Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past!  On Thursdays, I will be reviewing Decoy, which aired in Syndication in 1957 and 1958.  The show can be viewed on Tubi!

This week, Casey investigates a case of art forgery!

Episode 1.34 “Shadow of Van Gogh”

(Dir by Michael Gordon, originally aired on June 2nd, 1958)

Casey investigates art forgery!

Someone has produced and sold a forged recreation of Vincent Van Gogh’s Starry Night.  Casey’s investigation leads her to Jack Wilson (Ray Reinhardt), a struggling artist who is obsessed with Van Gogh.  Apparently, Jack once even pretended to cut off his ear.  Casey discovers that Wilson did paint the forgery but that he was manipulated by a crooked art dealer named Cors1 (Edgar Stehli).  When Casey confronts Corsi, he threatens to shoot her.  Casey responds by threatening to take a dagger to the real Starry Night.  And then Wilson shows up and grabs Corsi’s gun.  With Corsi off to jail, Casey looks at the camera and encourages everyone to go to their local museum and see a real Van Gogh.

Oh, how I wanted to love this episode!  I really did.  I majored in Art History.  I love Van Gogh.  This episode should have been right up my alley.  And there were some parts of the episode that I really did appreciate.  During her investigation, Casey goes to Greenwich Village and we get some on-location footage of a 1950s art fair.  We get to see some real-life beatniks!  I enjoyed that.

Unfortunately, the rest of the episode doesn’t really live up to its promise.  It’s not a particularly well-acted episode.  Edgar Stehli plays Corsi as being obviously sinister from the start and Ray Reinhardt seems to be mildly channeling every single crazed artist cliche that has ever existed.  If you’re going to make one of your characters a struggling artist obsessed with Van Gogh, you can either portray him as a realistic, undiscovered painter or you can go totally over-the-top and have him actually cut off his ear.  This episode tries to go for the middle ground and, as such, it’s never as interesting as it should have been.