Episode 19: It's Earlier Than You Think
Previous: Ep. 18 King of the Mountain Next: Ep. 20 The Perfect Un-crime
Just like last time, we begin with a suburban house and somebody crashing outwardly through glass doors. And, again, gun shots ring out.
But this time the defenestratee is not Sam. It is a man (Bill Catching) dressed in a dark, 1860s-style suit. He wears a stove-pipe top hat and sports muttonchop sideburns. (Note: Catching was a professional stuntman; so, even though you cannot see his face at all times, this is likely to be his own stunt, but that is not certain. Still, expand the second picture below and tell me that is not Catching.)
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| (Note the pistol in his right hand.) |
With his long-barreled revolver now in his left hand, he puts his right hand over an apparent wound on his left side and trades shots with his adversaries who are still inside the house.
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One of the men shooting at him peeks out from the doorway as he rides by. It is hard to tell, but he appears to have a moustache.
Two men come onto the porch. One wears a hat, the other doesn't, but they are too obscure to recognize just now. They can only watch as the horseman rides out of this currently dangerous but otherwise seemingly wholesome neighborhood. (Isn't that the Cleaver residence across the way?)
The wounded horseman rides through the streets.
At an intersection he stops next to a car,
the occupants of which give him a look, surprised to find themselves sharing the asphalt with a horseman.
The light changes,
and the rider hangs a right turn onto Sunset Boulevard.
Soon, he arrives at the offices of Honey West and Co. (We never knew before that Honey West's office was so close to Sunset, but it must be because the rider reaches her office in no time.)
He falls off the horse, but manages to tie the reins to the iron fence outside Honey's building.
Then he rushes in.
Meanwhile, Honey is putting up a picture while fielding growly complaints from Bruce, the ocelot.
She points out to him that while the wild cat in the picture might not be an ocelot, at least, it is a related species.
Suddenly, Honey is distracted
as the man bursts into the office and hands Honey a newspaper.
He then expires, but not before uttering his last words:
"Lincoln... Ford's Theater... Box number three... It's all wrong... we must stop them."
Honey looks at the newspaper.
[Opening Credits]
There is much excitement in front of the building. A crowd gathers around the horse.
Aunt Meg is helping Honey by covering the body with a sheet.
We only hear Honey's side of the conversation, but evidently, Sam is not taking this very seriously. She has to tell him that the man had clothes on. (Their business card would not have covered much.) Honey reasons that the man was a client because he had their card. (But did he ever pay a retainer?)
Someone rings the doorbell. Honey and Meg move the body around to the side of the desk, but it is not very well hidden.
Patrolman Cowan (Paul Sorensen) enters.
He asks Honey and Meg what they know about the horse out in front of their building. During this interrogation, Bruce draws attention to himself.
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| "Quite a managerie you got here." |
Honey allows that the horse might belong to a client. The policeman notices the rather obvious dead body
and makes a phone call.
A matching shot of a different telephone establishes a new scene, this time at the police station.
Lieutenant Barney (Ken Lynch, once again), in his office, is exchanging information with Honey and Sam.
Though, between the three of them, they know very little. The dead man was Paul Wycherly.
"The antiquarian?" suggests Honey.
That's right," says Barney.
Turns out that Honey has read Wycherly's book, "Lincoln's Last Hours."
Wycherly's only relative is a brother, Conrad, who is also eccentric, except that his obsession is all things Scottish. He wears kilts.
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| Leaving the station, Honey and Sam take separate vehicles, he the Ford Econoline and she the Cobra. |
On the way to her Cobra, Honey is met by a man in a kilt.
The mustachioed man, who has a British accent, claims to be Conrad Wycherly #1 (Maurice Dallimore).
He asks Honey to drop him off at his hotel. Honey turns on her radio so that Sam can listen in on their conversation.
On the way, the man asks Honey whether, by any chance, his brother gave her something. Honey claims that this does not ring a bell.
Honey drives down the street only to be flagged down by yet another man in a kilt.
He also claims to be Conrad Wycherly #2 (Leonid Kinskey). He also wishes to be dropped at his hotel and asks her whether his brother gave her a newspaper. Nope.
Surely, Honey can't help noticing that this Conrad Wycherly has an accent, too. It's Eastern European, though. (In fact, it's Russian.)
Heading into the office with Honey, Sam suggests that one of the Conrad Wycherlys must be a phony.
"Maybe they both are," observes Honey shrewdly.
Aunt Meg ushers them in with a warning that they have company.
And in their waiting room, they find another man in a kilt, and—you guessed it—his name is Conrad Wycherly #3 (James Griffith).
This one has a Southern U.S. accent.
The detectives ask for identification.
Wycherly turns away while fishing discreetly into his kilt for a cashier's check with his name on it.
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| ("Remind me not to shake his hand when he's about to leave." "Just follow my lead.") |
Acknowledging that it isn't a conventional I.D., he assures them that he is Conrad Wycherly. Then he leaves, without shaking hands.
Sam opines that a Scotsman with a Southern accent can't be the real McCoy, but Honey is not so sure. "Haven't you heard of southern Highlanders?" she asks.
Honey sends Sam to the library to find a copy of the Washington Star for the date of Lincoln's death.
She takes a necklace that has a microphone in it and announces that she is going to see a man about a date.
That is, the carbon date of the newspaper Paul Wycherly gave her. Mr. Pringle (Bill McLean) is a lab technician who tells Honey that the carbon-14 test she ordered has revealed the newspaper to be one hundred years old.
Honey asks whether it could have been faked.
"Not unless someone has discovered a way to age the paper using radiation. Which, of course, they haven't."
Asked how much the newspaper might be worth, Pringle pleads that he is not an expert on that question, but he opines that it must be worth at least $50,000.
"Boy was he wrong," says Honey as she is about to leave.
"Who?"
"Whoever said 'As worthless as yesterday's newspaper'."
Outside Pringle's office, Honey takes a self-addressed-stamped envelope that she apparently always carries in her purse, and she folds and inserts the possibly priceless newspaper.
Then she seals the envelope and puts it into a mail slot.
On her way to her car, Honey is surprised yet again by the British Conrad Wycherly (whose real name turns out to be Hurd). Now dressed in a twentieth century suit, rather than a kilt, he tells Honey that he has a gun and orders her to get into a gray sedan.
In the back seat, Honey finds herself next to the Russian edition of Conrad Wycherly (real name, Roger), but when she mentions his earlier impersonation to him, Roger tells her to "shut up."
(The car has a driver, too, but this third accomplice is never seen or mentioned again.)
Roger and Hurd take Honey to a house in the suburbs. Speaking distinctly into her pendant-microphone, she states the street name and the fact that the house has a for-sale sign in front.
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| ("You fellows wouldn't be interested in doing a commercial for Century 21, would you?") |
They take her into the basement and tie her to a pillar.
but the microphone falls to the floor
and Roger steps on and crushes it.
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| The crooks regain control. |
Sam realizes he has lost contact with Honey.
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| He taps on the speaker, but it's not his reception that's the problem. |
Hurd then reveals that he has invented a device that actually can age any matter by reducing its carbon-14 count.
He threatens to age Honey's face if she does not give him the newspaper.
Roger ungloves and shows her his hand,
which has been accidentally withered as if by time.
Sam has found the street,
but without an exact address, he is unable to find the house. Almost every house in the neighborhood is for sale.
Honey points out that Roger impersonated Conrad.
Roger denies this, but Honey tells Hurd that Roger is still wearing his tartan stockings. Hurd wants to see, and the men get into a fight,
ending with Roger admitting that he wanted to get the newspaper in order to blackmail Hurd.
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| ("You already know that I can't dance this way.") |
Honey has slipped off a ring that apparently contains a heating element, which she uses to burn through the rope,
which is pretty thin to begin with.
Honey gets hold of the radiation device and threatens the thugs with it.
She demonstrates the device and her willingness to use it by causing the floor to age and crack.
The two men each try to protect whatever body part they are most worried about losing.
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| ("Roger, I believe that we should be protecting ourselves a bit further down, if we're honest.") |
But Honey drops the device and dashes up the stairs, two bullets are fired from behind as she goes.
Outside, she sees Sam's truck and starts calling to him.
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| Honey runs toward the van. |
He appears and accompanies Honey back to the basement.
But the two crooks have apparently climbed out of an open basement window.
The real Conrad Wycherly is about to buy the letters of Abraham Lincoln from Roger and Hurd. He laments the lost newspaper in which the letters had been wrapped,
but he has cashed his check and is about to give the crooks a suitcase full of money.
Honey and Sam burst in and reveal that what the late Paul Wycherly knew was that the newspaper had the wrong theater box number for Lincoln. It should have been box 8, not box 3. Sam's earlier trip to the library to get a photocopy of the real newspaper confirmed her suspicion.
The crooks grab the suitcase and run out of the hotel room. Roger fires at Sam when he tries to follow.
He tumbles across the hallway and gets behind a cart, which he shoves all the way down the hall and into Roger...
...while Hurd tries to summon an elevator car that is slow in coming.
Honey joins Sam in fighting with the crooks and, finally, subduing them.
Wycherly enters the fray, but mainly to start stuffing his money back into the suitcase.
At this moment, Patrolman Cowan arrives in the elevator, just in time to view our tableau de la justice.
Epilogue
Honey, Sam, and Aunt Meg are about to go out to celebrate their success in solving the case.
On the way out, they are confronted by Cowan, who still wants to know what they are going to do about the horse.
Overall Rating: 2/5
Martial Arts Rating: 1/5
Martial Arts Notes: Honey throws Roger (or his stunt double) in front of elevator at climax; Anne Francis' face is visible, meaning she did her own ground work (stunt); Honey's atempted escape earlier was exciting but maybe not as impressive; Kinsky's face is on camera, so he did not use a double in that scene. Tactics: Honey chose her moment, apparently based on Roger accepting Hurd's gun while the latter began to tie up Honey. Transitions are good times to counter-attack when your opponent is too busy multi-tasking to pay attention to keeping you under control.
Notes:
Honey West meets science fiction. The technician, Mr. Pringle, says that carbon dating cannot be faked, unless someone has found a way to speed up the aging process, which, he tells Honey, they haven't. Except that, in this episode, someone has. A device that causes rapid aging of all matter is unleashed by the villains, and it does not sound like something that could be put to many good uses. Naturally, the villains have only used it to satisfy their greed—or try to, anyway.
My suspicion was that this technology is implausible, and ChatGPT (chat.openai.com) confirmed my suspicion:
Carbon dating is typically used for organic materials, such as bones or wood, which contain carbon and have been part of the carbon cycle. It's not suitable for materials like concrete or forged papers, which don't contain carbon from living organisms. Moreover, carbon dating is most effective for objects older than about 50,000 years. For recent materials, the amount of carbon-14 left is often too small to measure accurately.
Throughout this episode, Aunt Meg looks at the copy of the Washington Star from 1865 and focuses mainly on the advertisements for restaurants. In the epilogue, she spots an ad for a very reasonably priced lobster dinner with French fries. She must have been looking at the fake newspaper. (The private eyes now have a photocopy of the authentic newspaper, but Meg seems to be looking at the paper copy.) The trouble is that the term "French fries" was not coined until sixty years after Lincoln's death, during World War I. It was used by American troops in Belgium to describe what the French and Belgians still call "pommes frites," meaning fried potatoes (actually short for "pommes de terre frites" and sensibly shortened further to "frites").
Honey mails the maguffin (the item that everyone is after) to herself using a mail slot in a corridor of an office building. These slots were chutes to a central location, often in the basement, where either the post office or a private company's mailroom would see that letters were delivered. Electronic digital communication has made this amenity less common than it was in the 1960s.
This show keeps producing ambidextrous gunmen. Here, Paul Wycherly first appears holding his revolver in his right hand but soon switches it to his left; although, this might have to do with his being wounded in his left side, which causes him to put his right hand across his body to cover his wound.
Hurd, the Brit, offers his "driving license" while Roger, the Russian, who nevertheless speaks pretty good American English, offers his "driver's license" as identification. These are the different terms used in Britain and the United States. I wonder whether the term "driver's license" was the only one used in the original script, in which case, Maurice Dallimore, the actor playing Hurd, might have changed it.
I cannot help seeing unintended symbolism in the villains threatening to age the character of Honey West, played by the thirty-something actress, Anne Francis. As she aged, Francis was not treated well by Hollywood. The idea of pointing a device at her to cause her to become too old for the industry seems cruely poetic.
Cast
Bill Catching plays Paul Wycherly.
As a teen, Catching hitchhiked from Texas to Los Angeles and got odd jobs that led to work with horses. He parlayed his ability to ride horses into a career as a stunt worker on motion pictures. I put him at the top of the list of guest actors because he is the first actor we see on screen, his part is the catalyst to the plot, and his horsemanship adds interest to an otherwise ridiculous story. The sight of a horseman riding down Sunset Boulevard is genuinely unexpected.
James Griffith as the real Conrad Wycherly
Griffith was a steadily working character actor for several decades. Born in Los Angeles, California in 1916, he died in Avila Beach, California in 1993. A musician as well as an actor, Griffith served in the U.S. Marine Corps from 1941-1947 and then played saxophone in a band until his movie career took off. The Southern accent in this episode was not his own. He broke into movies in the late 1940s playing Wild West figures (Bob Dalton, Doc Holiday, Pat Garrett) and Judas Iscariot in "Day of Triumph" (1954). In view of the Abraham Lincoln theme of this episode, it is a noteworthy coincidence that Griffith did the voice for Lincoln in the movie "Stage to Tucson" (1950).
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| Maurice Dallimore (left) and Leonid Kinskey |
Kinskey
was born in St. Petersburg, Russia in 1903. He moved to Europe after the Russian Revolution in 1917. He also worked in Latin America before
coming to the United States and becoming a U.S. citizen. He appeared in over 60
films and was hired to play the bartender in “Casablanca” (1942) because of his
sense of humor and the fact that he and Humphrey Bogart were drinking buddies. Indeed,
his comic talents were also on display in the 1933 Marx Brothers’ movie “Duck
Soup.” He turned down a regular role on the hit TV series “Hogan’s Heroes”
(1965) because he disliked the premise. “Nazis were seldom dumb and never
funny,” he explained.
He
married three times, and was widowed twice. Over their sixteen-year marriage, he
and his second wife, actress Iphigenie Castiglioni, renewed their vows three times by
remarrying in different countries. (A total of four wedding ceremonies.) He died in Fountain Hills, Arizona in 1998.
Ken Lynch as Lt. Barney
Lynch (1910-1990) played police officers and detectives on many TV series. He played several on "Honey West," sometimes using the name Lieutenant Barney, but also under other names. He even played a policeman on "Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.," which was beating "Honey West" in the same time slot on Friday nights in 1965.
McLean was a solid character actor specializing in comedy but not limited. He appeared in well over one hundred films and TV series, including "The Twilight Zone." He was born in Pueblo, Colorado in 1917 and died in Los Angeles, California in 1994.
Paul Sorensen as Patrolman Cowan
More "Honey West":
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
Episode Thirteen: The Gray Lady
Episode Fourteen: Invitation to Limbo
Episode Fifteen: Rockabye the Hard Way
Episode Sixteen: A Nice Little Till to Tap
Episode Seventeen: How Brillig, O, Beamish Boy
Episode Eighteen: King of the Mountain
Episode Nineteen: It's Earlier Than You Think (You Are Already Here)
Episode Twenty: The Perfect Un-crime
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