Hot money in two different contexts is central to "The Great Brinksmeyer Robbery," in which the Heroes, Colonel Hogan's intelligence and sabotage unit operating covertly from the German prisoner-of-war camp Stalag 13, receive orders to pay 100,000 Reichsmarks to an informant (Theo Marcuse) with a map displaying the locations of German sites poised to launch rockets at the Allies. But when their initial stash of cash goes up in smoke, they must replace it fast before the rockets' red glare can occur.
Phil Sharp's slick script offers a schematic lesson on how to construct a "Hogan's Heroes" caper. First, Sergeant Kinchloe inadvertently triggers an explosion in the Heroes' tunnel complex that knocks out their radio. How will they hear the coded message broadcast by the BBC concerning their next mission? By tricking camp commandant Colonel Klink into tuning into the BBC on his radio so they can overhear it. They do, and later that night they retrieve the Allied air drop containing the money and further instructions on the informant.
However, Klink and Sergeant Schultz barge into the barracks and catch them after lights-out; in the rush to hide it, Corporal Newkirk shoves the money into the barracks stove. Then Klink notes that the failure to police the barracks for lights-out is on Schultz and sets his three-day pass on fire before shoving it into the stove. Poof goes the money. How to replace it? By going into town and robbing a bank, of course.
But to do that, Hogan, Newkirk, and Corporal LeBeau must create an incident to provoke Klink into throwing them into the cooler, from where they can escape into town. Once in town, Hogan and Newkirk case the Brinksmeyer Bank; finding it heavily protected against outright robbery, they have LeBeau find bank blueprints that show that an adjacent apartment building could give them access to the bank vault, namely from the bedroom of lovelorn Marian the Librarian type Mady Pfeiffer (Joyce Jameson), sure to be vulnerable to Hogan's blandishments of romance. Oh, and when Schultz catches them at a local tavern, they remind him that he is out of camp without his three-day pass.
See how neatly all that fits together? Too bad that a green light goes off at every resolution to a plot complication. A caper is much more convincing when you can't see how it's constructed, particularly when every problem has such a smooth solution you can see coming a mile away.
To be sure, "The Great Brinksmeyer Robbery" is fun to watch, with Jameson especially a trouper as the kind of non-glamorous woman Hogan typically doesn't romance, although Marcuse, whose appearance and demeanor make him a threatening foe, is simply set decoration. And just don't think too much about the narrative logic, to wit, would a bank manager (Arthur Hanson) divulge security secrets to two strangers (Hogan and Newkirk) he just met? In wartime Nazi Germany?
Director Bob Sweeney's extreme closeups, particularly in Bob Crane's scene with Marcuse, add dramatic heft to Sharp's script, but, like laws and sausages, you don't want to see how an episode is constructed. You just want to enjoy the end product.
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