Reviews

I'm pretty old but George Raft was before even my time. What was his appeal? How did he ever get a movie role?

The wooden Raft is not helped here by an incoherent plot and the random music behind many scenes. I saw the colorized version so most people had blue hands and ears and all cars were a shiny brown. The condition of the copy I saw on Youtube was excellent otherwise. All the dialog was clearly audible and no scenes were too dark to see anything. This is more than you can say for many old potboilers.

So why bother to review this movie? Why bother to watch it? SALLY GREY of course! I had just watched a couple of Hugh Sinclair "Saint" movies ("The Saint Takes a Vacation" and "The Saint in London") where she is just gorgeous and exudes an energetic charm. This movie is ten years later but Sally has still got "it".

In both the Saint movies and this one she is saddled with wooden co-stars. In the Saint movies her lively character perks things up a bit. There's not much hope of that here.

Having said all that, the movie is watchable, if you suspend your disbelief. All the cast are perfectly fine and the dialog in most scenes is quite natural. If they had dropped the Commie spy angle and made it a straight police procedural it would have been better.

Malloy's speech to Mac about his sailboat has stuck with me all these years. Amidst all the episodes through the run of the series some are suspenseful, some are action-packed, but some are just plain memorable. This episode is just really memorable.

I don't think any of the episodes are bad, there's just good and great. The plot here is pretty routine (albeit entertaining).

Martin Milner's previous series, "Route 66", does not hold up near as well. Each episode of "Route 66" had some dramatic emotional fight scene, usually involving whoever was riding with Milner that season. Watching those old shows in 2023 is not boring, but the shows are pretty stagey and try too hard to make a point.

Adam-12 is just the opposite, low-key, never in your face, yet the point is made. That point is usually that ordinary people can be heroes or crumbs, and it can happen wherever you live.

Milner and Kent McCord do a fine job, season after season, with well-written scripts. If you watch enough of these at one sitting you'll soon be find yourself requesting Code 7 before lunch, with Malloy's voice in one ear and the dispatcher in the other. A little spooky actually.

This "movie" is a combination of two hour-long episodes of "The Outsider" TV series. Darren McGavin plays private detective David Ross. Typically when a studio did this 2-hour thing back in the day, the first half of the "movie" was one show, then there would be an awkward seque into the second episode. But Holy Moly here they actually edited so that scenes from both episodes are intermingled. This means you have twice as many characters running around and some crazy lines dubbed to try and make you think they're all related. The result for you dear viewer is a royal mess. There are way too many characters to keep track of and the scenes jump jarringly from one context to another.

I guess this is why the typical TV show only has about four suspects, any more and it too much to digest in an hour long show. If you can follow all the characters here you're a better man than I am.

All that said, "The Outsider" was an above average detective show and well worth watching if you can find it. I don't think this mess does it justice.

Do notice the closing theme music by Pete Rugolo, it's one of my favorite TV show themes.

I don't think the other reviewers do justice to this movie. The racing scenes are excellent, plenty good enough to give you a feel for how terrifying it is to drive at high speed. It's second only to 1966's "Grand Prix" which had the luxury of color, a bigger budget and newer technology.

Plot-wise, you can only do so much with a racing story. No one avoids the cliches. This plot is at least as good as "Grand Prix". The real attraction here is the cast and the cars.

Bill Travers is excellent as the older racing driver, Syd James is always top-notch, and Ed Begley for once is not over the top in his acting. The supporting cast is all fine and believable. We even get a cameo of Jack Brabham, real life three time formula one champion.

All the cars shown are fun to see nowadays. There are lots of Triumph Heralds, which were even sold in the USA in the 60's, a Triumph 2 or 3, what look like Jaguar D-types, and many more I don't recognize.

The climactic race at the Mille Miglia has a lot of hair-raising scenes of racing on regular roads through towns and along cliffs. I looked on Wikipedia and the race was discontinued in 1957 after one too many fatal crashes, so the movie does not exaggerate the danger.

Well worth a watch.

This 70 minute documentary is padded with 10 minutes worth of slow moving credits. The entire show has random music playing in the background. William Windom reads Ernie Pyle columns while Harry Carey Jr. Narrates. Neither seems right for their role. Perhaps they should have swapped.

The story of Ernie Pyle is a great story, and most of it comes through in this documentary. Their are brief but excellent quotes from Walter Cronkite and Andy Rooney who were in Europe covering the war too. Andy seems to have known Ernie pretty well. I wish they had let both talk more.

We also have quotes from Charles Kuralt and the author of a book on Ernie. Kuralt seems especially appropriate since essentially Ernie wrote a newspaper version of Kuralt's "On the Road" stories before the war. They both tell stories of the little guy, the farmer, a mother with a sick child etc.

If you're not familiar with Ernie Pyle, he differed from other reporters in that he marched with the soldiers, slept on the ground with them, ate their chow and grew filthy with them slogging through the mud. He told their story, the story of the soldier on the battlefield, first person. His columns must have felt like letters home from the front. His writing is simple but incredibly effective. His fellow correspondents recognized this at the time and many said they wished they could write like that.

Too bad this documentary feels so slapped together.

I have just finished the first five episodes from the new Network Video release. Since I am an American and have never seen these episodes on-air, my opinion may differ from theirs.

As this new DVD format is the one most likely to be encountered by a modern viewer, I will address that directly. The video quality of the episodes is comparable to perhaps the earliest "I Love Lucy" episodes you may have seen, or very early "Super Man" shows. Unlike them, the exterior shots are fine and they seem to have actually taken Rupert across the Channel to film them (unlike Roger Moore in "The Saint"). But the interiors are a different story. There were sometimes issues with the video transfer process and it shows in the interiors (especially Episode 1). The interior sets look very much like something put together week by week. The standing sets for his office are a bit more detailed. The sound is like a stage production recorded. Even for 1960 some of the acting is very stage-like, with unrealistic speech and exaggerated mannerisms.

So if you can get past the late 50's production quality Rupert Davies and Ewen Solon are fine and the stories seem as effective to me as modern Maigret renditions of them (I've never read the books). Most of the supporting actors are good enough.

All 52 episodes are available, so there's quite a lot to enjoy if this is your cup of tea. But I must warn you that the production values are not even vaguely comparable to a show like 1958's "Peter Gunn", much less more modern versions.

It's wonderful that there is a full documentary on this subject. It's a fascinating slice of pre-revolutionary war colonial history and it happens to be in my home state. I certainly learned a lot from this film, but frankly it was a chore to watch.

The editing and structure of the film is poor, with different speakers all given the chance to repeat the same factoid, often with the narrator stealing their thunder by saying the same thing before them.

A half-dozen talking heads form the basis of the film, but their comments are are so sliced and diced that no one gets to say much at a time. It's like each one got two sentences per camera shot. Do this for each talking head and repeat.... and repeat...

At no point was there a clear North Carolina map showing where the battle took place, the layout of the battlefield, or any explanation of why there are currently two monuments, one off in the woods. Nor any mention of the distances between the battlefield and Hillsborough, or if there were any other settlements in the area. No context.

It's like watching an educational film in grade school and you might nod off of you're not careful.

This film would have benefited greatly from a better editor and director, to sort all these interviews and cheesy reenactor shots. Better yet, drop the cheesy reenactors and look a little harder to find colonial era paintings or something.

It could easily be shortened and greatly improved. But I guess since it's the only game in town, this has to be good enough.

Deborah Kerr plays an extremely naive young Irish girl who dreams of joining the IRA but winds up working for the Nazis instead. I see that many other reviewers really like this film, but it doesn't work at all for me. In the first place, the mood swings wildly between comedy and drama, and enough people are killed that it ought to stay on the drama side. Then there's Deborah Kerr's performance, in portraying naivete you run the risk of just being stupid. She does not all together succeed at this and in many scenes she just seems stupid. Lastly, the movie essentially laughs at the IRA as some long dead movement. Well even as an American who grew up in the late 20th century I had a steady diet of brutal IRA bombings on the news for decades, so the humor of the IRA is lost on me. And one more thing, there is a running joke about Cromwell that I suppose the original UK audience understood, but as an American I don't get.

I normally wouldn't bother saying bad things about a 1933 movie, heck talkies were just getting started. But despite what other reviewers are saying, this movie is really bad. Even Herbert Marshall, an impeccable actor, can't save this thing. Elizabeth Allen is also terrible, but she went on to do better stuff.

First, it's based on a stage play... and it shows. Lots of standing around talking. Lots and lots. Then it has some of those 30's themes where the woman loves one man, who won't tell her he loves her too, while stringing along some other poor fellow. All three in evening dress and talking, talking, talking.

When Lionel Atwill shows up and they all board the plane it gets even worse. The plot is crazy with people posing as Scotland yard inspectors one minute, and as a crook the next.

The only interesting thing about this movie are the airport scenes and the giant biplane these folks board to cross the channel. Super wide-bodied if you believe the set, with parachutes for every passenger and windows and doors you can open in flight. In fact about three times the passengers open the door and peer out for long seconds after someone has jumped out (or they think he has). This is at night, in the clouds, over the channel, so I don't think there would be much to see.

Other than the plane itself, there's just nothing interesting here.

I didn't think Claude Rains had ever been in a stinker before, but here he is in this thing. I blame the director. A poor story is told in the most muddled way possible. Wives show up before husbands and you never can match them up, dead people come back to life, the three female leads are all of the same build, dressed in similar gowns, whose role in the film is not clear at all (girlfriend? secretary? producer? rich niece?). Claude's character goes by two names, neither of which you'll associate with him until later in the picture. So scenes where a woman is coming on to a man can be a cheating wife, a lonely single woman, niece cozying up to Uncle, who knows? Hurd Hatfield is wasted and you'll be lucky to figure out who he's married too before it doesn't matter. The second lead is Ted North, whom I've never seen before. For the plot to work some of the characters have to be really stupid (which they appear to be). If the movie weren't so dull you could watch it twice and see if it all made sense. I'll pass.

All the stories in this series are well written and tight, but at this point the composer Edwin Astley has begun to hit his stride and you will hear familiar themes from "Secret Agent" and "The Saint" included. In this episode the lovely Ann Bell portrays a witness to a baby-snatching. It seems the woman parked her baby buggy outside the store, leaving the baby on board(!) while she goes into the store. This is only a prelude to the real story in which involves the disappearance of her husband, along with his clothes and suitcase. The police react pretty much like they'd react today, which is to say not much. The whole episode is exceptionally tense, perhaps more so because Ann's character and her husband are so typically normal, not gangsters or cops, just people like you and me. You'll be on the edge of your seat until the closing seconds. This episode really stuck with me.

This is another tightly written episode, but not so grim as usual due to the bubbly presence of Anne Lawson. (It's a pity she didn't do more TV shows.) The plot is pretty scary, involving an innocent accountant who is unaccountably the target of a murderer. What could have been really far-fetched is made plausible by careful writing. Once again Gideon seems to work night and day, and have a department with a wonderfully efficient phone service as he must intervene in the nick of time at the end. Another good episode, but Anne steals every scene she's in!

This episode involves the bizarre behavior of an ex-soldier. As the plot unfolds the nature of his injuries and his actions in the battle of the Falklands is laid out. There are some nice scenes at a very rich-looking family estate with a massive gun collection. Whately's girlfriend is also part of the plot, but I believe this is her last appearance. There many tense scenes with a hostage situation and the ultimate resolution of the plot is very satisfying. The only sore point is the inconsistent script for his wife. One minute she's saying "why do we have to leave tonight?" and the next "why didn't we leave earlier?" with no apparent moment of introspection in between. The kids do fine in their roles during some rather tense scenes, and the season 1 secretary has a some big scenes.

While not always logical, this series usually made at least some sense. In this, the last episode, one gets the feeling that the writers had already left the building! The two cases involved are a robbery at Griffith's own house, and a man who dies in a car accident (accident? suicide? murder?) Unfortunately the script is extremely poor and there is lots of filler material in the form of supposedly funny scenes that add nothing to the plot. The acting, as always is good. But while some of the episodes have large casts and on-location shooting, this episode has none of that. Save your viewing time for "Morse" and "Lewis". I really feel they could have done better with this series, as it is the first five episodes are OK, this one being the only stinker.

Having just watched all six episodes of this show and also watching "Morse" and "Lewis", I feel compelled to write a review. It's not clear to me why this appeared to be a good vehicle for Whately, who is so obviously born to play a copper. The insurance investigator angle does give them an opportunity for more plot variety, but they rarely take advantage of it. Things usually devolve to a murder case which is solved in the requisite 1-hour time period.

So what's good about it? The acting is fine. All the characters are capable actors and actresses. Even with a change in some of the cast with season two, the losses and additions even out and the ensemble still works. Almost all of the plots are interesting and most of them make some kind of sense. This is all good.

Now the bad... the Jimmy Griffin character is saddled with not just a girlfriend, but also a wife and two kids. While not fatal to a show like this, it turns out not to add very much either. In particular, the writers had no clue about how to handle his wife's role. In each episode she is given a different clichéd script. First the angry, jealous wife. Then in later episodes the "why can't you have a regular job" role, then "how dare you endanger my children" and finally to neutral bland housewife. There is no consistency or logic to any of her actions. In each episode she is a different character! I'm amazed she was able to handle it as well as she did.

For us Kevin Whately fans these are worth a look, don't be put off by the first episode which includes a lot of the wife screaming and domestic tribulations, nor by the last episode which appears not to have had proper writers at all. But on the whole you'll come away wishing they had skipped this show and done a couple more "Lewis" episodes.

This is a fairly ambitious undertaking for the series with several scenes with large casts of extras and lot of time spent at a huge estate with a wonderful set full of militaria. Also watch for old-time actor Anthony Steele as the owner of the estate. His many roles include movies such as "Siege of the Barbarians" and "Tiger of the Seven Seas" from his younger days! The basic plot makes a bit of sense, but the final dramatic fight scenes are not properly motivated. Maybe I missed some explanation! But that's kind of par for the course for British mystery shows like this one and even "Morse" and "Lewis" and it doesn't necessarily detract from the enjoyment. Several characters are brutally beaten, a bit more violent than usual for this series. And the final wrap up is quite sudden, but overall this is a pretty dramatic episode in the series!

This is the second episode that takes place in Brussels at the World's Fair. The Atomium is visible in the background and Mike visits one of the buildings there. In the final scene he rides off in one of the peculiar 3-wheeled carts they used at the Fair. He also stops by a building that looks like it may be the real US Embassy in Brussels.

I'm amazed at how many on location shots there are of McGavin in this series. For a show that IMDb says was filmed solely in Los Angeles, they must have made a lot of field trips to New York, as well as these even more remote shoots.

But the most interesting thing in this particular episode is a fight scene near the end. Mike fights a guy who has a really strange kickboxing style of fighting. He claims its "Savate", which is a real form of French kickboxing. Whether this is an actual example of the style or not, it's well worth watching!