Man in a Suitcase 1.10 – Day of Execution

I initially selected “Day of Execution” a couple of months ago because of its superb guest cast, including Donald Sutherland and Rosemary Nicols as two of McGill’s friends, Robert Urquhart as a contact at a local newspaper, and, toward the end, T.P. McKenna as somebody who keeps sending McGill death threats but calling him “Mariocki” for some reason. Last week, I double-checked the five I’d picked to show our son, and noticed that Philip Broadley wrote this one. We’ve mentioned this writer several times here at the blog, most recently two weeks ago, and I started really looking forward to this. Man in a Suitcase seems to be exactly the right series where Broadley would excel.

Boy, did he ever. This episode is terrific. I’d watched maybe eight or nine episodes from Network’s DVD set when I got it about three years ago and other things got in the way, and never realized that McGill had a real place to live in London. Or maybe just for this one installment he does. He has a nice two-story apartment with a curious little half-kitchen partway up the stairs and regular dry cleaning service.

An old college buddy is in town, and he’s been romancing an attractive girlfriend. The rules of the economy of speaking parts tells us that at least one of them is in on these mistaken identity death threats, but this story keeps the audience guessing who, how, and why for a really long time, sustaining the tension beautifully through some location filming at Heathrow Airport and a cracking nighttime car chase. Our son said that for the most part he enjoyed it, but he also felt it was a little slow to him. So maybe it didn’t sustain itself quite as well in his corner, but I thought it was excellent.

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?

Danger Man 3.12 – The Man on the Beach

Do you know why ITC started planning to shoot Danger Man‘s fourth season in color? It wasn’t because CBS told them that they were going all-color in September 1966. It was because of costumes like this dress.

But seriously, “The Man on the Beach” is a very good adventure, and I’m glad that the kid liked it more than the previous two. It was first shown in December 1965 in the UK and February 1966 in the US. Happily, it’s another winner from the pen of Philip Broadley. I mentioned last week that some of his later scripts for ITC left me a little cold, but he seems to have excelled in this series’ world of espionage and double agents. Our son was a little confused by a couple of things in the story, but he came around. It’s a great opportunity to see Drake cut off from any support. He’s been framed while allegedly working one assignment, but some much-higher-up had him secretly working another one. But suddenly the much-higher-up cannot be located, and the person with whom he has been staying denies all knowledge of him. This many lies required a little recap for our boy.

Anyway, if you’ve been following along, you’ll be disappointed to learn that this installment, unlike the previous two, does not feature any performers who were later in Moon Zero Two. Although, had I picked “Have a Glass of Wine” or “The Colonel’s Daughter,” we would have seen Warren Mitchell. No, this one features Juliet Harmer, who would star in Adam Adamant Lives! the following summer, and the great Glyn Houston. There’s one bit right at the end where Houston’s left eye starts twitching. Normally I can recognize an actor and it not take me out of the story at all, but just for a moment there, I was so amazed by Houston’s control of his facial muscles that I had no idea how the episode actually ended.

Danger Man 2.8 – The Battle of the Cameras

So Danger Man finished its run of 39 episodes and that, as they say, was that. Except that United Artists started making James Bond movies, and those films started defying everybody’s box office expectations. With advance word on the third film, Goldfinger, indicating it was going to be the biggest one yet, Danger Man went back into production as a one-hour show, with John Drake now formally an agent for British intelligence instead of some nebulous office of NATO.

The numbering I’ll use is the British broadcast order, which, as is standard with ITC series, never had any connection to the order they were actually made. “The Battle of the Cameras” was made twelfth and shown eighth in the Midlands region, in December 1964. But in America, it was selected to lead the run in April 1965. Given a new name, Secret Agent, and a brilliant theme song by Johnny Rivers, the show aired on Saturday evenings on CBS.

It was a midseason replacement for The Entertainers, a forgotten variety show that can’t have been bad; Bob Newhart and Carol Burnett were the hosts! But the show somehow failed despite an incredibly sweet slot between Gilligan’s Island and Gunsmoke, which any hour-long show would kill for, and Secret Agent caught the attention of younger viewers and all those people who were crazy for spies and, well, secret agents. I should note that it wasn’t quite the first off the block for this new fad in the US, though. NBC’s Man from UNCLE beat it to American airwaves, but there’d be another three or four similar programs, including the fourth season of The Avengers, on the air within a year.

The American broadcasts of this series were reasonably close to the British ones, which is remarkable considering the period and how fast these had to be made to make CBS’s dates. There were 22 made in the first production block. 21 of these aired in America from April to September 1965, along with two from the second production block of 23, before CBS gave the show a three-month break. It came back in December to replace The Trials of O’Brien, which CBS moved to another night to fill in a different hole.

The kid squirmed a bit at the beginning, but he settled in and said he really enjoyed this. I thought it was excellent, and I was very glad to see that such an entertaining story was written by Philip Broadley, because as those of you with long memories may recall, I was kind of hard on the writer for penning some disappointingly ordinary episodes of Department S. But this was amusingly twisty, with each side getting ahead of the other, and it had some nice fight scenes. Guest stars include Dawn Addams as the femme fatale, Niall MacGinnis as her boss, and Patrick Newell as a bumbling cohort from Drake’s office.

I’m not sure what the contemporary reviews were like, but if I’d have been around in 1965, I’d have watched it every week. Did CBS have anything remotely as good as this in 1965? Well, yes, The Dick Van Dyke Show, but nothing else.

Jason King 1.21 – A Royal Flush

“I have seen this Jason King in the newspapers… always a different woman!” Yes, and this time it’s Penelope Horner.

Well, I was saying last time that the kid runs hot and cold on King, and this was another very, very cold one. Quizzing him afterward, his main objection to this story by Philip Broadley was that neither he nor Jason had any idea what was going on. Jason is trying to enjoy some kissy time with the girlfriend-of-the-week – which our son didn’t like either – and is oblivious to British and Russian intelligence storming around Italy trying to swipe a cigarette lighter from a chain of Mafia types. Eventually, we paused to ask why he couldn’t concentrate on the story. “I don’t understand why everybody wants the lighter,” he said, and we replied that we didn’t either; the story hadn’t yet told us. “But there’s probably microfilm in it,” Marie added, guessing correctly.

I’ll agree that this was not a particularly strong outing, and I can see the kid’s point. It is a really odd adventure in that Jason is so removed from the action. Earlier in the run, in the story “As Easy as A.B.C.”, the difference was more obvious: we were watching the villains as the main characters in that episode. In this outing, the time is split equally between the Mafia pipeline and their business, and Jason doing his romancing, so he was front and center most of the time, but unaware of the situation. In fact, we knew much more about it than he did until the last eight or nine minutes.

Five more to go; I really think he’ll enjoy the final one, but I hope he gets some satisfaction from at least a couple more.

Jason King 1.15 – Nadine

This hasn’t been our son’s favorite day of watching old TV with his old parents. Following this morning’s Stargate, which he found disastrously dull, he had a great day of food and Xbox and pinball and pizza, and then we watched this unbelievably slow and subtle Jason King. It’s so subtle that he may not have even realized until the finale that there was a criminal scheme anywhere at all. Ingrid Pitt and Patrick Mower are among the criminals who have targeted our hero for reasons not divulged until the very end. Jason’s aware that something is up and plays along, but I think the storytelling and the acting were so underplayed that it just looked like an hour of romance and sightseeing and driving around Greece and Italy. He’s much more interested in what I’ve told him we are watching tomorrow.

Jason King 1.12 – Toki

“Uh-oh,” I said, and Marie asked our son “Can you see why he said ‘uh-oh’?” and our son said “Ohhhhhh, yeah, it’s a white Jaguar!” And within a couple of minutes, it goes over the cliff for the fifth time in two years of this blog. That’s not the only bit of recycled footage in this one. At one point, a character played by Felicity Kendal is watching an old gangster movie on TV, and it’s the 1930s Chicago shootout scene from the Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) episode “Murder Ain’t What it Used to Be”. Or maybe she was watching Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased).

Anyway, this episode introduces Anne Sharp as Nicola Harvester, Jason’s publisher. She appears in seven episodes. She tries to be sympathetic as Jason falls for a (modern day) gangster’s girlfriend. Peter Wyngarde gets to stretch and be a little sad, and Kieron Moore gets to throw his weight around his gang, one of whom is played by Tony Beckley. But any story where the Jaguar going over the cliff is the high point isn’t going to be a favorite of mine. My heart has started to sink when I see that Philip Broadley has written today’s episode.

The other day, I noticed that a film crew had followed several guest actors in “All That Glisters” around Paris, but not Wyngarde, and wondered whether they scheduled the shoot for the same time he had a smaller crew following him around Vienna. I think I might be slightly wrong, because in this episode, we see Wyngarde doing some shopping, without any guest stars, at some fashionable Parisian shops like Hermes, Cartier, and Christian Dior.

Jason King 1.9-10 – All That Glisters… (parts one and two)

Well, this was an interesting production, just not an interesting story. Philip Broadley wrote the only two-part storyline for Jason King in either this series or Department S, and King is effectively a supporting character in it. There’s a lot of location filming in Paris, and proper location filming with a real crew and most of the guest cast, although not Peter Wyngarde. Maybe he was off doing the “home movies” guerilla filming in Venice for other episodes while Clinton Greyn, Lee Patterson, Anton Rodgers, Johanna Dunham, and Michael Gwynn were in Paris for this one. Madeline Smith gets the girlfriend part in both episodes, but she didn’t get to go to Paris either.

The strangest thing about it is that the lead character is an American PI named John Mallen, played by Clinton Greyn, and he’s overdubbed. In earlier posts about ITC productions, I’ve referenced ITC’s deep bench of American and Canadian actors who they’d employ, people like Paul Maxwell, Ed Bishop, David Bauer, or Stuart Damon, but instead of using one of them, they gave this part to Greyn, who was Welsh. Perhaps Greyn tried to do the accent of a private eye from Santa Monica and the producers decided later on that they’d erred, and so they called in Shane Rimmer to overdub him. Rimmer isn’t credited. He often wasn’t in his long career – he provides a voice in the Michael Caine movie Billion Dollar Brain without a credit as well, to give another example – but it kind of makes you wish they’d have just called Rimmer in to play the part in the first place. Even the guy who plays the client is overdubbed. That sounds like Bauer, but I wouldn’t swear to it.

Anyway, the story itself is long, long, padded, and short on action. There’s a surprising twist near the end, when the story moves to a Paris-Rome express train and somebody’s going to come to a grisly and unexpected end, that I liked. But this is the sort of production where impatient men keep checking their handguns for no other reason to let the audience know they’re packing.

Jason King 1.5 – Variations on a Theme

This blog’s meant to be about sharing experiences with my kid more than it is me, so let’s be very, very clear on this one: the kid barely tolerated Philip Broadley’s “Variations on a Theme.” This is a murky, shadowy spy story with nobody telling anybody much of anything, and the only actress who does want to tell somebody something is – in that way of damsels in distress in the fiction of days gone by – “too scared” to talk. He was restless and bored and the only time he brightened up was when a VW Beetle or hippie van showed up on screen, which was constantly, because the streets of Vienna were full of them in 1971.

From a production standpoint, though, I thought this was fascinating. I wonder whether the script was actually finished before they shipped Peter Wyngarde off to Vienna with what appears to be a single cameraman, and a few reels of what looks like 8mm film, with the ambient sound of crowd noises and music dubbed on later. So you’ve got Wyngarde outside the Vienna airport with all the resolution of somebody’s home movie, and actors in London watching him in 16mm.

The other interesting thing about the production is, of course, all the great guest actors. Ralph Bates is here as the spy who can’t quite come in from the cold yet, and Alexandra Bastedo is a Russian agent posing as a Swedish journalist, and Julian Glover, who our kid saw earlier this week when he watched The Empire Strikes Back again, is a British spy who really should have been used in other episodes beyond this. No, the kid still couldn’t recognize a face, but when I said “You saw him as the AT-AT commander the other day,” he replied “Well, you told me then that he was in everything, guess you’re right!”

Jason King 1.3 – Buried in the Cold Cold Ground

When we were watching Department S, it got to where my heart would sink a little when I noted the script was by Philip Broadley. It’s not that any of them were necessarily bad, but they were so ordinary, and could have worked for any other ITC adventure series. Sadly, after two really good installments to open this show, tonight’s episode was written by Broadley, and it’s an okay story about a criminal following some very obscure clues to a fortune he’d heisted without his boss’s okay several years before. The boss is played by Frederick Jaeger, but he doesn’t help things much. The story moves about as fast as molasses, with no urgency or danger. Our son was disappointed. It was far too slow, and didn’t even have a proper fight scene.

Department S 1.25 – A Fish Out of Water

“That was really confusing,” our son grumbled at the end of this one. I don’t think I’d agree, but it was interesting to watch an episode where absolutely everybody was angry with each other. Our heroes are all emotional and wound too tightly around this tale of an international drug rung to work at ease with each other, and the numerous villains – other than a bellhop, just about every single speaking part in this story is given over to the bad guys or somebody connected with them – are all looking for opportunities to betray each other. At one point, Cyril Shaps, channeling Peter Lorre, blackmails the femme fatale of the adventure for some smooching. You know it’s all rushing to a tragic finale, and you sort of want it to hurry up and put everybody out of their misery.

The most interesting part of the story is that we learn Jason King is a widower. The femme fatale in question looks an awful lot like his late wife, an actress named Marion. This leaves Jason acting more rashly than usual. And to think that he was sent into the field in the first place because it was Stewart who was supposedly too emotionally involved to handle the case.