Carlos Rivas | Through the Shattered Lens

Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Tuesdays, I will be reviewing the original Fantasy Island, which ran on ABC from 1977 to 1984. The show is once again on Tubi!

Justice for Tattoo!

Episode 7.14 “Lady of the House/Mrs. Brandell’s Favorites”

(Dir by Bob Sweeney, originally aired on February 25th, 1984)

This was one of the Fantasy Island episode that was not on my DVR. However, now that the show is once again streaming in its entirety on Tubi, I was still able to watch it. Lucky me.

This is probably the worst episode of Fantasy Island that I’ve ever seen.

This episode gets off to a bad start with Mr. Roarke informing Lawrence that there will only be one guest with a fantasy this week. That guest is Esther Brandell (Polly Bergen). Whenever there’s only one guest and that guest is played by a middle-aged actress who was big in the 50s and the 60s, you know you’re about to spend an hour watching an hour of awkward melodrama that you’re supposed to excuse by saying, “She was great in Kisses For My President!”

Mrs. Brandell says that she’s a former sorority house mother who wants her three favorite sorority girls to be her bridesmaids at her wedding. Actually, Mrs. Brandell was a former madam and the three “sorority girls” all worked for her. Bebe (Lauren Tewes), Coleen (Randi Oakes), and Lynn (Shelley Smith) have all moved on and want to keep their past a secret. Over the course of the episode, each will admit the truth to their current partner and each will realize that Mrs. Brandell really did protect and care about them.

This episode basically features the same scene over and over again. Each of the girls works up the courage (or the anger) to admit that they were once a prostitute. Their significant other reacts. One guy tries to blackmail Mrs. Brandell. Another reveals that he knew all along because “I’m an investigative reporter.” Bebe’s idiot boyfriend (Dick Gautier) refuses to believe Bebe and insists that she sleep with another man for money so that he’ll be convinced. What? Bebe realizes that’s not her lifestyle anymore and she really does love her idiot boyfriend, the same one who pimped her out to some random guy on the Island.

And, through the whole thing, Polly Bergen delivers her lines in a voice that sounds like she just finished smoking a pack of cigarettes. The truth of the matter is that Bergen is absolutely lousy in the role but the script is probably as much to blame as Bergen herself. Every scene feels like it’s been cribbed from an old Barbra Stanwyck melodrama. At the end of the episode, the vice cop (Robert Brown) who used to bust her shows up at the wedding. “Everybody freeze!” he says. Oh, thank God, everyone’s getting busted for overacting. Oh wait — Mrs. Brandell (a widow) is marrying him!

The episode ends with the wedding, which would be touching if any of these characters were actually interesting. Lawrence gives away the bride because I guess they had do something to justify paying Christopher Hewett’s salary.

This was not a good trip to the Island. Is this season over yet?

In the post-civil war west, two Calvary troopers steal a Gatling Gun, the weapon that was invented to be such a powerful instrument of death that people would stop fighting wars just to avoid finding themselves in front of its barrel. (It didn’t work out that way, of course.) With the help of a pacifist reverend named Harper (John Carradine), they smuggle the gun into Apache territory. Rev. Harper thinks that the gun is going to be destroyed and, thus, another instrument death will be eliminated. from the world Instead, the greedy troopers are planning on selling the gun to Apache Chief Two Knife (Carlos Rivas). Two Knife has promised a fortune’s worth of gold to anyone who can deliver to him the deadliest weapon in the west.

Before the gun can be exchanged, the reverend, his daughter, and the two deserters are intercepted by a group of Calvary troops led by Lt. Wayne Malcolm (Guy Stockwell). One of the deserters is killed while the other, Pvt. Sneed (Robert Fuller) is captured.

However, Chief Two Knife still wants what he calls “the king gun.” Malcolm and his troops find themselves pinned down by the Apaches. Can Malcolm, with the help of a rancher (Phil Harris), a scout (Woody Strode), and a cook (Pat Buttram), keep both the gun and the all important firing pin from falling into the hands of Two Knife?

The Gatling Gun is a low-budget western that would probably be today forgotten except that it has fallen into the public domain and has been included in several DVD box sets. It has the flat, generic look of a Western television show and Guy Stockwell’s stiff performance may be believable for a 19th century Calvary captain but it’s still doesn’t exactly make for compelling viewing. The main problem is that the most exciting and interesting part of the story, the two deserters stealing the gun and tricking the Reverend into helping them, occurs off-screen and the movie instead begins with Malcolm capturing Sneed.

Western fans will mostly want to watch this one to see John Carradine and Woody Strode, two very different actors who were both favorites of John Ford’s and who appeared in several other, better westerns. (Strode and Carradine had both previously appeared in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, to name just one example.) Carradine is typically theatrical, delivering his lines like the old Shakespearean that he was. Strode, as usual, is stoic but his imposing screen presence makes him the most memorable of the film’s heroes. Also keep an eye out for Patrick “son of John” Wayne, playing the rancher’s son.

Though The Gatling Gun has the look of a film that was shot on a studio backlot in Hollywood, it was actually filmed, on location, in New Mexico. The state’s then-governor, David Cargo, has a small role as Corporal Benton and is listed in the credits as “Honorable Governor David Cargo.” A look at his imdb page reveals that David Cargo appeared in four films while he was governor. All of them were filmed in New Mexico so I guess casting the governor was a requirement for filming in that state. When Cargo left office in 1971, his movie career ended.