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Retro Television Review: Thief (dir by William A. Graham)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past!  On Sundays, I will be reviewing the made-for-television movies that used to be a primetime mainstay.  Today’s film is 1971’s Thief!  It  can be viewed on Tubi and YouTube.

Neal Wilkinson (Richard Crenna) would appear to be living a great life.  He has a nice house in the suburbs.  He has a beautiful girlfriend named Jean Melville (Angie Dickinson).  As he heads into middle-age, he is still fit and handsome and charming.  He dresses well, or at least well by the standards of the early 70s.  (By the standards of today, a few of his ties are a bit too wide.)  Everyone believes that Neal has a nice and comfortable job as an insurance agent.

Of course, the truth is far different.

Neal is a veteran con man and a thief.  He’s just recently been released from prison and his deceptively friendly parole officer (played by the great character actor, Michael Lerner) is convinced that Neal will screw up again eventually.  And, of course, Neal has screwed up.  A gambling addict, he is $30,000 in debt.  Can Neal steal enough jewelry from enough suburban homes to pay off his debt?  Can a man like Neal change his ways?

This is a surprisingly somber made-for-TV movie.  Just from the plot description and the film’s first few minutes, you might expect Thief to be a light-hearted caper film in which Neal and Jean work together to pull off one last heist so that Neal can retire.  Instead, Neal spends almost the entire film lying to Jean and there’s hardly a light moment to be found.  Neal says that he wants to retire from his life of crime but, as the film makes clear, that’s a lie that he’s telling himself.  Neal cannot stop stealing and gambling because he’s as much of an addict as the wild-haired junkie (Michael C. Gwynne) who briefly confronts Neal at the parole office.  At one point, Jean tells Neal, “The more I know you, the less I know you,” but the truth of the matter is that Neal is so deep in denial about the futility of his life that he doesn’t even know himself.

It’s not a particularly happy film.  Richard Crenna is ideally cast as Neal, playing him with enough charm that the viewer can buy that he could talk his way out of being caught in a stranger’s backyard but with also with vulnerability that the viewer can see his fate, even if he can’t.  Thief also provides a rare opportunity to see Cameron Mitchell playing a sympathetic role.  Mitchell is cast as Neal’s attorney, who continually tries to get Neal to stop messing up but who ultimately knows that his attempts to reform Neal are just as futile as Neal’s attempts to go straight.

The movie ends on a surprisingly fatalistic note, one that suggests that there’s only one way to truly escape from a life of crime.  I can only imagine how viewers responded in 1971, when they turned on their television and found themselves watching not a light-hearted caper film but instead a bleak examination of criminal ennui.  It’s not a happy film but it is more than worth watching for Richard Crenna’s lead performance.

Retro Television Reviews: The Master 1.13 “A Place To Call Home”

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a new feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Fridays, I will be reviewing The Master, which ran on NBC from January to August of 1984.  The show can be found on Tubi!

This week, The Master comes to an end.

Episode 1.13 “A Place To Call Home”

(Dir by Gordon Hessler, originally aired on August 31st, 1984)

The Master ends in much the same way that it began, with Max and John Peter McAllister in a small town that is controlled by an evil businessman.  In this case, land developer Mark Richards (Jock Mahoney) wants to run the local orphanage out of town so that he can steal the land and expand his uranium mine.  Max and McAllister not only help Kim Anderson (Susan Woollen) save her orphanage but they also provide some much-needed mentoring to two of the orphans, Mike (Doug Toby) and Bobby (played by Kane Kosugi).  Bobby, it turns out, has some martial arts skills of his own!  It’s amazing how McAllister and Max were always traveling to small towns that just happened to be home to other people who knew karate.

Though his son plays Bobby, Sho Kosugi does not appear in this episode, which is a shame considering that it would be turn out to be the show’s finale.  For that matter, the show ends with McAllister having yet to find his daughter.  In fact, Terri McAllister is only mentioned briefly at the end of the episode, when McAllister says that he and Max have to get back on the road because “I’m looking for my daughter.”  Considering that the whole premise of the show was that McAllister was searching for Terri while Okassa was searching for McAllister, it seems like neither was really in a hurry to accomplish their goals.

A Place To Call Home feels like a greatest hits package, duplicating the plot of the pilot while tossing in a bit of the union episode‘s political subtext.  Even the scene where McAllister attempts to hop onto a helicopter feels a bit reminiscent of the ghost town episode.  The Master ended with an episode that resolved nothing and didn’t really bring anything new to show’s format.

Why did The Master end after thirteen episodes?  When taken as a whole, the show wasn’t as bad as its reputation.  While the stunt doubles did most of the work, Lee Van Cleef and Tim Van Patten still managed to develop a likable chemistry over the course of 13 episodes.  At first, the show’s writer stried too hard to play up the idea of Max Keller being a rebel with a chip on his shoulder but, after the first few episodes, it appears that they realized that Van Patten’s greatest strength as an actor was that he had a sort of amiable goofiness to him.  The stories were predictable but the fight scenes were usually (if not always) well-choreographed and entertaining.  The stunt people earned their paycheck.

In the end, though, I think The Master never quite figured what it wanted to be.  Did it want to be a straight action show?  Did it want to be a goofy buddy comedy?  In some episodes, McAllister was apparently a famous and well-known figure.  In others, he was a total unknown.  In some episodes, finding Terri was the most important thing in his life.  In others, he really didn’t seem to care.  The best episodes were the ones that winked at the audience and acknowledged just how ludicrous the whole thing was.  But, far too often, The Master became a generic crime show that just happened to feature martial arts.

The Master is finished and, to my surprise, I’m going to kind of miss it.  It had potential.  But, it’s time to move on to a new series.  Get ready because next week, it’s time for T & T!

Framed (1975, directed by Phil Karlson)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Revenge can be brutal, especially when you’ve been framed.

Joe Don Baker plays Ron Lewis, a surly nightclub owner and gambler who wins a small fortune, witnesses a crime, and nearly gets shot all in the same night.  When he reaches his house, he’s planning on calling the police but he’s confronted in his own garage by a sheriff’s deputy who tries to kill him!  In a lengthy and brutal scene, Ron beats the deputy to death and gouges out his eyes.  Even though Ron was only acting in self-defense, he’s charged with murder.  Told that there is no way that he’ll be able to win an acquittal, Ron pleads guilty to a lesser charge and is sent to prison for four years.

While he’s in prison, Ron befriends a mob boss (John Marley, who famously woke up with a horse’s head in his bed in The Godfather) and the boss’s number one hitman, Vince (Gabriel Dell).  While Ron is in prison, a group of men assault his girlfriend (country singer Conny Van Dyke) and tell her not to ask any questions about the events that led to Ron being framed.

After serving his sentence and getting into numerous fights with the guards, Ron is finally released.  When Vince shows up and tells Ron that he’s been hired to kill him, the two of them team up with an honest deputy (Brock Peters) and set out to find out why Ron was set up and to get revenge.

Framed is a brutal movie, Ron and his friends hold nothing back in their quest to get revenge.  Whether he’s shooting a man in cold blood or hooking someone up to a car battery in order to get information out of him, there’s little that Ron won’t do and the movie lingers over every act of violence.  Several pounds overweight and snarling out of his lines, Joe Don Baker may not be a conventional action hero but he’s believable in his rage.  He’s the ultimate country boy who has been pushed too far and now he doesn’t care how much blood he has to get on his hands.  However, because Baker does seem more like an ordinary person than a Clint Eastwood or a Charles Bronson-type, he retains the audience’s sympathy even as he splashes blood all over the screen.  As violent as his action may be, they always feel justified.

Baker’s performance and the believable violence are the film’s biggest strengths.  It’s biggest weakness is a plot that revolves around an elaborate conspiracy that doesn’t always make sense and some notably weak supporting performances.  Ron’s revenge may be brutal but it takes a while to get there and the first hour gets bogged down with Ron’s struggle to adjust to life in prison.  John Marley does a good job as Ron’s prison mentor but then he abruptly disappears from the movie.

Before making Framed, Baker and director Phil Karlson previously collaborated on Walking Tall.  Framed is far more violent than that film was but its plot doesn’t hold together as well.  However, if you’re just looking for a violent action film that features Joe Don Baker doing what he does best, Framed delivers.

A Movie A Day #245: The Missouri Breaks (1976, directed by Arthur Penn)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

After Tom Logan (Jack Nicholson) and his gang of rustlers (played by Randy Quaid, Frederic Forrest, and Harry Dean Stanton) rob a train, Logan uses the money to buy a small ranch.  Their new neighbor is Braxton (John McLiam), a haughty land baron who considers himself to be an ambassador of culture to the west but who is not above hanging rustlers and hiring gunmen.  One such gunman is the eccentric Robert E. Lee Clayton (Marlon Brando), a “regulator” who speaks in a possibly fake Irish brogue, is a master of disguise, and uses a variety of hand-made weapons.  Braxton hires Clayton to kill Logan and his men, despite the fact that his daughter (Kathleen Lloyd) has fallen in love with Logan.

A flop that was so notorious that it would be five years before Arthur Penn got a chance to direct another film, The Missouri Breaks is best remembered for Marlon Brando’s bizarre performance.  Brando reportedly showed up on the set late and insisted on largely improvising his part, which meant speaking in a comical Irish accent, singing an impromptu love song to his horse, and disguising himself as an old woman for one key scene.  (According to Patrick McGilligan’s Jack’s Life: A Biography of Jack Nicholson, co-star Harry Dean Stanton grew so incensed at Brando’s behavior that he actually tried to rip the dress off of Brando, saying that he simply would not be “killed’ by a man wearing a dress.)  Brando’s later reputation for being a disastrously weird performer largely started with the stories of his behavior on the set of The Missouri Breaks.

I had heard so many bad things about Brando and The Missouri Breaks that I was surprised when I finally watched it and discovered that it is actually a pretty good movie.  For all of his notoriety, Brando does not enter this leisurely paced and elegiac western until after half a hour.  The majority of the movie is just about Jack Nicholson and his gang, with Nicholson giving a low-key and surprisingly humorous performance that contrasts well with Brando’s more flamboyant work.  While Arthur Penn may not have been able to control Brando, he still deftly combines moments of comedy with moments of drama and he gets good performances from most of the supporting cast.  Quaid, Stanton, Forrest, and Nicholson are all just fun to watch and the rambling storyline provides plenty of time to get to know them.  Whenever Brando pushes the movie too close to self-parody, Nicholson pulls it back.   The Missouri Breaks may have been a flop when it was released but it has aged well.