User Reviews

While this is a good episode, it would be fairly garden-variety but for the fact that, while set in Tampico, it was actually filmed on the old Warner Brothers set for the famous movie Casablanca, and specifically Rick's Cafe Americain (called Steve's American Cantina in the Maverick episode). The writers and director were clearly aware of this and decided to use the opportunity to throw in so many allusions to the movie that, for a while at least, I thought I was watching a takeoff on Casablanca. For example: Like Rick Blaine, Steve Corbett is a cynical American expatriate who longs for home but can't return for mysterious reasons (and who wears a white dinner jacket while in his establishment); he even looks a little like Bogart. At one point, a couple sitting at a table asks the head waiter if Steve would have a drink with them; the answer, as with Rick, is "Steve never drinks with the customers". The cantina has a roulette wheel, and one player is dressed in what can only be a French army uniform (complete with kepi), like Claude Rains's Captain Renault. Bret even refers to a mysterious customer as "the fat man"; while the "fat man" was a character in another Bogart movie, The Maltese Falcon, he was played by Sydney Greenstreet, whose Signor Ferrari was essentially the same character in Casablanca. Viewers may spot other examples of this stuff.

Unfortunately, despite the opportunity and the writers' obvious talent for parody (see Gun Shy, and the famous Shady Deal At Sunny Acres, a parody of Maverick itself), no real attempt to spoof Casablanca was made here. It's basically straight drama, and not even especially funny as Mavericks go. And to top it off, the ending seems wrong; instead of having Steve turn out to be the murderer after all, the better choice would have been the victim's brother, who had helped hire Bret in the first place.

Bret travels from Memphis to New Orleans by riverboat. On a losing streak, he even loses the $1000 bill pinned inside his coat. He is hired to bring a killer back from Mexico, where he takes a job in La Cantina Americana. Bret gets his man after some twists and turns. Gerald Mohr as Corbett is the man who escaped to Tampico. He had me fooled, too. Amy is the singer with her own agenda, and Corbett is under her spell. When Bret rids the Cantina of card cheats, he is jumped in the street. Corbett saves his life, and the two men get close. In Corpus Christi, Bret does what he has to do, and Corbett says he didn't want to die in Mexico, anyway. Lincoln's portrait on the wall gives us a sense of the time period.