Episode 12: A Million Bucks in Anybody's Language
Previous: Episode 11: A Stitch in Crime Next: Episode 13: The Gray Lady
The camera passes downward, looking through latticework. (If it looks familiar, that is because it is the same lattice that appeared in Episode 10: "A Neat Little Package." See notes below.)
Beyond this lattice is Honey West herself: Taking a bubble bath while talking on the telephone. She is multitasking.
"I think the
phone's tapped," he says. He won't say by whom.
He can't come to
her office because, "They're watching me everywhere." Who is
watching him? He won't tell.
He finally tells
Honey to come to his office, not to park on the street, pull all the way in,
and be careful.
"Don't let 'em see you," he says. Who? He hangs up the phone before Honey can ask.
Now she is puzzled and worried. It is evident that she considers Charlie a friend, but we do not yet understand their connection.
It is a gloomy night as Honey drives over to Charlie's office and parks near the building, by two other cars, one of them, perhaps, Charlie's ride. She goes into his office. Etched on the door are letters spelling out, "Charles Neeley, Private Investigations." Honey opens the door and calls Charlie's name, but no one answers.
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| "The envelope, please." |
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| He is not a happy P.I., |
They arrive in time to see Charlie's car—with someone in it—explode in his driveway.
Honey openly
declares that she will be investigating in tandem with the police.
"Since when
has H. West and Company walked out on a client?" she asks rhetorically.
Sensibly, the Lieutenant points out that Charlie is dead. Honey says that since Charlie left her money in an envelope, he is her client. (Is he? Even in death?)
Just then, they hear footsteps outside the door. Sam turns off the light. A man opens the door and steps into the darkened room. He has a drawn revolver. Sam jumps him only to discover that it is the Lieutenant.
"Any luck with his sister?" asks
Honey.
"Yes and no.
He wouldn't discuss it with her. He's been running scared, all right. Stayed at
her place a couple of nights. Like he was afraid to go home."
The Lieutenant leaves, but Honey and Sam stay, giving the office a thorough search. even tearing up the carpet. They are about to give up when Honey uses the oldest of tricks: She rubs the side of a pencil's nib over the depressions on a blank pad of paper to highlight the writing from a sheet that was previously above it, but which has been removed.
It is a business
called The Tiger's Torso. Honey never heard of it, but Sam has. Here he buries the
lead by describing it as "a very fancy drive-in restaurant out on Melrose.
It's quite jazzy." It is actually a take-out restaurant featuring scantily
clad waitresses. (This was before employee's of such establishments were re-dubbed "wait-persons," "wait-staff," and
"servers.")
"How's the
food?" asks Honey.
"That's
funny," says Sam. "I never even thought about that."
Honey and Sam go back to their own office, where they find the place ransacked...
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| (Notice Sam's gun carelessly pointed at Meg.) |
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...and Aunt Meg tied up,. |
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| ...and Bruce confined in a desk drawer. |
Aunt Meg volunteers, "I'm absolutely all right! Oh, my! It was exciting!" Then she hastens to add, "Sam, don't look at me that way. They didn't do a thing to me, not a thing."
"'They'?
Who?" Sam asks.
But Aunt Meg did manage to pick the pocket of one of the thugs.
This is the sign that Sam is looking at through the periscope in the surveillance van:
The Tiger's Torso evidently does not hire male servers. Honey spends ample time in this episode in a skimpy costume consisting of a clingy tiger-striped outfit that covers her torso plus one shoulder and arm (while exposing the other shoulder and arm). It fully exposes both legs, which are covered in fishnet stockings.
(BTW throughout much of this episode, Sam wears a shirt, or jacket of some kind,
that looks something like a sailor suit. It is not a look that ages well.)
"How you do carry on," says Honey, speaking clearly into her microphone disguised as a pen.
Apparently, Sam has been spending so much time ogling Honey in her revealing costume that he has failed to notice that something suspicious is going on at this restaurant. The owner, Mr. Garth (Steve Ihnat), has personally given two customers their box lunches.
"So, maybe he
likes the personal touch," says Sam.
"Nope. They both were take-out orders. They both were ready. They didn't have to wait."
(So what is Honey
saying? That call-ahead take-out orders were not possible in 1965?)
"Well, tip me
off if it happens again," says Sam.
"Right,"
says Honey. (She does not say, "You're the one who's supposed to be
surveilling the whole area. Keep your damned eyes peeled! What do we have this
expensive surveillance van for, anyway?" Apparently so that Sam can get in
his ogling time.)
Speaking of which...
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| The driver tries to hide the box. |
Sam shows his private eye license, and the driver says, "Big Deal," as well he might, but Sam points out the peculiarity of taking a box lunch on an airline flight. Don't they serve food on the plane? Of course, Sam notes that perhaps the gentleman is on a special diet. As he talks, Sam undoes the string on the box, and when he removes it entirely, the driver steps on it and rides the sidewalk around Sam's van and back onto the street. He leaves Sam spinning and the box flying. Its contents of loose paper escapes, swirling on the air, and littering the sidewalk.
In the next scene, Sam has taken the money to Wiley (Percy Helton), who wears green eyeshades, and is examining a piece of paper under a magnifying glass.
"What hat?"
"Take it
then." [What does this even mean?] “You're in the presence of
genius."
"Wiley, no
fancy flights of rhetoric. Just the plot."
"Let's put it
this way: Blimey. A British pound note the British government didn't know it
made, because it didn't."
"Funny
money," says Sam, "a do-it-yourself job?"
"Put a little
respect in your voice, Sam. Would you call Pasteur just a doctor?"
"It's that
good?"
"Paper, ink,
that plate. A man with a real social security plan."
But soon Wiley is
talking about that man as "poor Miller."
"Who's
Miller?" asks Sam. (What I want to know is, what makes him
"poor"? Does Wiley have any reason to believe that Miller is dead or
even in distress?)
Walter Miller, it
turns out, is a highly skilled counterfeiter and printer. Wiley cannot be
completely certain, but he is reasonably sure that these notes are the work of
Miller.
Meanwhile, Honey is
spending a considerable part of this episode wearing that revealing tiger-print
costume. Sam pretends to be a drive-in customer while he fills Honey in on what
he has learned. "That money is as phony as the tiger skin you're
wearing," he says.
Honey plans to bug
Garth's office while Sam is heading for the hotdog stand run by Charlie's
sister, Dora. "Oh, pussycat," calls Sam. He gives Honey a coin for a
tip.
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| Dottie |
...and puts a round disk on the underside of his phone. On her way out, she runs into Garth.
Sam is talking to Dora, Charlie's sister, at her hotdog stand.
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| More than hotdogs, she sells burgers and steaks. |
Back at the Tiger's Torso...
Honey calls Sam from the road, but he is away from the van. In Dora's house, looking around...
Still following Garth, Honey hears from Sam. (Yes, they are talking on the phone while driving; so rare in 1965 that there is apparently no law against it.) Sam thinks Charlie was up to no good when he hid the missing person's report and that he is involved with the counterfeiting ring. The Lieutenant told Sam that Charlie was hired to find Miller. He hid the files to cover that up. Honey still believes that Charlie must have had a good reason for whatever he was doing.
She follows Garth to a hunting lodge by a lake.
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Garth has another flunky who is pointing his pistol at Garth persistently throughout this scene. As the scene goes on, safe gun etiquette continues to be nonexistent. |
"Well, no one is what he seems to be," says Honey. "You ought to know."
Garth believes that
Honey has the plates. He will pay her fifty thousand dollars for them, but he
warns that if she bargains with him, he will "drop you in the lake."
"A
hundred," Honey suggests.
"You blew it," replies Garth. He hints that he is going to torture Honey and tells the big man to tie her up.
They hear something snap outside, and Garth sends the flunky to check it out.
Sam suggests that Honey call the Lieutenant, and Honey nonchalantly walks between Sam and Garth.
"I've heard of wild parties," says Sam, "but this is ridiculous." As he says this, Sam is waving the pistol around and pointing it at Honey. (There almost seem to be more gun safety violations in this one scene than in all of the episodes up until this one—and that is saying something.)
Sam suggests that Honey call the Lieutenant, for real this time. (Honey walks in front of the muzzle again, but at least their adversaries are both prostrate at this point.)
She dials only one number, which must be zero, for the operator, the last number on most rotary dials.
Honey does not complete the call however. She looks out the window and hangs up the phone. "Sam, my car."
Someone is prancing around the Cobra. Sam hands the gun over to Honey—this time with reasonable caution—and goes outside where he leaps on the interloper.
Honey recognizes him and cries, "Charlie!"
Garth is seething. "You dirty...." he begins to say.
But Honey cuts him off with "Down boy!"
Sam reveals that Garth hired Charlie to find Miller. He tells Charlie to admit that he killed Miller.
Sam explains that
each set of plates was used to counterfeit a different non-U.S.
currency. there were five sets in all. American stooges were meant to travel overseas and distribute the currency.
Charlie says he
picked Honey because he wanted to weld the plates under the fenders of her Cobra.
"They’re still there. The most valuable car in town," Charlie says.
She then dials the operator and, this time, waits for an answer.
Epilogue:
Sam brings in a basket with, perhaps, four champagne bottles in it.
It is a gift “from an admirer” he tells Honey. She reads the card, and it turns out to be from "Lieutenant Barney." (All through this episode, he has been called "the Lieutenant," but finally he is given a name; more about this in the end notes.)
Sam tells Aunt Meg that picking that hood's pocket yielded a key clue.
He kisses her cheek. Meg accuses him of "fibbing," but she kisses him back.
"Sam, you
didn't tell the Lieutenant about that, did you?" asks
"I certainly did," says Sam, "and he fell down laughing." He turns to Aunt Meg. "By the way, he said to quit while you're ahead, because it's habit forming."
"I expect you're right," Aunt Meg agrees. 
FADE OUT
Notes:
The latticework in the opening shot is the same design as the lattice that appears in Episode 10: "A Neat Little Package." (Probably the exact same piece.)
The title, "A Million Bucks in Anybody's Language," refers to the plates that Miller made being for five different currencies, for countries other than the U.S. We are only told that one is for the U.K. The others would have to be for countries that speak languages other than English, such as France, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, or Germany. (Just for examples.)
The big, unnamed thug at
the hunting lodge, who has no lines, is Bill Hickman (1921-1986), a legendary
stuntman. He worked on the driving stunts in "Bullitt" (1968)
and "The French Connection" (1971), which are widely considered to
be, respectively, the best and second-best car chase scenes in film history.
The phone number
that Honey finds in Charlie's office is "OL 61656." This phone number
is written in the format in which phone numbers in the United States and Canada
appeared between 1947 and the early 1960s, with two letters and five numbers.
Each of the letters at the head of the phone number represented a number on the
rotary dial. In this case, the letter "O" represented a "6"
and "L" represented "5." (Before 1947—before 1930 in New
York City—most local telephone exchanges in North America used a two letter and
four number combination, rather than two letters and five numbers.)
Multiple gun safety
issues arise in this episode. When Honey and Sam arrive to find their office
ransacked, Sam has his revolver in hand and carelessly points it at poor Aunt
Meg, who is already the victim of a crime and obviously no threat, in any case,
since she has been tied up.
During the
climactic scene at the hunting lodge, the unnamed thug I call the "young flunky" keeps pointing his pistol at his boss. (Not so passive, passive-aggression?) Sam carelessly waves the gun he is
holding so that the muzzle is momentarily pointing at Honey. And in a really colossal
blunder, Honey walks between the bad guys and Sam while Sam is holding them at
gun point. This means both that she walks in front of the muzzle of Sam's gun—exposing herself to danger—and that she prevents Sam from covering the
villains with the gun. Naturally, Garth takes advantage of this by pushing
Honey into Sam and knocking them both over. A fight ensues, which is obviously
what the writer or director wanted, in order to make the story more exciting.
Unfortunately, to anyone paying attention, it makes the crime-solving duo—and Honey
in particular—seem like idiots.
If anything could be more idiotic (though, little could be worse), a contender would be Honey and Sam not thinking to search the bad guys for weapons. For sure enough, as soon as Garth and Sam start punching each other, the big man whips a pistol out from his coat. Honey disarms him, but she should have done that earlier, when she had momentary control of the hoods. Further, there should be at least two handguns in the room. The one that Sam took off of Garth's flunky, plus the one the big man took out of his coat. As near as I can tell, the one that Sam and Honey trade back and forth is the big man's pistol. So what happened to the other pistol? Is it lying on the floor where one of the hoods could pick it up?
Surprisingly, when
Honey and Sam twice hand off the big man's gun to each other, they are reasonably careful.
"Thanks a lot, Diamond Jim," says Honey when Sam gives her a mere coin for a tip. This is meant to be mildly sarcastic. James "Diamond Jim" Brady was a flamboyant millionaire who flourished around 1900. He was famous for his fancy jewelry, gluttonous dining, big tips, and generosity to the hospitals that treated him for diabetes and urinary disease.
Speaking of doctors... Wiley compares counterfeiter Walter Miller to Louis Pasteur (1822-1895), which is an odd comparison except to say that both men might be geniuses in their very different fields. Pasteur was a French chemist and biochemist who pioneered the fields of microbiology and bacteriology. Though not a medical doctor himself, he laid some of the foundations of modern scientific medicine. Pasteurization, the process of using heat to kill bacteria during milk production, is named for him.
Sam says that Garth has confessed to everything except sinking the Lusitania. The RMS Lusitania was a British ocean liner that sank about three years after the Titanic—but it was sunk deliberately by a German U-boat rather than accidentally by an iceberg. Almost 1,200 people went down with the ship, including 123 Americans. Largely because of the incident, American opinion turned in favor of sending troops to fight the Germans in World War One. Germany had warned everyone that they would sink any British ship regardless of its civilian or military status. After the war, it turned out that the ship was carrying millions of machine gun bullets and thousands of shrapnel shell casings and artillery fuses from the U.S. to Britain. In any case, Garth is probably too young to have been responsible for sinking the Lusitania.
Throughout most of this
episode, the character played by Ken Lynch (1910-1990) is simply called "the
Lieutenant," but in the epilogue he is referred to as “Lieutenant Barney,”
but then the final onscreen cast credits list his character as "Lieutenant
Keller."
It so happens that
Ken Lynch had earlier played a character named “Lieutenant Barney Keller” in
"The Flame and the Pussycat." In two future episodes, he is “Lieutenant
Barney”; and, finally, he is “Lieutenant Wyman” in the series finale.
So, in this episode we seem to be having it every way: he is “The Lieutenant”
in much of the dialogue, but also “Lieutenant Barney” and “Lieutenant Keller.” Consistency really
didn't matter on series TV in the last century. The same actor would
often play multiple characters on the same TV series. This can still happen occasionally.
Bonus: "Burke's Law": "Who Killed the Jackpot?"
Episode One: The Swingin' Mrs. Jones
Episode Ten: A Neat Little Package
Episode Eleven: A Stitch in Crime
Episode Twelve: A Million Bucks in Anybody's Language (You are already here.)
Episode Thirteen: The Gray Lady
Episode Fourteen: Invitation to Limbo
Episode Fifteen: Rockabye the Hard Way
Episode Sixteen: A Nice Little Till to Tap
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