Jack Kenny | 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 Mondays, I will be reviewing Miami Vice, which ran on NBC from 1984 to 1989. The entire show can be purchased on Prime!

Sonny goes to Hollywood.

Episode 4.10 “A Rock and a Hard Place”

(Dir by Colin Bucksey, originally aired on January 22nd, 1988)

I guess I am going to have to accept that Miami Vice is no longer a show about two vice cops fighting a losing war against drug traffickers. Instead, it’s now a show about an undercover cop who is married to a world famous rock star, even though it makes absolutely no sense.

In this episode, a tabloid reporter goes to Miami to do some research on this Sonny “Burnett.” He hears a lot of stories about how Sonny Burnett is one of the city’s biggest drug dealers and he writes a story about it. Sonny is upset, though one would think this would actually help him maintain his cover story. Myself, I have to wonder how competent this reporter was. Sonny Crockett has been established as having been a semi-famous college football star (Tubbs recognized him as soon as he met him) but no one ever seems to notice that Sonny Cockett and Sonny Burnett look, sound, and act exactly alike. Considering the number of times that Crockett’s cover has gotten blown and that everyone who has ever done business with Sonny Burnett has ended up either getting arrested and gunned down by the police, you would think there would at least be some speculation about this guy being a cop.

(On a plus note, Don Henley’s Dirty Laundry played in the background while the reporter doing his thing. That’s a song you can’t help but chair dance to.)

The majority of this episode dealt with a corrupt record executive (Tony Hendra) who was looking to get out of paying Sonny’s wife, Caitlin, the money that she was owed for her new album. His solution was to have her assassinated and to make it look like she got caught in the crossfire of one of her husband’s drug deals. Needless to say, it didn’t work. Sonny gunned down the two assassins and then arrested the record executive. “You’re a cop!?” the bad guy said, stunned.

And again, I have to wonder how this is not going to blow Sonny’s cover. Is the press really not going to ask why Caitlin’s criminal husband just arrested the guy releasing her latest album?

This episode had all sorts of plot holes and it asked the audience to suspend their disbelief just a bit too far. But at least it didn’t features Crockett and Tubbs searching for a stolen shipment of bull semen. That’ll be next week’s episode!

(Seriously, I’m not kidding….)

I miss the old Miami Vice. Seriously, the city’s drug business is probably booming because Crockett and Tubbs are wasting their time with all of this season 4 nonsense.

ride It’s the turn of the 20th century and the Old West is fading into legend. When they were younger, Steve Judd (Joel McCrea) and Gil Westrum (Randolph Scott) were tough and respect lawmen but now, time has passed them by. Judd now provides security for shady mining companies while Gil performs at county fairs under the name The Oregon Kid. When Judd is hired to guard a shipment of gold, he enlists his former partner, Gil, to help. Gil brings along his current protegé, Heck Longtree (Ron Starr).

On their way to the mining camp, they spend the night at the farm of Joshua Knudsen (R.G. Armstrong) and his daughter, Elsa (Mariette Hartley). Elsa is eager to escape her domineering father and flirts with Heck. When they leave the next morning, Elsa accompanies them, planning on meeting her fiancée, Billy Hammond (James Drury), at the mining camp.

When they reach the camp, they meet Bill and his four brothers (John Anderson, L.Q. Jones, John Davis Chandler, and the great Warren Oates). Billy is a drunk who is planning on “sharing” Elsa with his brothers. Gil, Judd, and Heck rescue Elsa and prepare for a final confrontation with the Hammond Brothers. At the same time, Gil and Heck are planning on stealing the gold, with or without Judd’s help.

Ride the High Country was actually Sam Peckinpah’s second film but it’s the first of his films to truly feel like a Sam Peckinpah film. (For his first film, The Deadly Companions, Peckinpah was largely a director-for-hire and had no say over the script or the final edit.) Peckinpah rewrote N.B. Stone’s original script and reportedly based the noble Steve Judd on his own father. All of Peckinpah’s usual themes are present in Ride the High Country, with Judd and, eventually, Gil representing the dying nobility of the old west and the Hammond brothers and the greedy mining companies representing the coming of the “modern” age. Ride The High Country‘s final shoot-out and bittersweet ending even serve as a template for Peckinpah’s later work in The Wild Bunch.

Much like the characters they were playing, Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea were two aging veterans on the verge of retirement. For these two aging stars, who had starred in countless westerns before this one, Ride The High Country would provide both fitting farewell and moving tribute. This would be the last chance that either of them would have to appear in a great movie and both of them obviously relish the opportunity. The best moments in the film are the ones where Judd and Gil just talk with the majestic mountains of California in the background.

Among the supporting cast, Ron Starr and Mariette Hartley are well-cast as the young lovers but are never as compelling as Gil or Judd. Future Peckinpah regulars R.G. Armstrong, L.Q. Jones, and Warren Oates all make early appearances. Seven years after playing brothers in Ride the High Country, L.Q. Jones and Warren Oates would both appear in Peckinpah’s most celebrated film, The Wild Bunch.

The elegiac and beautifully-shot Ride The High Country was Sam Peckinpah’s first great film and it might be his best.