Change Your Image
Gregory Reed
Reviews
Murder by Proxy (1954)
Not a film noir
While interesting for the footage of London circa 1954, this is an absurd movie. The story line is almost impossible to follow. There's almost no dramatic tension. The situations and supposed relationships are so unrealistic that even willing suspension of disbelief doesn't work. The protagonist is gullible and hard to swallow as a supposed tough guy when he spends so much time playing the fool to beautiful women and whimpering like a small boy to his mother, etc. And to top it off, it really doesn't strike me as a film noir at all, just a confusing murder mystery. The best thing about it is Belinda Lee, previously unknown to me, a beautiful woman who was killed a few years later, at 26, in a California car accident.
Maverick: A Fellow's Brother (1959)
Maverick's answer to High Noon
I'd add to the previous comment that this episode was Maverick's mocking answer to High Noon, and has several allusions to that movie. The flash to three men relentlessly riding toward town, sternly intent on shooting Bret for supposedly killing the brother of one of the men. The long-winded speech by Diane McBain's character, condemning the useless violence of men (then she watches in stylized, almost mock, horror out a window as the confrontation is about to occur).
Only, unlike Gary Cooper, Bret first hides in the woman's house, hoping they won't find him. That doesn't work, so when the trio arrives in town, Bret smiles nervously and suggests they just talk it over. The would-be killer slowly walks toward him as in 1,000 cowboy movie gunfights -- only he doesn't pull his gun. Instead, he chickens out when he's about 2 feet from Bret, and announces that Bret isn't the one they're looking for after all. (He later admits this was just a ploy to get out of the gunfight.) In High Noon, the townsfolk all ran and hid, afraid of the coming gunfight. Here, they all seem to look forward to it as rare excitement in their boring town.
Of course, in contrast to the guy trying to avenge his brother, Bret sends the trio off to another town by suggesting that his own brother Bart might be the one they're really after.
All in all, classic Maverick.
Maverick: Shady Deal at Sunny Acres (1958)
Hands down, the best Maverick episode
I loved this episode as a kid in 1958, and I still do after watching it numerous times as an adult. James Garner's genius for comedy has never been better displayed. He spends most of his time sitting and rocking, so his humor must depend solely on his talk and facial expressions, unadulterated by physical action (Jim's humor has always been essentially nonphysical, even though there's lots of action in his series). Watching and listening to him as he sunnily responds to the bemused town folk of Sunny Acres is simply priceless.
That the writers could pack this smoothly flowing, clever, funny and complicated plot -- a precursor to The Sting -- into 50 minutes is amazing, especially given the number of characters involved. Of course, many were already familiar to viewers of the series, so there was no need to spend time "explaining" them. We already knew that Samantha Crawford, Dandy Jim Buckley and Gentleman Jack Darby (and for that matter, Jack's girlfriend, the beautiful Cindy Lou Brown) were always ready and eager to pull off a swindle at a moment's notice.
Indeed, what's most astonishing is that this group of crooks could all be induced to work together to help Bret recover his stolen money, by cooperating in a complicated con of the thief. After all, Bret's (and Bart's, for that matter) many prior encounters with each of these lovable scoundrels were always problematic to say the least, as each managed to pick one or both brothers' pockets numerous times. Moreover, Bret's relationship with Dandy Jim was never anything but acrimonious. Even though in a strange, wary way they and the Mavericks all seemed to like each other, one would have assumed from this bunch's past behavior that, when brought together by Bart to pull off this sting of the dishonest banker, John Bates, each of them would immediately have begun scheming to use it as an opportunity to con Bret and/or Bart once again, or to con each other somehow, or both. (True to form, Samantha does try this a little, and one can only imagine what Bart had to do to induce the amoral Dandy Jim to play his part "honestly".) Aside from Bart, the only remotely trustworthy participant in the sting is Big Mike McComb. Perhaps it was a matter of honor among thieves, or that, while OK for each of them regularly to swindle the Mavericks on his or her own, heaven help an outsider like Bates who dares to try it.
This episode, and others like it in which wit and not outdoor action carried the day, were what made Maverick such a great, groundbreaking show.
Maverick: Escape to Tampico (1958)
Maverick in Casablanca
While this is a good episode, it would be fairly garden-variety but for the fact that, while set in Tampico, it was actually filmed on the old Warner Brothers set for the famous movie Casablanca, and specifically Rick's Cafe Americain (called Steve's American Cantina in the Maverick episode). The writers and director were clearly aware of this and decided to use the opportunity to throw in so many allusions to the movie that, for a while at least, I thought I was watching a takeoff on Casablanca. For example: Like Rick Blaine, Steve Corbett is a cynical American expatriate who longs for home but can't return for mysterious reasons (and who wears a white dinner jacket while in his establishment); he even looks a little like Bogart. At one point, a couple sitting at a table asks the head waiter if Steve would have a drink with them; the answer, as with Rick, is "Steve never drinks with the customers". The cantina has a roulette wheel, and one player is dressed in what can only be a French army uniform (complete with kepi), like Claude Rains's Captain Renault. Bret even refers to a mysterious customer as "the fat man"; while the "fat man" was a character in another Bogart movie, The Maltese Falcon, he was played by Sydney Greenstreet, whose Signor Ferrari was essentially the same character in Casablanca. Viewers may spot other examples of this stuff.
Unfortunately, despite the opportunity and the writers' obvious talent for parody (see Gun Shy, and the famous Shady Deal At Sunny Acres, a parody of Maverick itself), no real attempt to spoof Casablanca was made here. It's basically straight drama, and not even especially funny as Mavericks go. And to top it off, the ending seems wrong; instead of having Steve turn out to be the murderer after all, the better choice would have been the victim's brother, who had helped hire Bret in the first place.