on NBC in the summer of 1967, but I can’t confirm that presently.

I’m still not sure that moving to color was the right move for this series, in part because it always looked so right in black and white, but our son certainly enjoyed this one a lot. Simon pulls a great switcheroo on the bad guys that had him laughing out loud, and the whole thing is one fisticuff-fueled cat-and-mouse game with criminals while Simon brings some snobbish Nosuchlandia royalty back down to Earth. Bits of it are very reminiscent of one of the most entertaining black and white episodes, “The Golden Journey.” Dawn Addams, who our son predictably did not recognize despite seeing her twice in the last month, plays the snobby queen, with support by George Pastell and John Woodvine.

But I didn’t pick “The Queen’s Ransom” for its guest stars, actually. I picked it for the ITC white Jaguar going off a cliff again, and the darn kid didn’t realize what was happening until it was on its way to launching. “I didn’t realize it was a Jaguar,” he protested. They picked a brilliant, amazingly twisty road to shoot on, and Avengerland tells me that it’s a road on the Llyn Stwlan Reservoir in Wales. The road was also used in a Persuaders! four years later, as well as, weirdly, another Saint that we’re going to watch soon, in which the other stock ITC crash, with the Red Renault, is used. I honestly didn’t plan this. I swear I picked it for its guest stars, not its car crash.

The Saint 4.2 – The Abductors

Everybody knows that Ivor Dean played the Saint’s regular foil at Scotland Yard, Inspector Teal. It’s less well-remembered that he had another recurring irritant among the French police, Sergeant Luduc, played by Robert Cawdron. Luduc appears in six episodes, although unfortunately they couldn’t settle on a regular actor for Luduc’s superior, Inspector Quercy, and he was played by four or five different people. This time out, Templar calls Quercy a “second-hand Maigret,” which was a bit mean.

“The Abductors” is another one packed with memorable guests, including Annette Andre again, and a trio of villains played by Dudley Foster, David Garfield, and Nicholas Courtney, whose character is strangely more violent and base than we usually see from this series. Andre and Courtney crossed paths again a few years later for the Randall and Hopkirk that everybody remembers for its own amazing guest cast, “The Ghost Who Saved the Bank at Monte Carlo”, and weirdly, in 1969-70, Foster, Garfield, and Courtney each appeared one at a time in consecutive Doctor Who serials: “The Space Pirates,” “The War Games,” and “Spearhead From Space.” No, I don’t know why I know that, either.

The kid liked this one much more than the previous two. It is a very straightforward tale of criminals with a goal that’s easy for a ten year-old to follow. No weird adult stuff like mistresses or market manipulation, just plenty of driving around, making the police look like idiots, with some funny quips, great brawls, and a credibility-straining dungeon where the bad guys stuff their captives. I’ve always liked it a lot. It was one of the episodes I taped off-air in 1986-87 and rewatched several times later, but I had forgotten just how ugly and bloodthirsty Courtney’s character is. We’re so predisposed to love Who‘s Brigadier that it feels downright wrong to know this dude strangled a prostitute to death. Maybe WATL cut some of that part out from their copy to make room for an extra commercial or something.

The Saint 3.10 – The Imprudent Politician

Hey, it’s Jean Marsh and Michael Gough! Reckon they’re up to no good? Just look at them.

Back when I first started watching The Saint in 1986-87, “The Imprudent Politician” became one of my favorite episodes, in part because of the story and in part because Marsh and Gough were in it and I knew who they were from their roles in sixties Doctor Who. In time, I’d come to recognize most of the great guest cast, including Anthony Bate, Moray Watson, and Mike Pratt. And in the spring of 1988, after reading a little bit about the Profumo Scandal of 1961-62, I caught that guest star Justine Lord is being a little bit Mandy Rice-Davies in this story about blackmail that involves an accidental death and a country house full of suspects.

So no, for the small number of you hoping our kid would recognize Lord after seeing her in another episode just four days ago, he didn’t. This one took a little more work, and a little backtracking after we got started, than I would have thought. It seemed simple enough: a politician’s being blackmailed because he has a cute mistress and once passed her some insider stock information. I overlooked the reality that the kid has only a vague idea of what a mistress is or why anyone would want one, and no clue at all what insider trading is. But I wasn’t going to let this one collapse because he didn’t understand it, so we got it all cleared up and once he understood there’s a big country house full of brooding visitors who don’t seem to like each other, he said “Okay, it’s like Clue,” and he was good to go.

Mike Pratt plays one of the blackmailers in this, and you’ll remember how, as Jeff Randall, the poor guy lost just about every fight he got in? He coshes Simon Templar from behind about halfway through this story, and that’s it for his luck. He gets thrashed to within an inch of his life later on. When Monty Berman and Dennis Spooner were putting together Randall and Hopkirk, they might’ve looked at this episode and said “That’s our man!”

The Saint 3.6 – The Saint Steps In

Afraid our son wasn’t in the right frame of mind for tonight’s episode of The Saint. He said that he enjoyed all the fights – there’s a brawl about every six minutes – and didn’t like all the smooching, but he got lost in a plot detail. He’s done this before when he’s a little tired and overstimulated, but he convinced himself that the story’s macguffin was vitally important to his understanding of the plot. Plus he misheard “Process G” as something else, and stayed completely confused until he asked us to pause and explain why in the world some American company is going to pay an old man a million dollars for processed cheese.

Since he didn’t understand the macguffin, he decided the story was too complex for him and tuned out. It’s been a while, but I remember a New Avengers left him similarly stumped and bored. Interestingly, he realized afterward just where he misunderstood. He recited straight back to us a pretty good definition of a macguffin, that it’s merely the object that drives the plot and the action. Once he understood he was hung up on something unimportant, he conceded that he enjoyed the scraps.

And that’s a shame, because he could have enjoyed a good one, packed with great actors, with a very funny opening. It begins with Simon in a fancy hotel bar overhearing two young men mocking him, because he’s got the looks of a fellow upon whom damsels in distress throw themselves. Cue, immediately, a damsel in distress played by Annette Andre.

So Simon doesn’t give her story of death threats and macguffins any attention, congratulates the chaps on pulling a good gag, and has to run to her rescue because some villains, among them Peter Vaughan, Neil McCarthy, and Michael Robbins, really did send her that death threat because they want her father’s macguffin. McCarthy and Andre appeared together a few years later in a Randall and Hopkirk. Other familiar faces include Justine Lord as the maneater who wants to do all the smooching that bothered the kid, along with Ed Bishop, Geoffrey Keen, and David Jackson. That is a really terrific cast for a fun and entertaining story. Hopefully he’ll be less wired for the next episode, although I’m not expecting him to recognize Justine Lord in it since he tuned her out completely tonight.

The Saint 2.20 – The Lawless Lady

Several months ago, some wag on Twitter pointed out how the great Julian Glover has been in practically everything as a villain, and “this pest” has made enemies of the Doctor, Indiana Jones, the Rebel Alliance, and James Bond, among others (Jason King, the Avengers, etc.). For some reason, while our son gamely accepts his old man pointing out actors with good humor and a smile, he thinks the world of Glover because every casting director for the last sixty years has had his number for projects that he enjoys, and has labeled him “The Pest.” Even if he still can’t recognize him without a prompt. That is reserved only for Doctors, it seems. He also didn’t recognize Dawn Addams, who he saw in Danger Man just two weeks ago, so we shouldn’t be too surprised.

But our son’s oddball little Glover fandom – okay, the word’s a bit strong, but we’ll use it – led him to theorize that since Glover’s character from the legendary Doctor Who serial “City of Death” was splintered in time, there could be a version of Scaroth who is split across the multiverses. We were hiking a few months ago and he started putting together a Legion of Doom, of sorts, with some villains to battle his favorite heroes. And in his imagination, Lex Luthor and Davros and Megatron are right to call in Scaroth, because all his other selves have long experience battling all sorts of heroes throughout the multiverse. Glover’s character in this story actually comes close to winning a brawl with Simon Templar, which very few other villains on this show do.

Anyway, the kid enjoyed this one, in which Templar starts acting like his old, notorious gentleman thief self to get in with a gang of high-society criminals. There’s a little mystery about what’s going on to keep his attention, a funny bit where a butler gets locked in a closet, and it ends with a good scrap. It also features a brief appearance from Ivor Dean as the delightful, grouchy, and long-suffering Inspector Teal, “the bloodhound of Scotland Yard.” If we were digging deeper into this series, I’d be sure to pick a few more episodes with him, but as it is, I think we’ll see him just once more, later this month. We’ll also see Dawn Addams again, but after nine whole days, I’m not expecting him to recognize her.

The Saint 2.18 – The Romantic Matron

For a really long time now, Leslie Charteris’s The Saint has been one of those properties held onto by nostalgists. That’s fair; time marches on and nothing lasts forever, but it’s interesting to think about how once upon a time, Simon Templar was such a huge character, known by just about everybody. By the eighties, he wasn’t. I’d catch a glimpse or a reference here and there in Doctor Who Magazine in 1985-86 to there being a show, presumably British, called The Saint where a writer or actor whose names I recognized contributed, but I had no idea what it was. Eventually, I noticed it in the TV listings; it started appearing weeknights at 10 on WATL-36 – this was the show I mentioned last week – and once I finally stayed up late enough to try it out, I had the time of my life. This show was terrific!

Of course I expect everybody reading this nostalgic blog today knows that, but that was certainly not the case with my high school classmates. No matter, The Saint immediately moved up to number three on my list of favorite TV shows, right behind Who and The Avengers, despite nobody at any bookstore being able to find me a program guide with an episode list. The main thing keeping me from completely digging in to the six other ITC series available on WVEU that I mentioned in that link above was that most nights I trying to stay up late and watch this, and I had to do my homework sometime. WATL’s package was a strange one. It seemed to have been 95 hours – the 71 black-and-white Saint episodes and the 24 Return of the Saint installments.

So this evening, we gave a capsule introduction to the show and character to our kid. What did he need to know? Our hero is a gentleman adventurer and former master criminal, still notorious and still unable to stay out of trouble, played by Roger Moore, featured in ITC’s longest-running adventure program. It’s second only to The Avengers for number of episodes for an action-adventure hour of its day, it ran in syndication in just about every American market in the sixties before NBC picked up the color years and played them for three seasons on the network, and I’ve picked ten installments for our sample series. Did I pick them based on the guest stars rather than the plots? Probably!

And once again, our kid proved he can do it, given the right actor. “I think that’s Patrick Troughton,” he said, and my heart grew three sizes that day. Troughton joins some other recognizable British faces, including John Carson and Joby Blanshard, as playing Argentinians in this story. A modern program would probably not do that, but I was particularly impressed with Carson, who has to smooth-talk a truly gullible young American widow into helping him move some stolen gold out of the country. It’s a role that could have veered into stereotype very easily, and he didn’t let it.

Happily, the kid really enjoyed it. I worried that I may have picked a turkey, because I had forgotten that Templar hardly appears at all until about the midpoint, while the con gets moving. But there’s enough of an undercurrent of ugliness that it works. It’s only jaded and skeptical viewers who will spot Carson’s character as a baddie; the show presents him as an unlikely good guy being followed by some thugs. Then watching Templar put things together, while engaging in some great brawls, kept his attention very well. He was really pleased with the scheme to ship the gold out of the country in the romantic matron’s car: they’ve given her a solid gold bumper! We reminded him that he saw something a little similar in Freewheelers way back when, but that really was a while back, and he didn’t remember it that well. Maybe he’ll feel like revisiting it sometime. I’ll hint at it.