John Peyser | 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 Mondays, I will be reviewing CHiPs, which ran on NBC from 1977 to 1983. The entire show is currently streaming on Prime!

This week is just a mess.

Episode 5.9 “Finders Keepers”

(Dir by John Peyser, originally aired on November 29th, 1981)

Oh, it’s a Steve McLeish episode!

These episodes are fun because they were so obviously written and re-written to try to cover up the fact that Caitlyn Jenner was a terrible actor. In this episode, we learn that Steve is into rare flowers and that he drives a pretty snazzy convertible. And yet, despite these character details, Steve still doesn’t really have a personality beyond being kind of twitchy and always hesitating before delivering his lines. Jenner seemed to be made out of charisma anti-matter and it’s bizarre to see a public figure with absolutely zero screen presence.

This episode is a mess. Two teens steal a car and come into possession of some stolen money. Steve searches for the stolen car. An eccentric bounty hunter (Noble Willingham) drives from Texas to California in a pink Cadillac and gets in everyone’s way as he chases a fugitive. Oscar nominee Amy Madigan appears as a country singer who would really like to get it on with Baker but Baker always ends up running late. Ponch makes three brief appearances in this episode. It’s explained that he’s preparing to testify in a huge trial and that’s why Baker and Steve are temporary partners. None of the storylines really feel complete or connected. One gets the feeling that three different scripts were just randomly crammed together.

This episode had two effective car crashes and it was somewhat amusing to watch as Baker always showed up just a minute or two after Amy Madigan stopped singing. That said, this episode didn’t add up to much. The only thing that really made it watchable was Jenner’s bizarre performance.

There’s a part of me that kind of hopes that Ponch never comes back! Of course, if that happened, it would no longer be….

In this self-conciously hip western, former Lolita Sue Lyon stars as Myra Polsen. Myra has a reputation for being the town tramp and, when her father discovers Myra in bed with wanted outlaw Frenando Nunez (Julian Mateos), it leads to her father having a violent breakdown which ends with him shooting himself and Frenando escaping into the desert. (Before anyone comments, that’s not a misspelling. The outlaw’s name actually is Frenando.) World-weary U.S. Marshall Ross (Pernell Roberts) heads into the desert to try to capture Frenando. Accompanying him are Myra (who still loves Frenando) and the mysterious Mr. Brown (Leslie Nielsen!), a detective who is obsessed with Frenando and who says that he’ll kill the outlaw as soon as he sees him.

Also accompanying them is a ghostly folksinger played by Janis Ian, of At Seventeen fame. Ian sings songs that comment upon the story and they’re just as empty-headed and bad as you would expect them to be. Janis Ian’s presence marks this as being one of the handful of new wave westerns that were released in the wake of Easy Rider, The Wild Bunch, and the films of Sergio Leone. These westerns attempted to appeal to the counter-culture by sympathizing with the outlaws and featuring crooked lawmen. The addition of Janis Ian and her songs is Four Rode Out‘s way of saying, “This may be a western but this is a western that gets it.” Instead, it just comes across as artificial and forced. There’s a lot of room for both moral ambiguity and political subtext in the western genre, which was something that Leone and Sam Peckinpah proved. There’s less room for a hippie folksinger, as Four Rode Out demonstrates.

Other than Janis Ian’s songs and some dialogue that tries too hard to be profound, Four Rode Out isn’t bad. Sue Lyon really digs into the role of Myra and even Pernell Roberts gives a good performance. Of course, if you’re watching this movie in 2020, it’s probably going to be because of Leslie Nielsen. This movie was made before Nielsen recreated himself as a comedic actor and it’s interesting to see how the same things that made Nielsen so funny — the deadpan delivery, the overly serious facial expressions — also made him a good villain. For modern audiences, it can be difficult to look at Leslie Nielsen without laughing. That’s how much we associate him with comedy. But once you accept the fact that this is Leslie Nielsen playing a bad guy, he’s very convincing in the role.

One final note of interest: Four Rode Out was based on a story idea from the actor Dick Miller. Yes, that Dick Miller. Unfortunately, Miller himself is not in the movie.