Eddie Bracken | Through the Shattered Lens

Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Wednesdays, I will be reviewing Monsters, which aired in syndication from 1988 to 1991. The entire series is streaming on YouTube.

This week, we have the second-to-last episode of Monsters!

Episode 3.23 “The Maker”

(Dir by William Wesley, originally aired on April 18th, 1991)

Mack (Philip Anglim), a suit-wearing vagrant, wanders into what he thinks is an abandoned hotel. Mack just wants a place to spend the night and he’s shocked to discover that the hotel is also occupied by Freddy Fredericks (Eddie Bracken), a former stage magician who is now an alcoholic. When Mack asks how an abandoned building has electricity, Freddy explains that he can create things with his mind. Mack is skeptical so Freddy creates an apple and a banana. Mack asks for money and Freddy creates that. It’s quite a power except there always seems to be some small mistake. For instance, the money has Mack’s picture on it. When Freddy tries to create gold, he creates brass instead. Mack decides that the alcohol is holding Freddy back and he demands that Freddy quit cold turkey.

Bad idea.

When someone can create things just by thinking about them, the last thing you want is for that persons to get the DTs.

This, the second-to-last installment of Monsters, was definitely an effective episode. It wasn’t perfect. It got off to a slow start and Eddie Bracken occasionally went a bit overboard as Freddy. But the idea of Freddy’s alcoholism inhibiting his powers was a good one and the episode took it in a pretty clever direction. The monster — half snake/half-woman — that was created by Freddy’s DTs was genuinely frightening and the episode’s final twist not only made sense but it also worked. All in all, it was a very good episode.

Next week, we’ll finish up Monsters with a Stephen King adaptation starring Tom Noonan.

Painter Bob Randolph is famous for painting a beautiful woman who is known as “the Randolph Girl.” Everyone wants to meet the model but they can’t because there is no one model. Instead, there are a dozen models, each with a perfect feature that Bob uses in his paintings. In need of money, Bob and his business partner, Chuck Donavon (Eddie Bracken) search for a woman who can be the real-life Randolph Girl. Chuck thinks that he’s found her when he spots school teacher Ruth Wilson (Virginia Mayo) but Ruth has no interest in being a model. She wants to be known for how she thinks and not how she looks. Hoping to change her mind, Randolph pretends to be Czech immigrant and enrolls in Ruth’s citizenship class.

When a photograph of Ruth in a swimsuit is published without her prior knowledge, the school board decides that Ruth is not a good role model and they fire her. With the support of Bob and Chuck, Ruth sues for reinstatement. Bob ends up posing in the courtroom in his own swimsuit, the better to prove that there’s nothing wrong with appearing in public in a swimsuit.

The role of Ruth was originally offered to Lauren Bacall, who turned it down because she didn’t think she could play a pin-up. Not to knock Bacall but Virginia Mayo does seem like a better choice for the role of Ruth and she does a good job of bringing the role to life. She proves to be a good match for Ronald Reagan, whose amiable nature allows him to get away with taking her class under a false pretext and speaking in a mangled approximation of a foreign accent. The comedy is light and it fits well with Reagan’s affable screen presence. The film is pleasant but ultimately lightweight and forgettable. I can understand why, by this point in his career, Reagan was getting frustrated with the quality of scripts he was being sent. The Girl From Jones Beach would be forgotten today if it didn’t star the future president of the United States.