I suspect "They Only Kill Their Masters" owes something to the previous year's successful "Dirty Harry." Instead of, "Do you feel lucky, Punk?", we hear "Neat." And, towards the end, James Garner as the police chief of a small California town, dispenses with his regulation snub-nosed .38 and produces a .357 magnum. In its elements, it also hints at "Harper", in that familiar character actors or those somewhat over the hill show up for brief scenes and then are never seen again.
Garner is sardonic, neatly sardonic. Katherine Ross as first the girl, then the suspect, then the girl again, is pretty. Alas, the print I saw cut out a second or two in which she rushes out of a bedroom an displays her cunning tush.
The murder mystery itself has a certain promising premise. A beautiful young woman, who may or may not be a lesbian, appears to have been killed by her doberman pincher.
But what follows is bland. There are a few major problems with the film. First, this is obviously no small town on the California coast named Eden Landing. It's Malibu and somebody's back lot. "Eden's Landing," with its distinction between small town folks and "city people" belongs on the east coast, probably in the South, maybe North Carolina. There really aren't any small tightly-knit communities on California's Coast Highway between the LA suburbs and Pescadero somewhere south of San Francisco.
Michel Hugo did the cinematography and has turned a feature film into a television movie with high key lighting and fills. There's certainly no drama in the images.
The writer, Lane Slate, with the complicity of the director, James Goldstone, miscalculated the impact of the comic scenes and the attempts to draw some interest from conversational exchanges. Edmond O'Brien, for instance, is a low-brow liquor store owner, and Garner's questioning of him, a total dufus, ought to be amusing but although the pauses for laughs are present, there are no laughs to be had. One imagines what Howard Hawks would have done with this material. He'd have invented some bits of business on the spot that would have resonated with whatever ludic propensity the audience had brought to the theater. He had Humphrey Bogart tossing off lines like, "She tried to sit in my lap while I was standing up," without bothering to wait while the laughter subsided.
The performances aren't bad, considering the narrative frame. Garner is pretty good at this kind of role, as he demonstrated before and would demonstrate later. See him in "Sunset" for an example. June Allyson is given a speech that is too long, over the dead body of her husband -- I guess because she is June Allyson.
It's all a little amateurish -- the writing, photography, and direction being the principal weaknesses. I kind of enjoyed it, but it could have been much more with a bit more skill behind the camera. And of course nobody should ever have cut that brief glimpse of Katherine Ross's rear end.
Garner is sardonic, neatly sardonic. Katherine Ross as first the girl, then the suspect, then the girl again, is pretty. Alas, the print I saw cut out a second or two in which she rushes out of a bedroom an displays her cunning tush.
The murder mystery itself has a certain promising premise. A beautiful young woman, who may or may not be a lesbian, appears to have been killed by her doberman pincher.
But what follows is bland. There are a few major problems with the film. First, this is obviously no small town on the California coast named Eden Landing. It's Malibu and somebody's back lot. "Eden's Landing," with its distinction between small town folks and "city people" belongs on the east coast, probably in the South, maybe North Carolina. There really aren't any small tightly-knit communities on California's Coast Highway between the LA suburbs and Pescadero somewhere south of San Francisco.
Michel Hugo did the cinematography and has turned a feature film into a television movie with high key lighting and fills. There's certainly no drama in the images.
The writer, Lane Slate, with the complicity of the director, James Goldstone, miscalculated the impact of the comic scenes and the attempts to draw some interest from conversational exchanges. Edmond O'Brien, for instance, is a low-brow liquor store owner, and Garner's questioning of him, a total dufus, ought to be amusing but although the pauses for laughs are present, there are no laughs to be had. One imagines what Howard Hawks would have done with this material. He'd have invented some bits of business on the spot that would have resonated with whatever ludic propensity the audience had brought to the theater. He had Humphrey Bogart tossing off lines like, "She tried to sit in my lap while I was standing up," without bothering to wait while the laughter subsided.
The performances aren't bad, considering the narrative frame. Garner is pretty good at this kind of role, as he demonstrated before and would demonstrate later. See him in "Sunset" for an example. June Allyson is given a speech that is too long, over the dead body of her husband -- I guess because she is June Allyson.
It's all a little amateurish -- the writing, photography, and direction being the principal weaknesses. I kind of enjoyed it, but it could have been much more with a bit more skill behind the camera. And of course nobody should ever have cut that brief glimpse of Katherine Ross's rear end.