Naked City (TV Series) The Contract (1962) User Reviews

A Very Boring Episode

[ccthemovieman-1 · 2/10 · 6 July 2006]

This started off very promising and quickly petered out to a talk-fest and little else. That's fine for an Alfred Hitchock Presents drama, but this is a gritty New York City crime show. At least give us SOME action!

"The Contract" turned out to be soap opera, telling of two men's love for a young woman, whom we discover early on has been killed. Both men confess to doing it. It still sounds promising but then the older man (an actor who is Burmese-Jewish, hardly Chinese) gives his long story of how he came to know the girl, and brought her up, wants to marry her, blah, blah, blah. The rest of the story is much of the same, except we then get the young's man sad tale of woe. There is nothing but talk as we wait around for the real story to be revealed, which was so predictable even I knew it.

This was one of the worst episodes I've ever seen of this fine TV series. Guess you can't win 'em all.

Love! it drives people to do the craziest things!

[sol-kay · 5/10 · 28 August 2012]

***SPOILERS*** It's when James Kam, James Shigeta, suddenly flips out and after checking out from work as a dishwasher at a Chinatown restaurant Kam crazily rushes to the top of nearby Manhattan bridge threatening to end it all by jumping to his death some 250 feet below into the Easr River.

It's when NYPD Detective Adam Flint, Paul Burke,saved Kam's life by almost losing his in the process that with him back at the police station the truth came out about what caused Kam to try to kill himself! He confesses that killed the love of his life 20 years old Lotus Tze, Pilar Seurat, with a ivory handled ceremonial knife that he just bought the day before at a local pawn shop in Chinatown. But just wait a minute things get even more confusing when Lotus's guardian Ling Twong, Abraham Sofaer, a rich local Chinese businessman who paid her way out of China some 14 years ago, just before he Communists took over the country, shows up at the police station where an hysterical Kam is being held in custody under a suicide watch. Even though Twong and Kam have no use for each other, the two hate each other like poison, It's the elderly Twong who confesses to Lotus murder thus exonerating Kam!

It's true that Lotus was found stabbed to death in Twong's Chinatown penthouse but why would both Twong & the heart broken Kam try to take the rap for her, what seems like, murder? It soon comes to the surface that both men, Kam & Towng, were indeed responsible for Lotus's death but not the way they tried to explain it away to the police. Thus we, the audience, have to suffer through this mind boggling and confusing "Naked City" episode to finally get the lowdown to what exactly happened to her. And the strange and insane circumstances that lead to her death!

***SPOILERS*** And as we soon or later find out it was love that did poor Lotus in! The love that drove both Kam & Twong to go off their rockers over her that lead to Lotus' untimely death! A death that was preventable if only her two suitors Kam & Twong kept their heads and not go off the handle. Thus driving Lotus to do the unthinkable just to keep her from any more suffering that the two were putting her through!