Episode 4: A Matter of Wife and Death

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Honey goes down to the sea... 

or to the marina at least. 







Opening:

Honey is hired to protect a woman named Maggie (Dianne Foster) who has received death threats.

The villain turns out to be a villainess, whom Honey kicks in the butt in a decent fight scene. 








(Well, it's actually indecent, if you think about it.)






 Stills do reveal how much fight-scene choreography resembles dance. 
Slow-motion viewing of this girl-on-girl action also reveals a short gap between Honey karate-chopping the wrist of the bad gal's gun hand and the gun falling from the hand. Without slo-mo, you will hardly notice it. The why could be because something didn't look right on screen (so the in-between shot was simply cut out) or because one or the other actress's double was substituted between shots. Who knows? (As mentioned previously, Anne Francis took karate lessons during the course of production of "Honey West.")

The number of explosions is two: one in the opening and the other at the climax.
 

The first explosion is superimposed over a small sailboat. The last one is an under water explosion, appearing as nothing more than a big plume of water.
(BTW if the picture at left looks like a color photo, it's a happy accident. My screenshots sometimes take on a bluish cast—inexplicably to me.)




Sam fights with a frogman (in the living room instead of in the ocean where fights with frogmen belong).

Notes: The title is coincidentally similar to the title of a televised play that John Ericson was in back in 1951, "A Matter of Life and Death" on "The Philco Television Playhouse."

There is a Lt. Stone who grouses at Honey and Sam at the beginning of the "Snowman" episode, and a Lt. Kovacs who serves a similar function in this one. Kovacs is tamer than Stone, but otherwise interchangeable. In later episodes, a different actor, Ken Lynch, plays three or four different (?) police lieutenants. (One is Lieutenant Barney, another is Lieutenant Keller, but another is Lt. Barney Keller. Sounds like the exact same guy.)

Warning: All ratings are graded on a curve because “Honey West” is a guilty pleasure that doesn’t get better.


Overall rating: 3/5

Martial Arts rating: 4/5







Episode Four: A Matter of Wife and Death (You are here already)












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