User Reviews

They Only Kill Their Masters is a flawed murder mystery. A meatloaf dinner half way through stops it in its tracks. The female romantic lead is as bland and uninteresting as packaged custard. The director never establishes control over the movie.

On the other hand, it also has a great deal of easy-going charm, a winning performance by James Garner (who carries the picture) and a deliberately misleading set of clues that lead to steamy speculation, smarmy behavior and committed kinkiness. There's a sleight-of-hand solution that makes sense and a Doberman named Murphy with chompers big enough to rip out a throat and a tail that could power an aluminum smelter just by wags.

Never trust small town values, especially if the small town is Eden Landing on the California coast. When a young woman washes up on the sand in front of a beach house, she has major mauling on her body and a prancing Doberman bouncing around in the surf next to her. It's not long before the newspaper pronounces the woman dead by dog and Murphy is scheduled for euthanasia by Dr. Watkins (Hal Holbrook), the town vet. Then Police Chief Abel Marsh (Garner) has a talk with the town coroner. Seems the dog's bites were all on the body's arms and legs. Looks like Murphy might have been trying to rescue her. Then there's evidence that she drowned...on purpose and it wasn't suicide. Her lungs are full of tap water mixed with salt, not seawater. And she was pregnant. As Abel investigates, he finds more questions than answers. He gets bashed and beaten. And he finds he likes the vet's new assistant (Katharine Ross) well enough to invite her over for a meatloaf supper. Abel also finds some erotic photos. Seems the dead woman liked to keep a record of her doings. Through it all Abel remains skeptical, likable, wry and smart...just like James Garner. The conclusion is tricky and nearly lethal for Abel.

Some fine actors join Garner in this flawed but interesting murder mystery. Katharine Ross, unfortunately, brings little to the part. The character is bland, has a nice smile, not much personality and pours too much dressing on the salad she makes for herself and Abel to accompany Abel's meatloaf. But as compensation there are all those excellent, aging actors who show up and demonstrate why Garner is wise enough not to go toe-to-toe with them in their scenes together. Tom Ewell is one of Abel's cops; June Allyson is the vet's wife; Edmund O'Brien is the liquor store owner; Arthur O'Connell owns the local diner and Ann Rutherford is Abel's police dispatcher. Even Peter Lawford shows up as a sleaze with a lot of hair. They give us more than cameos, but none of the parts requires actors as known as they are. The result is that each actor gets a little extra business to do so that we can appreciate their skill and we can remember their great roles. As much as they add to the movie's pleasure, their presence distracts from the story.

I've always liked this movie. The solution is unexpected. Garner is Garner, and that's a plus. And it's still good to see in their old age just how skilled and professional were Edmund O'Brien (D.O.A., Seven Days in May, The Wild Bunch), Tom Ewell (Adam's Rib, The Seven Year Itch) and Arthur O'Connell (Picnic, Anatomy of a Murder).

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.

Potential cult film has a pregnant lady found dead near her beachfront property in coastal Eden's Landing, a little California town, her body covered in dog bites perhaps associated with a pet Doberman. A number of possible suspects include a visiting beauty (Katherine Ross), a veterinarian (Hal Holbrook), and a swinging aristocrat (Peter Lawford). The police chief, Able Mars (James Garner, already rocking the effortlessly cool Rockford detective look) doesn't realize how complicated this case will become. With a town of oddballs, some non-PC homophobic and sexist dialogue, a police force of two that Able has available to him, a casual, none-too-hurriedly pace to the ongoing investigation and apprehension of the soon-to-be-discovered suspect on the lam, and a California county police that love to stop by to flex their supposed muscle but are none too bright; this film caps it all off with a twist involving a ménage à trois that provided an incentive for the murder.

Ross looks mighty foxy, Garner occupies the time on screen with a performance that is as laid back as the pace (he really doesn't even have to try because he's a natural actor allowing his character to function within the environment of his small town that rarely sees much excitement or intrigue besides the eccentrics that live there), and a cast of veterans filling out the characters of locals living in Eden's Landing (like Arthur O'Connell as the owner and cook of the only diner in town, Edmund O'Brien as a liquor store proprietor always poking Able for details in the investigation, June Allyson as the suspicious wife of Holbrook's veterinarian, Tom Ewell as the portly cop attending to the mundane activities and misdemeanors of the locals (like a man biting off a woman's nipple during a heated make out in the back seat of a car!!!) and Christopher Connelly as the inquisitive cop with suggestions that might be accurate about the case, Harry Guardini as an intrusive county law enforcer who thinks he knows better how to conduct the investigation than Able, and Ann Rutherford as Garner's secretary dealing with a station house containing equipment hand-me-downs "from the city"). Lawford likes them young, drives a convertible sports car, and is ambiguous when it comes to sharing personal/intimate details of his ex-wife, a real sexually promiscuous gal. Garner and Ross' romance gets some time on and off throughout the film, but when she becomes a possible member of the murder victim's social circle it throws a monkey wrench in their blossoming relationship. Allyson is wasted in a rather small role while Holbrook does a great deal with a rather limited part that gives him few opportunities to leave a definite mark in the film, although his use of a drug on Garner, during one key sequence which could (or could not) reveal his guilt, taking advantage of the fallen, subdued police chief, after a car chase comes to its conclusion, is quite a memorable moment. Garner's exhaustive tolerance of the locals in his town while investigating the murder case is part of the film's charm. A specific sequence, besides Holbrook's "sticking Garner with the needle" in the vet's office and ensuing car chase, concerning the property of the crime, set afire by the killer (and his/her accomplice), with Garner interrupting (too late, unfortunate for Lawford) as they are about to (or already have) flee, is another memorable moment in the film, especially in why the Doberman didn't bark while in the chief's car…Garner waiting and waiting on the beach, as a body is lying right next to him (retrieved from the burning house), the Doberman his only live company, as the police/fire dept seem predisposed, describes the plight of a small town with limited resources and manpower. A one-way tunnel to the crime scene is the perfect means to plug a hole, stop the flow of traffic when needing to avoid capture, and allow time for the home to burn, baby, burn. Ross is the kind of actress who looks great while holding a lot of how she feels internally. The investigation into a murder seems almost too gradual, but that's just Able's style, I guess.

This is sort of a cross between a B-movie and a TV-movie that somehow wound up in theatrical release with some fairly biggish names (James Garner and Hal Holbrook). It's most notable for being the final movie made on the MGM Backlot, which stands in for a fictional California coastal town called Eden Landing, so small that it's literally a "one-horse" (ie, one-cop-car) town. Yes, there's one cop car that has to be shared by police chief Garner, his faintly stupid deputies, and even his deputies' wives. Also, the only road to the beach goes through a one-lane tunnel. The nice twist to this setting is that hometown boy Garner is thoroughly sick of the place and his underlings, and everyone is pretty much an underachiever, which probably would have made for a great TV show a la Northern Exposure, come to think of it.

Garner is quite good playing an uncharacteristically dour role as the police chief (who, strangely, wears a suit and not a police uniform, which I never understood) - he rarely smiles, not even when in bed with the lovely 70s starlet-of-the-moment Katharine Ross. The mystery is convoluted and, without spoiling too much, really hard to swallow. Suffice it to say that the Doberman is not guilty...

What knocks several points off this film for me, is the level of throwaway sleaze (sordid police cases mentioned in passing, jiggly boob shots, and outright homophobic sentiment) that the script inserts in a vain attempt to seem "ultramodern" yet only horribly dating the picture. It's one of the only films James Garner didn't feel like discussing in his autobiography, and although he gives a fine performance, the movie probably wasn't anyone's finest hour. That said, if you have a hankering for 1970s California and can stomach the word "f-ggot" being said by the film's hero, it isn't a complete waste of 138 minutes.

This 1972 film is the first and probably the best of four, varied 1970s movies by the same writer about sensationalistic small-town murders solved by the local police chief against the backdrop of quirky town regulars and a casual romantic interest. The others are: (1) Isn't It Shocking (Alan Alda, 1973); and (2) The Girl In The Empty Grave and (3) Deadly Game (both Andy Griffith, 1977).

Here, Chief Abel Marsh (James Garner) returns from a Los Angeles vacation to read in the paper about a local woman's death while he was away. She was found dead at the beach, with her pet Doberman "Murphy" beside her and its bite marks on her arms. Marsh finds some suspicious signs at her house and learns that Dobermans strike for the neck, not the arms. So he has the woman's body exhumed and autopsied. He discovers that she was drowned in fresh water but dumped in the sea. He also learns that she was pregnant. Her ex-husband (Peter Lawford) tells Marsh that she ended the marriage because she was in love with a woman. Although the killer stripped the victim's house of evidence, Marsh finds in some litter on the floor a photograph of an unidentified nude couple running toward the beach, away from the camera. He takes in Murphy. He also starts a romance with Katharine Ross, who plays the assistant to veterinarian Hal Holbrook, husband of June Allyson.

Marsh arrives at the victim's house to meet Lawford. Marsh finds the house in flames and Lawford unconscious inside, before being slugged. There is a nice scene as Marsh uses the phone in the house (his car tire and radio cord were slashed) to call for a fire truck and ambulance, only to have to sit outside and watch the house burn down and Lawford die, because the assailant, who took off in Lawford's car, blocked with the car the "one-way tunnel" between the town and the house, delaying the reinforcements. Further deductions lead Marsh to a suspect, who drugs and eludes him in an implausible scene (why would Marsh take the bundle from the suspect, tying up his arms, instead of handing it off to the owner, who was standing right there?). Marsh pursues the suspect and gets closer to the killer, with limited help from the bungling county police and apparently little or none from his own men. His relationship, such as it is, with Ross, falls apart due to his work on the case, at least for now.

Unlike Alda, Garner is credible as a police chief. He uses a gun, breaks up a bar fight, and comports himself with authority. Unlike Griffith, Garner plays the role straight. The supporting cast is good, even if not as well-used as Alda's. There is more plotting and detective work in Garner's than the others. It strikes a better balance between serious and light elements than the dreary Alda or silly Griffith versions. Garner's has pleasant music and some good use of locations.

But problems spoil fuller enjoyment of the movie. The plot depends on Marsh not being able to distinguish a 30-year-old woman from a 55-year-old woman. Why did the careful culprit leave the crucial photo behind? And there is no explanation for how the case could have initially been so badly mishandled (mistaking cause of death for bite marks, instead of drowning). The director seems to go out of his way to present early scenes as unpleasant and loud (Marsh banging incessantly on the police car horn outside the station; a waiting room at the vet's with countless barking, jumping dogs; sickly lime green counter trim and wallpaper in the victim's house; Marsh clumsily knocking things on the floor there).

Garner acts so sullen and cynical that he lacks his usual charm and energy. Marsh's catch-phrases "Neat," "City folks," and "When you know where not to look, that tells you something about where to look," feel overused and phony, not natural. Marsh wisecracks about "triple bourbons for lunch," gleefully brings a second full pitcher of beer to his table, and always has a bottle handy. Nothing is made of this. Although likable, attractive actors, the relationship between Garner and Ross is hasty and unexplained in how it begins and especially ends, with excruciating, slow-paced scenes in which he, doing tight-lipped slow burns, and she, inquisitive and confused, take forever to say nothing. Lines that are supposed to be significant are incomprehensible (suspect tells Marsh, "You're shrewd, Abel, but you're not very smart"). Marsh is too rough with Ross and with Murphy.

There is little depth to the characters or relationships. Allyson is a mere stick figure plot device, with only a brief glimpse early and a few coarse, bitter lines ("She was a bitch."; "If you're so smart, you find the car."). The victim is left obscure. Marsh's deputies play no meaningful role. The running joke of the gung-ho county police's incompetence is taken too far when it causes a death.

The plot relies on sensationalism and innuendo rather than clear, satisfying explanation. The killer's confession is nearly incoherent ("….There was nothing left of him. Nothing of me. I had no choice."). The movie seems to exploit homosexuality and "threesomes" as plot gimmicks. It can be crude and offensive, as when Marsh jokes to Ross' question about why he is still single, "I'm a faggot. Have you seen the women in this town?"; Ross remarks, "I guess dykes don't use the pill."; a deputy laughs hysterically when discussing with Marsh a young woman who had part of her anatomy bitten off by a guy with her in the back seat of a car that hit a bump in the road; Marsh mutters in response to Lawford's new teenage-looking floosie girlfriend's question about whether there are motels in town with vibrator beds "in the box," "In the box, neat....City folks."; and dirty old townsmen quiz Marsh about "Did he get much?" on his L.A. vacation.

Eden Landing (James Garner) is the sheriff of a small California coast town. A dead woman is found on the beach. It's first believed her Doberman killed her but Eden finds out she was murdered, was pregnant and also a lesbian! As he tries to find out who did it someone is blocking him at every turn...and people are getting killed.

A very strange murder mystery. It was the last film shot on the old lots of MGM before they were sold and torn down. The architecture looks like the 1940s but the story is very 1970s. The attempts at humor in this fall flat and the story is needlessly convoluted. It looks--and feels--like a made for TV movie. But the mystery itself is interesting and it's worth seeing for the acting alone. Garner and Halbrook are good and the supporting cast is full of old MGM stars who seem to be having the time of their lives. Especially good were Peter Lawford and June Allyson. Katharine Ross (a good actress) is given a nothing role and sadly can't do anything with it. And wait'll you see the bathroom of the victim. Talk about 70s!

MINOR SPOILERS!!! Unfortunately there are some pretty negative things to deal with in this too. There's tons of sexism (especially in how Ross is treated) and some truly sickening homophobia. Sample line: "Isn't a pregnant lesbian a contradiction in terms?" I realize this was OK in 1972 but it comes across as pretty sick today.

Still it's worth a look for the cast alone. I give it a 7.

'They Only Kill Their Masters' (James Goldstone, 1972) is a film that would fit nicely as a clip or segment in Vito Russo's excellent documentary 'The Celluloid Closet' (Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, 1995), the latter of which explores an expansive collection of films from the Classic Hollywood era up to the 1990s that either directly or indirectly include harmful gay stereotypes and/or homophobic language and plot clichés. The problem with 'They Only Kill Their Masters' isn't just the homophobic terms as well as phrases such as "normal heterosexual" uttered by heterosexual characters that are littered throughout a particular scene where Abel Marsh (James Garner) and Kate Bingham (Katharine Ross) are having a meal at Abel's house. It's also the screenplay that not only doesn't do Garner or Ross any favours as actors but also provides only a razon-thin amount of screen time to Mrs. Watkins (June Allyson).

The screenplay allots Mrs. Watkins a two-minute monologue, which is interrupted more than once, of a one hour and thirty-seven minute film. It allows her enough time to confess her crime but with no real opportunity to express how she may have been treated as a person, whether this would include her lived experience as a woman or a non-heterosexual. As she kneels over her husband Dr. Warren G. Watkins' (Hal Holbrook) body after he's been accidentally shot and killed by Captain Daniel Streeter (Harry Guardino), she states of him, "We loved each other" to which Abel replies, "Who? Who loved who? He came home to protect her. He must've loved you very much, Mrs. Watkins. Always cleaning up after her." Here, Abel berates her for not being grateful that she had a man in her life and the dialogue in this scene appears to make Mrs. Watkins feel guilty not strictly for her crime but also for her existence.

The moment should obviously not trivialize the fact that she killed Jenny Campbell, but Mrs. Watkins' extremely brief screen time can be construed as a missed opportunity to explore a more multi-dimensional character. This opportunity could've been similar to the emphasis of anti-heroes which were common in a lot of 1970s films happening at the time, primarily dramas, crime films, and neo-noirs during and after the Vietnam War. These character types shared a similar sentiment with those of films noir of the 1940s and 1950s that were especially popular after the end of World War II. The absence of shades of character and focus on "bad city folk" versus "normal heterosexuals" and the innocent and likable small townsfolk, places this film more strongly with crime films of the 1930s where characters were more clearly defined as good versus evil.

In Mrs. Watkins' two-minute monologue, she goes on to say about Jenny: "She was a b****. She wouldn't let anything be. She wouldn't let it be us, just us. It WAS just us. The two of us." The monologue goes on to emphasize how Jenny's pregnancy "destroyed" their relationship. Her monologue, which is written with words that the writer appears to consciously or subconsciously illustrate as jealousy-toned, emphasizes a disdain for the heterosexual family unit and further emphasizes Mrs. Watkins abnormality for not wanting it. Before we are about to hear anything more as Mrs. Watkins says, "I had no choice..." she is handcuffed and pulled away by Captain Streeter. Because of the unfortunate lack of Mrs. Watkins' screen time, her emphasis as pure villain is further expressed by Abel's question, "Where's your Chevrolet?" to which she defiantly snarls, "You're so smart. You find it" before she is placed in the police car. Abel calmly responds, "Yes, ma'am", affording his character the opportunity to be the reasonable, rational one.

In the final scene, where Kate arrives at the police station to say goodbye to Abel, she continues the sexism of the dialogue where Dr. Watkins is now seen as a hero. She says, "I never thought he'd done any of it. He saved lives" to which Abel responds, "That's what he was trying to do. Save his wife's life. Followed her around, tidying up." One positive about the screenplay is that it does not leave Abel's character entirely unscathed. There is a previous scene where Abel accuses Kate of killing Jenny because Kate knew the dog's name was Murphy; in her apartment, he grabs her by the throat and slams her down onto her bed to demand her confession. She explains she knew the dog's name because Dr. Watkins told her, and then Abel storms out of her apartment to try to find Dr. Watkins without apologizing to Kate for what he just did to her. Getting back to the final scene at the police station, he confesses to Kate that it wasn't the police that initially believed that she was guilty, but it was himself that originally thought it, albeit "not for very long" he says. Kate then says in her exit, and in what's probably the best line of the film, "Well, you got yourself a dog, anyway. A man and his dog", which can suggest Abel's blatant disrespect in treating Kate like a dog in that moment in her apartment and he still got to keep Murphy. Kate leaves the police station, as well as the town of Eden Landing, in a taxi as Abel calls a sheriff vehicle to follow Kate's taxi to see where it goes.

On the plus side about 'They Only Kill Their Masters', the combination of seeing a prominently-featured MGM backlot in a decade different than when we're used to seeing one, along with seeing Hollywood actors primarily from the Production Code era interact with actors primarily from the MPAA film ratings system era, makes this a fairly unique film to experience. It's a treat to see the famed MGM backlot 2 in a 1970s colour film, albeit a little washed-out, which had been so frequently seen in previous decades in black and white. The film is also peppered with some great outdoor locales including a one-way tunnel that leads to Jenny's Malibu beach house. Another treat is to see so many scenes featuring stars primarily of the 1930s to early 1960s including the aforementioned June Allyson, as well as Tom Ewell, Peter Lawford, Edmond O'Brien, Arthur O'Connell, and Ann Rutherford. Overall, it's not a surprise that James Garner had wrote in his memoirs that he'd "rather not talk about" this film. However, 'They Only Kill Their Masters' offers enough enjoyment despite a screenplay that would've benefitted from either more time to write it, or a different screenwriter altogether, to flesh out its characters a bit more to make them more interesting and/or relatable.

In 1972, MGM was in dire financial straits (like most of the major studios, after trying to come up with another "Sound of Music," and squandering millions in the process). MGM hired TV-executive James Aubrey in a desperate attempt to rescue the studio from oblivion. Aubrey responded by drastically cutting the budgets (and quality) of MGM's film output, and instead concentrated his efforts and the studio's remaining assets on the creation of a vulgar MGM Vegas hotel. Meanwhile, no one was around to run the store on the studio's film output, and "They Only Kill Their Masters" was typical of MGM's theatrical output during Aubrey's Reign of Terror. A cheapjack mystery no better(and in most ways worse) than the average TV movie-of-the-week, this abomination was especially horrific in unintended ways. For one, it was the last movie made on the memorable MGM backlot (soon to be bull-dozed and sold to realtors). Secondly, it reunited two of its top stars of the not-so-distant past, Peter Lawford and June Allyson, who starred in the memorable musical classic "Good News" filmed on that same lot 25 years earlier. To add insult to injury--SPOILER ALERT--an unhealthy-looking Lawford played one of the murder victims, and guess who the killer is? None other than poor Ms. Allyson, playing a homicidal lesbian whose motives remain as murky as everything else in this slapped-together disaster. Congratulations to Mr. Aubrey for cannibalizing the heritage of MGM, its wondrous backlot, and its rightful boasting that its contract players at one time constituted "more stars than there are in heaven" (look closely and you'll glimpse some other stars of years gone by--Ann Rutherford, Edmond O'Brien, etc--wasted in the wreckage). An all-around vile concoction that might have desecrated our memories of MGM for good, had not "That's Entertainment" (a compilation of MGM's greatest stars and musical numbers that became such an unexpected boxoffice hit that it spawned two sequels) come along 3 years later and put June Allyson and Peter Lawford together again exactly where they belonged--back on the (then-demolished) MGM backlot, singing and dancing up a storm to "The Varsity Drag" finale excerpted from. . . not "They Only Kill Their Masters".. . but the one-and-only collegiate musical classic "Good News."