Episode 10: A Neat Little Package
Previous: Episode Nine: The Flame and the Pussycat Next: Episode Eleven: A Stitch in Crime
The marque outside the cheap hotel advertises special weekly rates.
Nothing jumps out from the sign about hourly rates, but when Honey walks into the lobby, she is challenged by the desk man (Gilchrest “Gil” Stuart) who seems to be suspicious of who Honey is and why she is there.
Maybe it has something to do with the way that Honey sashays in. She happens to have a long silky kerchief hanging from her right hip, swinging in synch with her dress as she moves—that is, when the kerchief doesn’t move in counterpoint to her sway, maybe because she gives it a little push forward with her hand.
“Sister, where do you think you’re going?” the desk man demands.
“My husband’s room,” she replies. “Third finger, left hand
and all.” She flashes her fake wedding ring for him.
“Yeah? Room what?” This place is low, but the desk man seems
to be determined to keep it from getting any lower.
Honey sighs, almost as if she gets this all the time, but that it’s no big deal. She reaches into her purse and comes up with a key. It has a
big tag on it, which, we might imagine, is made of hard plastic, and even in black and white, it looks as if it might
be bright red. On it is a number in unmissable white characters: "318."
“Three-eighteen,” she says.
“The rates go double,” he tells her.
“So, two can’t live as cheap as one,” Honey tosses off, and she
saunters toward the elevator.
As the door to the elevator closes, a man who has been sitting in the lobby throughout the scene lowers his newspaper and stares after her. (The headline on his paper, now upside-down, reads “Here We Go Again: New Police Scandal! Cop Held in Jewel Theft.”)
This-No-Name Hood nods to the desk man, and the desk man winks back, before turning to the switchboard behind him. He puts a receiver to his ear and plugs in a connection, presumably to a phone inside the hotel rather than an outside line. If we have our thinking caps on, we might suspect that he is connecting to room 318 and whoever might be there now.
Meanwhile, Honey gets out of the elevator and finds herself directly across from the door to room 318. She unlocks it and goes in. She does not open the door all the way before entering, and she does not look to see what and who is in the room before she has committed herself to being in the room. She lets the door close behind her and finds herself looking down the barrel of a semiautomatic pistol.
It is funny how a gun does not have to be directly in your face—it can
be, as it is in this case, perhaps, ten feet away, and it doesn’t matter
whether it’s a big cannon or a pocket pistol—but when it is pointed at you, it
seems as if you can’t look anywhere but down the tunnel that could launch a
deadly missile.
The man (Val Avery) holding the pistol looks oily or sweaty. We can’t tell which it is, but does it really matter? His suit is rumpled, his
tie and collar loosened. He is dark-haired, but with a retreating hairline,
and his mustache doesn’t compensate for the loss of hair or his seedy looks.
“So, ah, you're Mrs. Grady, huh?” he says.
“So, you’re the welcoming committee,” says Honey coolly.
“You can call me Roger.”
“Must I?” asks Honey, like somebody not looking
down the barrel of a gun for the first time.
“Now, ah….” starts Roger as he gets up and approaches her, gun leveled at
her chest. “…we go find the, ah, long-lost Mr. Grady, huh?”
“You’re so forceful,” Honey purrs. “Your name is Roger?”
“Don’t get cute. Move.” Roger gestures toward the door with
his gun as he glances in that direction.
Suddenly, Honey tosses the silky kerchief—that has been at her side the whole time—into Roger’s face, and chops down on his wrist, making him drop the gun.
He bends over. (Partly to try to retrieve the gun?) But Honey chops down on his carotid artery at the back of his neck. Roger goes down, and Honey is out the door and in the hallway.
The elevator is directly across and she goes straight for it, but it opens. Just in time, she dashes to the side and out of sight.
The unnamed hood from the lobby steps out and covers the few steps to room 318. Honey steps back into sight and heads to the end of the hall where there is an open window onto a fire escape and a door marked “Stairway.” She opens the door, which closes very slowly. But instead of heading down the stairs, she climbs out the window and out of sight. (This is starting to remind me of the opening to “Whatever Lola Wants….”)
The hoods come out of 318 and walk toward the end of the
hallway. Roger, rubbing the back of his head, is trailing the No-Name Hood. They
see that the stairway door is still in the process of closing (almost as if
somebody pushed it open again after Honey did, just so that the fact that it is
not yet closed couldn't be missed even by the slowest hoodlum—or TV viewer).
Meanwhile, Honey is standing on the balcony, watching the hoods fall for her ruse and go down the stairs.
She now crosses the balcony to a metal ladder attached to the wall of the building, and she climbs down it.
While she does this, the hoods reach the lobby. The desk man is not particularly alert, but at least he is behind the desk.
“Hey, where is she?” the No-Name Hood demands.
“Who?”
“The blonde!”
“Uh, she didn’t come down.”
“Let’s look in the alley,” the No-Name Hood says to Roger. “Come on.” They run out of the hotel.
(Not to break the spell of this exciting race between the relentless hunters and their resourceful but vulnerable prey—but we can now see that the exterior of the hotel does not match the exterior in the opening, establishing shot. Many things are different in the two images. Here, the sign with “Hotel” on it replaces the big, apparently three-sided marque. This plainer sign looks as if it was put up two minutes before the scene was shot, and the buildings and businesses around this hotel look nothing like the ones around the hotel in the opening shot. Just for example, the establishment next door to the hotel is now "Jack's Bar & Grill" whereas it was a barber shop in the earlier shot, which I suspect was taken from stock footage of 1950s vintage. Notice, too, that the few people on the sidewalk are dressed more fashionably and up-to-date—sixties-wise—than those in the opening shot. As this scene unfolds— and we get a wider view of the street—it all looks like a Hollywood backlot made to look like a city street.)
Honey reaches the ground and turns toward the only way out—just in time to see the hoods arrive at the alley entrance.
She hides behind some trash cans and calls Sam on her secret-decoder-ring radio.
(It isn’t a decoder ring, really, but I want to call it that, because “decoder rings” are classic gadgets; BTW it’s not to be confused with the wedding ring she was flashing earlier because the decoder ring is on her right ring finger.)
“Sam, I’m trapped in the alley,” she says breathlessly.
She sounds as if she has exerted herself and is tense. All of this heightens the sense of
verisimilitude and demonstrates good acting and/or good directing (from Murray
Golden).
“You better back the truck in, all the way,” adds Honey. So, Sam starts his engine and takes off, driving a little faster than would be circumspect but fast enough to show that he gets the urgency of the situation.
We see a wide, somewhat elevated view of the lot—er, street—as Sam swings around the corner from the street in front of the hotel, tires screeching. He drives past the alley entrance, slams on the breaks and back-turns—fast—into the alley, forcing the two hoods to get out of his way. He doesn’t slow down at all until he has backed deep into the alley.
“What’re you doin’ here?” demands Roger when he reaches the van.
“Delivery,” says Sam.
If there was any doubt up until now as to which of these hoods is in charge, there isn’t anymore.
“I’ll look in the back,” says the No-Name Hood. He points a commanding
finger at Sam. “You. Get out.”
As No-Name heads to the rear of the van, Sam climbs out, complaining, “Why do I always hafta run inta problems like that….” And he delivers a right cross to Roger’s jaw. (Roger never sees anybody's tricks coming, as we shall continue to see.)
Meanwhile, No-Name opens one of the rear doors of the van only to be kicked by Honey, sending him backward into the trash cans.
And off Sam goes, out of the alley, and back around the corner, tires screeching at every chance.
FADE TO BLACK on a great opening.
The regular opening credits and montage for "Honey West" follow, and these would have been chased with commercials—for cigarettes or something—back on 19 November 1965, when this episode first aired. (That was
fifty-seven years ago as I write this, and I remember it like yesterday. Well,
almost.)
Now back to “Honey West.” The episodes always begin with the
title superimposed over an establishing shot. Often, and in this case, the shot
is of the building where Honey is supposed to live and work. (In the next
episode, this will not be the case, because Honey and Sam will be taking a road
trip, but let’s not get ahead ourselves.)
Inside their office, Honey and Sam are grilling their client, Francis Grady (J. Pat O’Malley), who evidently told them almost nothing about why he hired them to go to that hotel room.
Until recently, you see, Grady operated a corner newsstand, apparently not far from the offices of H. West and Co., and he has been there for years. Honey and Sam have been his customers, and they were on friendly terms, although they didn't socialize. Eight days ago, something changed. The newsstand was shuttered without explanation, and Grady disappeared for a while.
Only now, Grady reveals that he was in the hospital
following a traffic accident. When he woke up, he not only could not recall the
accident, but he could not remember anything that had happened during the previous
three months.
When he was discharged, he discovered that he had a hotel room key and a one-hundred-dollar bill in his pockets. He soon became frightened.
And the thing that
really scares him is what he found in the trunk of his car. He takes Honey and Sam to see it for themselves. He hands Sam a package wrapped in newspaper.
“Would you open it? I don’t want to touch it again.”
There are stacks of
bills in it. Grady says they add up to $150,000.
Honey dubs it, "A neat little package."
Grady doesn’t know what he has gotten himself into, but it
worries and frightens him.
Grady: All I want to do is go back to my stand. All I want to do is sell…
Cut to the newsstand.
Sam: …Newspaper!! Newspaper!!
A bespectacled Sam is hawking newspapers. A man (Norman Palmer) buys a paper but also asks what happened to Grady. Sam claims that he bought the business from Grady.
 |
| "Up periscope!" |
Honey and Grady are in the van, watching Sam through a periscope and listening to him over a radio as he talks to customers. Grady takes a peek and identifies the man talking to Sam as a regular customer who owns a nearby shoe store. Honey notes that a lot of people have asked after him. A lot of people care about him.
Sam reports that this seems like a “cold lead.”
Honey wants to stick it out. Suddenly, she spots the hood, Roger, lurking nearby and watching the newsstand.
(It occurs to me now that Roger might be able to recognize Sam as the driver who sucker punched him in the alley, but this never comes up. Must be that Sam looks different with glasses. He does, too, doesn't he?)
Roger gets in a car with the No-Name Hood, and they drive away.
Honey says, “Just peddle your papers, Sam. I'll be in touch.” And she follows Roger’s car, which is driven by the No-Name Hood.
Sam vainly calls into his glasses, “Honey, Honey, Honey!” as she drives off. Just then, a middle-aged woman (Barbara Morrison) walks by Sam.
“I beg your pardon, young man,” she says indignantly.
Sam chews seductively on the bow of his glasses and replies, “Sorry, ma’am. I guess I got carried away.”
HARRUMPH! (She actually says nothing, but that look means, "Harrumph!")
Meanwhile, Honey finds the black car driven by the villains. (If not always, then often, the villains on “Honey West” drive black cars.) It is parked next to the Golden Lotus Restaurant, which turns out to serve Polynesian cuisine.
(An inset of the sign is in the lower right of photo.)
Before going in, Honey looks over a fence and sees a pond in
back of the restaurant.
She finds the dining room empty except for an East Asian man (Harold Fong) vacuuming the carpet. He mistakes Honey for someone responding to an ad for employment.
Meanwhile, back at the newsstand, a nervous man asks Sam about the whereabouts of Grady. Sam takes a picture of the man with a camera-wrist watch.
Cut to the picture being developed in Honey and Sam’s darkroom. Grady is there, and he identifies the man as a good customer named Charles Addison who once gave Grady a big tip and praised him for his honesty. Addison owns a major construction company.
Sam asks the golden question: “How does he fit in with a
package of money wrapped in newspaper and two gunsels in a cheap hotel?”
Honey replies, “We won’t find out standing here.”
Sam asks, “So, what are we going to do?”
“I’m going to look for a job,” says Honey.
Honey walks into the camera, closer and closer:
darkening the screen until it is black;
We then see a dark image walking away from the camera, and a new scene appears.
It turns out to be a dark-haired woman, who turns out to be Honey in a dark wig and using the alias Lana (?) O'Brian. She is in the manager’s office at the Golden Lotus, thanking Mr. Chico (Arthur Batanides) for hiring her as a cigarette girl. (Can we say overqualified?)
Chico tries to get fresh, but Honey strategically puts her tray of cigarettes between them and says she has to get busy. “I take my job very seriously.” She backs awkwardly out of the office.
Back in Honey’s apartment, Sam, Honey, and Aunt Meg are trying to jog Grady’s memory. Suddenly, Grady recalls that Addison was the one who gave him both the key and the money.
A desk clerk (Charles Wagenheim) tells them Mr. Addison is in room 204, but he isn’t answering his phone.
Then Honey and Sam spot the No-Name Hood coming off the
elevator.
 |
| "It's a door, Sam, not a jar." |
They go up and find the door to 204 ajar.
Although they do not, we could notice a number of marked differences between this hotel and the frowsy one in the opener. For one thing, this place has a more spacious lobby, the hallways are clean and carpeted. Room 204 even has a fireplace.
But a less than pleasant difference, which they can't help but notice, is that room 204 has a dead body in the bathtub.
Back in Honey’s apartment, Aunt Meg and Sam are in the living room when Honey wanders in, apparently getting ready to go to her undercover job as a cigarette girl. She hasn’t put on her black wig yet, and she's humming “Aloha ’Oe.”
“Well, if it isn’t Miss Polly-nesia,” says Aunt Meg.
"Well, partner?" says Honey.
Sam doesn't like it. Going undercover at "that hokey jungle restaurant" is too dangerous. The same thing that happened to Addison could happen to her.
"I don't go swimming with my clothes on," says Honey.
 |
| "I know what to do: 'Cigars..." |
Honey dismisses Aunt Meg's worries, too. Then Sam gives her the photo of Addison, in a manila envelope, and Honey comments, "If there is a tiger in your hokey jungle, this could be the bait to make him roar."
"Or put him in the mood to kill," says Sam, but he nevertheless plays Q, as he often does, explaining the listening device that Honey is going to wear, camouflaged by a flower over her left ear.
Sam: You know what to do.
Honey: Of course. "Cigars..."
At the restaurant, Honey continues: "...cigarettes."
As she distributes cigars and cigarettes to the patrons, one of he customers is none other than Aunt Meg—pretending she doesn't know Honey.
"Oh, young lady, would you do me a favor and deliver this to the manager, please?" She gives Honey the manila envelop containing the photo of Addison.
Honey takes it, but the maître d’ (Clarence Lung) tries to grab it from her.
Aunt Meg deliberately drops her fur wrap on the floor. The maître d’ picks it up, missing his chance to prevent Honey from carrying the envelope into the manager’s office herself.
The photo of Addison rattles Chico.
Honey tells Chico that a woman in the restaurant gave it to her, and Chico rushes out...
...leaving Honey
alone in his office with the opportunity to plant a bug under Chico’s desk.
Chico finds out
from the maître d’ that the lady who left the photo was whisked away in a waiting cab. He tells the maître d' to go find Roger. Chico goes back into his office and is annoyed when Honey says she recognizes the man in the
photo from the story in the paper about a bathtub drowning. Chico shoos her out.
Honey walks past Roger on her way to the front door. He evidently recognizes her before he heads for Chico’s office. (None of Honey’s many disguises ever seem to fool anyone for long.)
Honey walks around the building until she is outside the window of Chico’s office.
Chico and Roger are inside.
(This is reminiscent of other episodes, such as “In the Bag,” where Honey also spies on the bad guys through a window.)
Using her listening-device-disguised-as-a-flower-over-her-left-ear, Honey and Sam (parked in their nearby van) learn that Chico and Roger are talking on the intercom on Chico's desk with Ed Stashall, the biggest loan shark in town. They fear that their link to Addison has been exposed.
Honey talks to Sam over her decoder-ring-radio, and pieces together what has happened.
Stashall loaned Addison $100K and expected it back with interest. Addison gave the money to Grady for safekeeping, but Grady’s amnesia put him out of circulation.
"Honey, our tiger has sharp teeth," observes Sam. "You better come out now."
"Sam, the hunt's just begun. He was on the intercom. Stashall's in that building somewhere. I'm going to see if I can find him."
Sam tells Honey to leave, but she stops talking to him and heads back to the restaurant.
She runs smack into Roger, who wants to take her to see the boss and says to her, “No tricks.”
She offers him a free cigar, and he takes it. (It is his own fault that he has immediately fallen for one of her tricks.)
While he lights the cigar, Honey hits him with her cigarette tray.
She proceeds to flip and chop and then tie him up.
Waiting for her behind the door is the maître d’ with a gun.
Honey is re-acquainted with Chico, too,
and then there is another man standing with his back to the room.
Honey is asked to remove her wig. Which revelation impresses Chico, if no one else.
It is soon revealed that the other man in the room is Stashall.
And when Honey sees his face, she is surprised, because he is the man that she previously took to be a flunky.
Stashall offers Honey a drink and starts unpacking the whole case for her. He admits to Honey that he loaned Addison $100,000 and demanded that $150,000 be repaid in 30 days. Addison told Stashall that Grady would deliver the money, but then Grady disappeared, and when Addison couldn't pay, Stashall personally made an example of him.
Honey relays all of this to Sam via her decoder-ring-radio.
Then Stashall takes her drink away from her and orders Chico and the maître d’ to drown Honey in the “lake” out back. (Apparently, Stashall has delusions of about his restaurant's grounds. That body of water out back is a pond at best, but if Stashall insists on it being a lake, who would be foolish enough to argue with him?)
 |
| "Come on, baby, let's you take a swim, huh?" |
Sam has heard enough by this time. He grabs a gun and heads into the restaurant.
When Sam enters Stashall’s office, Stashall is behind the door.
(Get a clue, gang. When you stealthily enter a room: there is always somebody behind the door.)
Stashall karate chops Sam’s wrist, making him drop the gun.
There ensues a terrific fight in which Stashall demonstrates that he is just as proficient at martial arts as Sam. He also has weapons mounted on his walls (as well as tiki art), and he takes a machete-like sword and goes after Sam with it.
Sam nevertheless manages to disarm Stashall and lays him out in the middle of the room (actually, down but not out).
Sensing that Honey is in immediate danger, Sam dashes out the
back door without tying up Stashall.
Honey is, indeed, having some difficulty. And the script
is having a continuity problem. She and the two goons bent on drowning her
are only just walking down the steps that lead to the pond, er, “lake.” This should
have been accomplished earlier, while the fight was still going on between Sam and Stashall. Only
now does Honey try to turn the tables on her would-be murderers.
Chico and his maître d’ put up as much of a fight as she
does, and they outnumber her, but this fight scene proves to be more watery and less well lit than the fight between Sam and Stashall. (Ordinarily, it is difficult enough to capture screen
shots of action because of all the movement. The problem of taking a good shot is compounded in the
dark.)
So, Honey is fighting two men at once, and they have restrained her, between the pair of them, and are trying to drown her in the lake (as Stashall would have it), when Sam finally gets there. (Where has he been? We saw him rush out of the office more than twenty seconds ago. The lake can't be that far from Stashall's office.)
In any case, Sam's arrival makes it a much fairer fight. Then Stashall joins in, theoretically making the odds favor the home team again, but this only makes the fight splashier. Finally, Honey and
Sam subdue all the men. (Although, Chico and the maître d’ just sort of disappear from
view; supposedly knocked out. Or maybe they suddenly remembered that they have a restaurant to
run.)
Honey and Sam can congratulate themselves on having "caught that tiger after all."
 |
| "Good Gimp." |
In the epilogue, Sam and Honey are sitting at the water’s edge while the police escort the bad guys back up the steps, toward the restaurant.
Sam finds out that Honey has only charged Grady $100, and
she doesn’t want to take even that much from him.
“Poor Grady,” she says by way of explanation.
Sam is miffed. “All this work for nothing?”
 |
| "Oh, Pancho!" "Oh, Cisco!" |
“Nice Sam.”
“What am I going to do with you?”
“Buy me a Polynesian dinner. I’m hungry after all that
swimming.”
That’s a wrap. And we can all go to that Polynesian
restaurant that is apparently still open for business despite the fact that the
owner, manager, and maître d’ have all been carted off to the hoosegow. (If it were up to me, I would put Harold Fong in charge of the place. Maybe he could turn it into a real Chinese restaurant.)
Continuity problem
The two
climactic fight scenes, one involving Sam and the other Honey, should be in progress simultaneously, but instead it is as if Honey’s fate is suspended
in time until the end of Sam’s fight with Stashall. The climax is exciting, but it doesn’t make
sense in terms of continuity.
In this episode, Honey has a radio in her ring and an
earpiece that is dedicated to picking up the signal from a thimble-shaped
listening device that she plants under Chico’s desk. Once again, Sam uses the
radio-glasses that he used in “Snowman.” In one shot, you can even see the
little speaker at the end of the left bow. (Zoom in on the picture of Sam nibbling on the bow of his glasses, and look at the end of the other bow.)
The van that Sam and Honey drive—the one that Honey calls a truck—is a state-of-the-art (circa 1965) surveillance-mobile with two-way radio, various listening devices, a reel-to-reel tape recorder, and a periscope. Oh, yes, there are also guns mounted on the interior walls.
The
exterior of the van can be disguised with the logos of various fictitious businesses: H.W.
Bolt & Co. TV Repairing [sic], Daily Gazette, or Clay’s Laundry—whatever seems the
least conspicuous considering the van’s location on a given job.
Honey definitely refers to Sam as her "partner." She might have done so before, but when Sam originally appeared on "Burke's Law," he was her employee.
Part of the fascination with private eyes is that they often
seem to be straddling the divide between lawful and unlawful—as well as the one between common decency and indecency. They
are, by trade, not entirely honest with everyone; although, like Sam Spade in “The
Maltese Falcon,” they may have a code that they follow; a sense of integrity that isn't necessarily visible to everyone else.
Much of this ambivalence can be explained. Private
investigators have to be ethical toward those they serve—their clients. When
you are a private investigator, it is one thing to be deceptive and devious
toward the people you have been hired to work against; but it would be quite
another thing to behave dishonestly toward those who hire you, who are paying
for your services. A real-life private eye named Gil Lewis once said that the
thing he hated most about private eyes in the movies is that they make
sarcastic remarks to their clients. “I save my sarcasm for my clients’
enemies,” he said. Honey and Sam do try to walk that line, and they do
it to a fault in this episode.
Even so, the police ought to be hassling H. West and Co. the way they did in the last episode, but the authorities seem to be far more indulgent toward the private eyes this time around. We don’t see any police until the epilogue, and then they have no lines—we only see their backs.
A restaurant named the Golden Lotus ought to be a Chinese restaurant, by my lights, but here it is Polynesian, instead. Go figure. Historically, many so-called Polynesian restaurants have served mostly Cantonese food.
"Tiki culture" was popular following World War II and throughout the 1950s an '60s. Donn Beach and Victor "Trader Vic" Bergeron both pioneered and expanded Polynesian-themed establishments, which were originally bars, in the 1930s. Beach expanded his bar into a restaurant called Don the Beachcomber in Hollywood in 1937. Bergeron began in the San Francisco area but expanded his franchise by partnering with hotel chains. The tiki fad faded in the '80s an 90s. Its lasting impact is the drinks the tiki restaurants served, such as the Mai Tai. As to why a tiki restaurant was chosen as a front for the loan sharks in this episode, the writers could have been aware that the Beachcomber restaurant in Chicago was a hangout for mobsters who almost certainly had their fingers in the business.
 |
| Moro (Philippines) swords, top to bottom: barong, bangkung, bolo. (Not to scale.) |
It could be one of these blades, all used by the Moro people of the Philippines. Or it could be a banyal (not pictured, but also used by the Moro), which has the shortness of the bolo knife, but a shape similar to the bangkung.
"Stashall" seems an unusual name. It could be an alternative spelling of names such as "Stachel" or even "Stanshall," but maybe it is more significant that the name could be read as "stash-all."
In the credits, “Maitre d’ is listed as “Maitre ’D,” with the apostrophe in the wrong place, among other errors. (How many can you spot?)
Cigarette girls were walking concessionaires who sold cigarettes, cigars, and, often, candy and gum, usually in restaurants and nightclubs, which hired them. They characteristically were young women who wore revealing costumes and carried their wares on trays strapped across the backs of their necks, much as is portrayed in this episode in which Honey goes undercover as a cigarette girl.
In the 1920s, cigarette girls became popular, especially in speak-easies, which were illicit bars that operated in the U.S. during Prohibition. After Prohibition ended, they became even more popular in nightclubs. In their heyday, cigarette girls worked at theaters and sports arenas, as well. They were very common in the United States and Europe before the 1960s but began to become passé during the 1950s, due to the advent of cigarette machines. However, there are some venues where cigarette girls can still be found today, for example, in some establishments in Las Vegas.
Even so, this is another case
where “Honey West” is treating an institution or occupation that had already seen
better days as if it still thrived. (See for example “Live a Little…. Kill a Little,”
where Honey goes undercover as a taxi dancer, an occupation that had pretty
much died out, or was well along in the process of dying, by 1965.)
Why I don’t take more screen shots of action scenes: Because the images tend to be blurry when people move fast. [Note: from the future: I think I get better at taking action shots in later episodes, but it is still a challenge.]
Worse still are scenes where the fight takes place in the dark as in this episode. Murky = blurry.
Snappy patter:
Sam: How does he [Mr. Addison] fit in with a package of
money and two gunsels in a cheap hotel?
The word “gunsel” got past the censors when Warner Brothers
made “The Maltese Falcon” because the censors assumed it meant “gunman” or
something like that, but it actually means a young man who is kept by an older
man (from Yiddish meaning "little goose"). Never mind. The sanitized meaning of the word quickly found its way into
the noir lexicon.
Val Avery looks terribly oily when he first appears on
screen.
Nevertheless, the bit players do some of the best acting.
The best thing to watch in this episode is J. Pat
O’Malley’s expressive face.
Barbara Morrison is great, too.
And Harold Fong. (It’s not as easy as it looks to point
convincingly.)
Roy Jenson gets a position high on the cast list (just beneath J. Pat O’Malley), but without a character name, as if there was an effort to conceal the surprise revelation that he is the arch villain. I don’t see any point in that. If we have watched the episode before we see the credits, his identity is hardly still a secret.
Honey hums “Aloha ’Oe,” which is also heard over the sound system in the restaurant. It is probably the best-known Hawaiian song in the world. It was written by Princess Liliuokalani in 1878. She became the queen of Hawaii in 1891, but was deposed in a coup two years later.
Who are the actors?
J. Pat O’Malley (1904-1985) was born in Great Britain (now the United Kingdom). He did voice work in Disney’s “One Hundred and One Dalmatians” (1961), appeared in “Hello Dolly!” (1969), and did TV series such as "Burke's Law" and “The Twilight Zone.” As a youth in England, he recorded hundreds of songs. Other movies: "Mary Poppins" (1964), "The Jungle Book" (1967), "The Long, Hot Summer" (1958), "Willard" (1971), "Alice in Wonderland" (1951), "Lassie Come Home" (1943), "The White Cliffs of Dover" (1944). Other TV: "Maude," "Bonanza," "Gunsmoke," "The Untouchables," "The Wild Wild West," "Mannix," "The Brady Bunch," "I Dream of Jeannie," "The Beverly Hillbillies," "The Fugitive," "The Andy Griffith Show," "Perry Mason," "Rawhide," "The Dick Van Dyke Show," "Bewitched," and the list goes on.
Val Avery (1924-2009) was born in Philadelphia as Sebouh Der Abrahamian the son of an Armenian political activist and an actress. He died in New York City at age 85. He was a busy and respected actor who played supporting roles in some of the best movies and television series. His enviable resume includes movies: "The Magnificent Seven" (1960), "Donnie Brasco" (1997), "Shaft" (1973), "Faces" (1968), "Papillon" (1973), "Requiem for a Heavy Weight" (1962), and the list goes on; and TV series: "The Twilight Zone," "Bonanza," "Gunsmoke," "Kojak," "The Odd Couple," "The Mod Squad," "Mission: Impossible," "Get Smart," and more.
Roy Jenson (1927-2007), a Canadian-born actor, made a good
living playing bit parts—over 200 of them. In fact, there is an inside joke in
having him turn out to be the arch villain in this episode, because he was well-known
as the guy who does not get a credit when playing the thug, soldier, guard, or
outlaw who might only have a couple of lines and not seem important to the
plot. Along the way, though, he was in some classic films, from “The Robe” (1953)
to “Chinatown” (1974).
Barbara Morrison (1907-1992) was a British-born character
actress who appeared in movies such as “From Here to Eternity” (1953) and "Papillon" (1973), as well as TV
fare including “Little House on the Prairie” in 1977 and “Batman,” “Hogan’s
Heroes,” and “The Beverly Hillbillies” all in 1967.
Harold Fong (1911-1982) was an American-born character actor
who appeared in movies such as Cheech and Chong’s “Up in Smoke” (1978) and many
TV series including “Peter Gunn” and “Gomer Pyle: USMC.”
Clarence Lung (1914-1993) was an American-born actor who appeared
in dozens of movies and TV series including “Dr. Kildare,” “The Outer Limits,” “My
Favorite Martian,” and “Bewitched,” just in the mid-1960s. He got his start playing
Japanese officers in World War II films such as “First Yank in Tokyo” (1945).
Arthur Batanides (1923–2000) was a character actor who had
some high-profile roles in “Star Trek: The Original Series” and the “Police
Academy” movies. He often played bad guys as he did on “Honey West,” but he was
also a standup comic early in his career. He appeared in such series as “The
Twilight Zone” and “Get Smart.”
Overall rating: 4/5
Martial arts rating: 4/5
Episode One: The Swingin' Mrs. Jones
Comments
Post a Comment