Episode 15. Rockabye the Hard Way

Previous: Invitation to Limbo Next: A Nice Little Till to Tap

Honey and Sam drive the Cobra into a remote Mexican town. Wearing straw sombreros that make them look like nothing else than tourists, they ask a local man, Jose (Pepe Callahan), for help in finding a man named McWhorter. Sam's Spanish seems non-existent, and Honey's is not much better,

but when Sam shows Jose a wad of money, he elicits considerable helpfulness.

"Esa es su casa,” the man says.

A woman in a hammock (Bella Bruck) in front of said casa tells them that “Señor Mac” is not at home but is in the cantina. So, after introducing us to two new words in Spanish—casa and cantina—the scene shifts to the interior of the cantina,

where a man (uncredited?) plays guitar as Honey and Sam enter.

Jose, they find, has warned someone of their coming.

"Our tipster was a homing pigeon," says Honey.

“We should have clipped his wings," replies Sam.

In the cantina, by the way, first Sam and then Honey doff—and proceed to lose—their hideous sombreros (If you count “señor,” that is four Spanish words we have learned), thankfully never to put them back on.

The someone who has been warned, turns out to be a European named Lazlo Schatzi (Ivan Triesault). He claims not to know anyone named McWhorter.

"Try Señor Mac," suggests Honey. Implausibly enough, The answer is still, "No."

"What's upstairs?” asks Sam, moving toward the stairs. Schatzi stands athwart Sam’s path and tells the private eyes that the upstairs is private.

Honey says, "Sam, the man is right. Don't be a party crasher." She pulls Sam out of there.

But that does not mean that Honey has given up.

Honey and Sam reach the upstairs by throwing a knotted rope up to the balcony and then climbing it. (Or their stunt doubles do.)

They look in an upstairs window only to see McWhorter (uncredited) being threatened with a pistol (with a silencer on it) by a bald fat man (Larry D. Mann). (Yet another of the ambidextrous gunmen on “Honey West,” here displaying his left-handedness.) They also see McWhorter get shot, evidently because he is blamed for being followed to Mexico by Honey and Sam. McWhorter drops to the floor. The gunman turns and shoots at Honey and Sam,

who skedaddle down the rope, dash around the corner and into the cantina.

They hop over the guitarist and run upstairs, but when they burst into what they presume to be the murder room, they instead find a four-handed card game in progress.

"They got a full house,” says Sam.

“These jokers are wild,” quips Honey.

“Sam, the body,” Honey says wonderingly, but Sam initiates a tactical retreat.

“Excusa. Perdón. Mistake,” he says to the card players in his best Spanglish. “Vamos,” he says to Honey. They step out of the room.

“We can’t just walk out of here,” says Honey, sensing unfinished business.

But Sam replies, "If we're lucky, yeah."

After the opening credits,

Honey and Sam are still in Mexico, and Sam wants to go home, but Honey wants to check out McWhorter's casa first. Sam tries to stop her, reminding her that they are in danger while in a foreign country where they can’t carry guns. It is no use. Honey tells him to get the car and pick her up outside McWhorter’s place.

In McWhorter's upper room, The bald fat man is packing neatly packaged shirts into a suit case when he hears Honey’s footsteps on the staircase. He hides behind the door before she enters.

Honey notices a radio transmitter by the window before she begins unpacking the shirts that the fat man had just packed.

Undoubtedly miffed to see his work so carelessly undone, he closes the door and brandishes his gun at her.

Naturally, Honey behaves as if someone points a gun at her every Friday. She points out how expensive the shirts are. “Too bad there is nobody to wear them.” She figures that the radio was why McWhorter was here.

The gunman raises his gun to shoot Honey. He is now righthanded. (There is so much ambidextrousness among gunmen in this series.)

Honey throws the suitcase at him, which not only miraculously prevents him from firing his gun but inexplicably makes him fall to one knee. He does not propose marriage, but his position does make it easier for Honey to knee his head and strike his chest,

laying him out in front of the door,

which makes it difficult for her to squeeze out of the doorway when Lazlo enters the room through a different door.

Outside, Honey jumps into the Cobra, driven by Sam, and the pair get away. Two more gunmen shoot at them at close range, but neither is good enough a shot to stop our heroes.

After a brief montage at the border crossing, we dissolve to a truck stop where we find Honey and Sam meeting with their client, Rocky Hansen (Joe Don Baker), a truck driver who lost his job after he lost consciousness and his rig was five hours late. He hired Honey and Sam to restore his good name. (How he can afford the detectives is never explained.)

"McWhorter was my only witness," he observes, "and now he's dead."

Sam adds the wrinkle that the Mexican government does not believe that any such murder took place.

Rocky is ready to pay his bill and accept defeat, but Honey tells him to repeat his story (for the audience's benefit, of course).

The crime started right in this very cafe. Rocky, McWhorter, and some other men were at the counter.

"I was trucking missile parts that night," says Rocky, nonchalantly introducing us to the high stakes involved in this case. If anybody else believed Rocky's story, the FBI would be investigating. (It turns out that Honey and Sam do not know that’s who they should call.) Put that together with the radio transmitter Honey saw in Mexico—not to mention the probable KGB agent, Lazlo Schatzi—and we have reason to suspect that this story is about international espionage, not just the kind of domestic industrial espionage that Honey and Sam investigated in the episode “Invitation to Limbo.”

"There was a big guy sitting right over here," says Rocky, indicating the seat next to his, where Honey sits now.

"What did he look like?" asks Honey.

"Well, not like you. I'd remember."

"You're a brick, Rocky. Anything else?"

"Nah, nothin', you know the rest."

But we get the rest of the story, anyway.

Rocky had his coffee, returned to his rig, and drove ten or fifteen minutes before he felt so sleepy that he pulled off the road. Woke up with a hangover five hours late and was fired on the spot. Now he can't get a job anywhere.

Honey points out the obvious: somebody slipped Rocky a Mickey Finn. The mystery is that when he came to, nothing seemed out of place. Nothing had been stolen. The other wrinkle is that McWhorter lied when he told the company that he had seen Rocky drinking alcohol.

Honey suggests that the big man sitting to Rocky’s right at the counter was bald. Rocky wonders how she knows that.

Honey asks whether all the trucks in this company carry classified material. Some do, reveals Rocky, and they all regularly stop at this truck stop.

Honey sees a sign:

"Sam, it's so nice to be wanted," she says.

Sam is slow to get it, but he doesn't like it.

Honey is being ogled by truck drivers as she serves one of them “ham on rye” in a sexy voice. (Honey is so *almost* liberated.)

Sam saunters in, dressed as a truck driver himself. He has been hired by Gage Electronics, the same company that Rocky and McWhorter worked for. He pretends to attempt to seduce Honey who resists his charms,

but when Sam leaves, she tells the counterman (Gil Lamb) that she’s taking a break.

Out by Sam’s rig, it turns out that he went through McWhorter’s locker and found a bespoke jacket with someone else’s name on the inside label: John Raven.

John Raven (Vincent Beck) spends a lot of his time in his rec room where he maintains a pool table and the liquor cabinet. Honey shows up asking why a truck driver had one of Raven’s custom-made jackets. Raven says he gives things away to charity a lot.

Naturally, he challenges Honey to a game of pool, and she kicks his ass. Equally naturally, he asks her out for a rematch.

“You wouldn’t like the way I play,” she says. “I call my own shots.”

The bald fat man enters the room once Honey has left, and he admits that he let McWhorter take one of Raven’s cast-off coats. Raven reasons that since they collected everything McWhorter had in his rooms, there is only one place they might have missed: McWhorter’s locker at his job, and Honey must have found the jacket because she has someone working on the inside at Gage Electronics. The bald man even reasons that it must be Honey’s partner whom he saw in Mexico.

“Find him,” says Raven. “Then we’ll bury them both.”

Honey and Sam don their ninja costumes and come back to break in and search Raven’s rec room.

“We could get five years for breaking and entering,” says Sam.

“Don’t be silly, Sam. We’re not going to break anything.”

They find incriminating evidence.

The most incriminating, perhaps, is a room for developing infrared photographic film. They put it all together: The truck driver is knocked out, the missile parts are photographed, and Schatzi sends the pictures to a foreign government.

Sam wants to call the Secret Service. (He does not seem to know that this is the FBI’s bailiwick, not the Secret Service’s.) Honey points out that everything they have discovered is circumstantial. (Not to mention discovered by means of illegal snooping, which Sam seems to have forgotten already.)

Before they leave, they trip up and karate chop the bald man (whose name, it subsequently turns out, is Mr. Tripp). This is the second time he has been knocked unconscious by Honey.

They also put a bug in Raven’s home, which now comes in handy.

They listen while Raven and Tripp talk to an unidentified person at the electronics plant and plot to slip Sam a Mickey and take him to Mexico. Honey and Sam plot countermeasures. They have a tape of Raven’s confession, and Honey now wants to call in the Secret Service. (Yeah, we know; wrong agency.) But Sam argues against calling them in before they have more evidence.

Honey obtains an antidote to the Mickey from a chemist (Jonathan Hole).

Sam is set up for an important night run by his supervisor, Swetlow (Paul Sorensen).

And Swetlow is the one who shows up at the truck stop to slip Sam the Mickey.

Honey tries to give the antidote to Sam, but the counterman bumps into her and she drops the glass.

Thinking fast, she pours his coffee into a thermos so he can take it with him. Swetlow gives Honey the evil eye this whole time, but he must let Sam go.

On the road, Sam pours the coffee out the window of his cab.

The sedan following him a half a mile behind (according to Sam in his radio communication with Honey) is far enough behind that its occupants do not to notice him pouring out the coffee, and they are not surprised when they find Sam pulled off the road and apparently unconscious a couple of minutes later.

They drive the rig to a clearing where they open the back

and begin photographing some unidentifiable electronic hardware.

During all of this, Honey, who has been tracking Sam with an electronic device, arrives and observes.

She and Sam whisper their strategy to each other over their radios. Then Sam leaves the cab,

"...And the stars are so... are so... are so...."

sets off a flare at the feet of the baddies, climbs on top of the truck, and jumps down onto one of the villains (risking hurting himself so that he might be useless in the ensuing hand-to-hand). Honey joins the fray, exhibiting some unlikely judo moves that involve throwing more weight than she could possibly leverage. (Nor could her stunt double, I’ll wager, even if he were a man.) Sam whips off his belt fast enough to wrap it around a bad guy’s gun hand as if Sam were wielding a bull whip. (My belt always snags on the loops when I try to pull it off fast.)

The two heroes manage to subdue the three enemies of the state who are Raven, Swetlow, and Tripp.

Back at the truck stop, Honey is finishing talking to a grateful Secret Service agent who does not seem to know that he has gotten lost in wrong scenario. The counterman is basking in the excitement of "private detectives, spies, and Secret Service agents."

“Who just don’t seem to know when to leave,” says Sam, casting a jealous glance at Honey and the suit.

“Good-lookin’ guy, ain’t he?” says the counterman, pushing Sam’s jealousy button if not making him wonder which team the counterman is playing for. When Honey joins Sam at the counter she, too, remarks on the agent’s handsomeness.

Honey and Sam keep arguing about whether the agent is handsome and whether he asked Honey for her marital status and phone number.

“Maybe he wants me to join the Secret Service,” says Honey.

“There are no women in the Secret Service,” Sam assures her.

Rocky comes in and begins asking what happened, and where does he stand.

“Hey look, I don’t like to interfere, you know, but I’m only your client. What happens to me?” asks Rocky.

“You got your job back,” says Honey. She turns back to Sam. “Are you sure they don’t have women in the Secret Service?”

“I just told you that….” And Sam tries to finish the sentence despite the piece of toast that Honey shoves into his mouth. “…they don’t have women in the Secret Service,” he mumbles.

Overall rating: 2 (This is a bad episode, but it gets worse.)

Martial arts: 1 (Generosity keeps it from being zero.) There is nothing of use that anyone could learn about martial arts from the mostly unrealistic fight scene choreography displayed here.

A “Mickey Finn” is a drug of any kind secretly administered for the purpose of knocking out someone targeted for robbery or other nefarious exploitation such as “shanghaiing,” which is the impressment of someone into a ship’s crew against their will. The origin of the term, Mickey Finn, is uncertain. It might have come from the name of a bartender suspected of drugging and robbing people, but this is poorly supported by any historical facts.

The Secret Service is a branch of the United States Treasury Department. Ironically, it was created by a bill that was signed into law by Abraham Lincoln on the very day that he was assassinated. It has always been primarily an agency that enforces U.S. laws against counterfeiting money. Much later, it became the agency charged with protecting U.S. presidents, vice-presidents, and foreign dignitaries, as well as presidential candidates and former presidents. The first woman to be sworn in as a Secret Service agent was Elaine Weddington Steward in 1971, about four yeas after "Honey West" went off the air.

The association of the Secret Service with espionage and counterespionage goes back to the Civil War when the term was used to refer to organized Union espionage efforts; but for decades, by the 1960s, and up until today, the theft of state secrets such as U.S. missile technology would normally be investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), not the Secret Service.

Ann Francis did her own stunts in the Burke's Law episode, “Who Killed the Jackpot?” but she was not allowed to on her own series. Most of her character’s stunts are done in long shots so that you cannot be sure that it isn’t her. A lot of the fight scenes and other stunts in “Rockabye the Hard Way” are photographed from many feet away.

This episode introduced Joe Don Baker as the almost titular character, Rocky Hansen. Following a career on the stage, Baker made his small screen debut here, then went on to bigger things, in movies such as "Cool Hand Luke," "Junior Bonner," "Walking Tall," "The Living Daylights," and "GoldenEye."

Vincent Beck played bad guys and monsters in such TV series as “Lost in Space” and “The Monkeys.” He is probably best known for his worst movie, 1964’s “Santa Claus Conquers the Martians,” in which he played a villainous Martian named Voldar.

Also known as Larry Mann, Larry D. Mann, who thanklessly is beaten to unconsciousness three times in the course of this episode, was a veteran character actor whose long resume includes bit parts in “In the Heat of the Night” (1967) and “The Sting” (1973).

Ivan Triesault was born in the Russian Empire in 1898, in what is now Estonia. His long resume includes Alfred Hitchcock’s “Notorious” from 1946.

Paul Sorensen, who plays the supervisor, Swetlow, was another veteran character actor. Like Vincent Beck, he was in one of the worst movies ever made, 2012’s “Dropping Evil” in which he played a Secret Service agent, a role for which he may have been grateful not to be credited. He was probably more grateful to have a credited role in “Star Trek: The Search for Spock” in 1984.

Jonathan Hole, who is Mr. Brady, the chemist, was an established character actor who was more often not credited at all or else played even less memorable parts like “Second Ornithologist.” But he was in over 170 movies and TV series in a career that stretched from the 1950s to the 1990s—and that was just his screen career. He had been acting on the stage since the 1920s.

Bella Bruck was a character actress who appeared in more than seventy movies and TV series, often credited simply as "___ Woman" as in this episode where she is listed in the cast as "Mexican Woman." Born in Brooklyn, New York City, she often had lines in English, though, often as not, it was only one line. She appeared on such 1960s TV series as "Wagon Train," "That Girl," "The Addams Family," and "The Twilight Zone."

Pepe Callahan was from New Mexico, originally, and in his career, which consisted of some thirty TV appearances and a handful of movies, he played at least two characters named Pepe. He was in three episodes of "Mission Impossible" playing three different characters. On the big screen he was in movies that starred Clint Eastwood, Gregory Peck, and Elliot Gould.

Gil Lamb made seventy appearances in movies and on TV from 1935 to 1980, including a brief stint as Clarabell the Clown on "The Howdy Doody Show." He was in one episode of "The Twilight Zone."

More "Honey West":

Introduction

Opening Theme Music & Images

Episode One: The Swingin' Mrs. Jones

Episode Two: The Owl and the Eye

Episode Three: The Abominable Snowman

Episode Four: A Matter of Wife and Death

Episode Five: Live a Little.... Kill a Little

Episode Six: Whatever Lola Wants....

Episode Seven: The Princess and the Paupers

Episode Eight: In the Bag

Episode Nine: The Flame and the Pussycat