The Night of the Ready-Made Corpse

I like this story but . . .

G. K. Chesterton wrote a story about a doctor who could make one look fully twenty years . . . Older. This was to help criminals escape justice. This story is similar: when a criminal wants to escape an obliging undertaker gives them a nineteenth century version of plastic surgery, kills someone of like build, and buries them.

But there's a catch.

The guest star is Carroll O'Connor, an actor I've never respected. Watch him traveling through time in "The Time Tunnel." He looks ridiculous. And what was he doing in "Cleopatra"? He looked awful in a toga. The only performance of his I come close to liking is in "Kelly's Heroes" and that's an overacted extension of his performance in "What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?" But "Kelly's Heroes " with its WW2 hippies firing paint from tanks and the rest, was larger than life except Eastwood's uber-cool performance.

I'd rather see almost any actor (male or female) in the undrtaker's role. Especially since O'Connor uses a weird voice. He stinks.

Also, the girl with the Irish accent doesn't seem to be mourning much for her father. I don't buy her. The story is good but the actors muck it up.

If you think that Archie Bunker was actor Carroll O'Connor's one and only role, you can watch this episode of "The Wild, Wild West" and marvel at the sheer range of his acting ability (or, perhaps better yet, there's a Lee Marvin/Angie Dickinson movie right after this show titled "Point Blank"). This isn't an especially good installment of this series, written by Ken Kolb, but neither is it an awful one. O'Connor's villainous character here is a corrupt undertaker/mortuary director, a very smart man with quite sophisticated tastes (IOW, the polar opposite of his character as Archie!). So this episode gets a 7 out of 10 star rating.

"The Night of the Ready-Made Corpse" remains an episode that Robert Conrad isn't fond.

And for what may be good reason. Happily, though, it's for the benefit of the viewers.

Carroll O'Connor was one busy actor before his signature role as Archie Bunker. He plays a cultured mortician who apparently has extracurricular activities that attract the attention of James West and Artemus Gordon.

This role shows how far removed Carroll O'Connor was from Archie Bunker, and how skilled an actor he was, right down to his mannerisms. I can see why Robert Conrad was concerned about being upstaged. The episode has other cast members who do a great job, and I can say that I have met one of them (Paul Comi) in person.

Overall, an excellent entry in the series.