John Beradino | 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 Wednesdays, I will be reviewing the original Love Boat, which aired on ABC from 1977 to 1986! The series can be streamed on Paramount Plus!

It’s time for another cruise on …. THE LOVE BOAT!

Episode 4.21 “Clothes Make The Girl/Black Sheep/Hometown Girl”

(Dir by Earl Bellamy, originally aired on February 28th, 1981)

This week’s cruise is all about money!

For instance, in this episode, we learn that Doc Bricker is from a small town called Cedar Flats. Doc was the head of a committee that raised the money necessary to send Mike Lucas (Randy Powell) to medical school so that Mike could return home and serve as the town doctor. However, when Mike boards the cruise with his fiancée, Tracy (Cindy Morgan), it turns out that he has some bad news. Tracy’s wealthy father has offered Mike a job working at a Park Avenue clinic in Manhattan. Mike is planning on taking the job because of the money and the fact that Tracy doesn’t want to live in a small town. Unfortunately, that will leave Cedar Flats without a doctor.

Doc Bricker, showing that he actually is a man of integrity despite also being a walking HR nightmare, decides that he has no choice but to return to Cedar Flats and serve as their doctor until someone can be found to replace him. He asks Captain Stubing for a six-month leave of absence. Stubing agrees but warns that the cruise line might hire someone to take Doc’s place.

Meanwhile, Suzy Marshall (Kyle Aletter) is excited because it appears that her daughter, Anne (Lee Meriwether), has attracted the attention of a wealthy man named Jonathan (Larry Breeding). Little do they know that Jonathan is actually just Johnny, the ship’s valet. Johnny is wearing another passenger’s clothes and pretending to be rich.

At one point, Johnny takes Anne back to his cabin, making this the first episode to show us what a low-level employee’s cabin looks like. It’s small and cramped and located at the bottom the boat, which means it’ll be the first to flood if The Love Boat ever hits an iceberg. It’s also mentioned that Johnny is not allowed to eat in the main dining room with the passengers. I have to admit that it’s all a bit disillusioning. Apparently, the Love Boat is a terrible place to work!

Finally, a passenger named Donald Gray (Robert Ginty) tells the Captain that he works for the Secret Service. He is on the Love Boat because he hopes to capture a notorious counterfeiter. But what will happen when that counterfeiter turns out to be Jesse (Demond Wilson), Issac’s ne’er-do-well uncle who claims to have turned a new leaf? Poor Isaac!

Well, don’t worry. Everything works out:

1) Mike realizes that he has to honor his commitment to Cedar Flats and, after talking to her father, Cindy realizes that she loves Mike enough that she can be happy in a small town. (Cindy’s father says some very dismissive things about Cedar Flats but it turns out that he was only doing that to get Mike so outraged that he would have no choice but to return home. He was doing it as a favor to Doc Bricker. Can you imagine if that plan didn’t work? What if Mike just said, “You’re right! New York, here we come!”)

2) Anne learns the truth when she sees Johnny in his valet uniform. Luckily, she doesn’t care.

3) It turns out that Donald is actually a criminal who is masquerading as a treasury agent and Uncle Jesse is an undercover government agent! Isaac is happy to learn this but also agrees to keep Jesse’s secret. “You’re my favorite nephew,” Uncle Jesse replies. Awwwww!

This was an okay cruise. The guest stars weren’t particularly interesting but Bernie Kopell and Ted Lange both got an opportunity to show what they could do when given a real storyline to deal with. Kopell especially deserves a lot of credit for showing that humanity that lurked underneath Doc’s carefree surface. This episode kept me entertained and I enjoyed the scenery. Really, what else can you ask for from The Love Boat?

Film noir comes to the suburbs!

The Killer is Loose opens with the robbery of a savings and loan. At first, it seems like meek bank teller Leon Poole (Wendell Corey) behaved heroically and kept the robbery from being far worse than it could have been. How meek is Leon Poole? He’s so meek that his nickname has always been Foggy. People have always made fun of him because of his glasses and his bad eyesight. Everyone assumes that Poole is just one of those quiet people who is destined to spend his entire life in obscurity.

However, the police soon discover that Leon Poole is not the hero that everyone thinks that he is. Instead, he was involved in the robbery! When Detective Sam Wagner (Joseph Cotten) leads a group of cops over to Poole’s house to arrest the bank teller, Poole’s wife is accidentally shot and killed. At the subsequent trial, Poole swears that he’ll get vengeance. And then he’s promptly sent off to prison.

Jump forward three years. Leon Poole is still in prison. He’s still deceptively meek. He still wears glasses. Everyone still assumes that he’s harmless. Of course, that’s what Poole wants them to believe. He’s still obsessed with getting his vengeance. Meanwhile, Detective Wagner and his wife, Lila (Rhonda Fleming), are living in the suburbs and have a somewhat strained marriage. Lila wants Wagner to find a less dangerous and less stressful job. Wagner wants to keep busting crooks.

When Poole see a chance to escape from prison, he does so. That’s not really a shock because even the quietest of people are probably going to take advantage of the chance to escape from prison. What is a shock is that Poole ruthlessly murders a guard while making his escape. He then kills a truck driver and steal the vehicle. He then tracks down his old army sergeant and guns him down while the man’s wife watches. Always watch out for the quiet ones, as they say.

Now, Poole has just one more target. He wants to finish his revenge by killing Lila Wagner.

The Killer is Loose is a tough and, considering the time that it was made, brutal film noir. (Seriously, the scene where Poole kills his former sergeant really took me by surprise.) While both Rhonda Fleming and Joseph Cotten give good performances in their roles, it’s Wendell Corey who really steals the film. Corey plays Poole not as an outright villain but instead as a man who has been driven mad by years and years of taunts. After spend his entire life being told that he was a loser, Poole finally decided to do something for himself and, as a result, his wife ended up getting killed by the police. Now that Poole’s managed to escape from prison, he’s willing to do anything just as long as he can get his final revenge. Corey plays Poole with a smoldering resentment and the performance feels very real. (If the film were made today, it’s easy to imagine that Poole would be an anonymous twitter troll, going through life with a smile on his face while unleashing his anger online.) It brings a very real spark and feeling of danger to a film that would otherwise just be a standard crime film.

The Killer Is Loose also makes good use of its suburban setting, suggesting that both Fleming and Cotten have allowed themselves to get complacent with their life away from the obvious dangers of the big city. You can buy a new house, the film seems to be saying, but you can’t escape the past.