"Action!" a late episode of the first season of "Mission: Impossible," is an episode drenched in irony. Set in a European dictatorship of some kind, the show actually offers some intriguing behind-the-scenes shots of Desilu Studios during its last year under Lucille Ball's management. The episode helped pave the way for Peter Graves to become Jim Phelps, the head of the Impossible Missions Force. And within a few short years, real world events would overrun the comfortable assumptions undergirding this episode's mission — and perhaps some of the assumptions supporting the entire series.
The story itself is relatively straightforward. Miklos Klaar (J.D. Cannon), the politically ambitious head of an Eastern European motion picture studio, has faked footage of an atrocity in which American troops mercilessly gun down peaceful peasants at a field hospital. The forgery has been carefully spliced into footage of real American troops on patrol in Vietnam. As "the Secretary" (the mysterious unseen figure who appears only as the taped voice at the beginning of most episodes) explains in handing out the mission, "If this film is shown it will seriously damage the United States and our future peace talks."
For the only time in the series, however, someone besides Dan Briggs (Steven Hill) or Jim Phelps receives the Secretary's assignment. Here, it was Cinnamon Carter (Barbara Bain) who listened to the self-destructing tape, for reasons as interesting as anything in the episode itself.
As documented by Patrick White in his fine book, "The Mission: Impossible Dossier," after two days of filming, series star Hill was supposed to climb a 20-foot staircase to the rafters above the Desilu sound stage. Hill refused to do so, and also refused to explain his refusal, even after being confronted by the series' producers Bruce Geller and Herb Solow. Hill was then suspended for the balance of the episode, rendering useless two days' worth of footage that had already been shot. A new actor had to be brought on to replace Hill, the tape scene had to be redone with Bain in Hill's place, and the production ran late and over budget.
This was not the first time that Hill had delayed production or cost the production company money. Hill had insisted upon, and executive producer Geller had agreed to, a clause in Hill's contract allowing him to leave the studio early on Fridays so that Hill, a devout Orthodox Jew, could attend Friday services — leaving in the middle of filming a scene if necessary.
Of course, those inconveniences were something Geller accepted to get Hill's services in the first place. But the constraints that they imposed on the series, coupled with Hill's behavior on this episode, led the producers to seek a new leader for the IMF. At the end of the season, they announced that Hill would not be coming back as Dan Briggs, and they eventually selected Peter Graves to play Jim Phelps.
Despite the off-screen turmoil, the episode is fun to watch, if only for the use of Desilu (both exteriors and sound stages) as the setting for the show. J.D. Cannon, as always, is good as the oily Klaar, and Cinnamon gets into his office late at night through a unique means of entry: she sits at the end of one of those cranes used by directors and cameramen for high-angle shots, and is hoisted to a convenient window. Once inside the building, she uses a specially-tailored skirt to walk off the dimensions of Klaar's office, so that Barney (Greg Morris), who is waiting in the basement, can run a heating element to the precise spot inside a fire sprinkler to destroy the contents of Klaar's vault. (This is a switch from the normal situation, when the IMF usually has better plans of the villain's headquarters than he has himself!) It went so well, in fact, that a similar gimmick was used in the fourth season episode, "Fool's Gold."
The final irony of the show, though, is that many if not most viewers in 1967 would have accepted without question that the atrocity scene was indeed faked. But almost a year to the day after this episode was broadcast, the My Lai massacre occurred, with the deaths of hundreds of unarmed peasants dwarfing the scale of what was depicted in Klaar's faked film. The assumptions underlying this episode, like that of the series itself — that Americans simply didn't do such things — makes viewing "Action!" today a far more sobering experience than it must have been in 1967.
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