Route 66 (TV Series) The Man on the Monkey Board (1960) User Reviews

Tense and Exciting

[rwint1611 · 9/10 · 19 May 2008]

Tense and exciting episode featuring Ayres as a undercover Nazi hunter getting a job on a offshore oil rig in order to try and weed out a fugitive member of the German Nzi party who is hiding out as one of the rig's crew members.

What makes this episode so intriguing is the fact that neither Ayres nor the viewer has any idea which one of the crew members it is until the very end. This creates some great tension and mystery as Ayres orchestrates a lot of elaborate tactics to get the culprit to expose himself.

This episode is also good as it gives a very rare and vivid glimpse of just what it is like to work on an oil rig. The excellent camera work and direction make you feel like you are right there. There is also some really good (and dangerous) stunt work and as usual episode writer Silliphant comes up with some very profound and memorable lines of dialogue.

Grade: A

Superior Episode, Despite No Curves

[dougdoepke · 7 January 2016]

Guys!—don't look for eye candy here, because there's not a female form in sight, and for 60- minutes, no less. Still, it's a heckuva a good episode, one of the most visually compelling of the entire series. No sneaky process shots here. Everything's filmed on an oil-rig off the Louisiana coast where the boys are working as roustabouts. Those metal spires jut into the sky like giant bony fingers. Great camera work to capture their soaring effect.

And, oh yes, there's the plot. Seems a Nazi war criminal is hiding among the crew, and dedicated Nazi hunter Bartlett (Ayers) is on his trail. So there's an intriguing which-guy-is-it storyline to go with the visuals. Looks to me like the premise was borrowed from headlines of the day when war criminal Adolph Eichmann was captured in Argentina (1960), and later brought to trial.

Buzz and Tod have a lot to do here, especially making big water splashes. I hope they got paid double. And catch that notable supporting cast, many of whom rose to their own stellar careers, including Ed Asner, Bruce Dern, Michael Conrad, and Alfred Ryder. All in all, it's a superior entry. I just wish they could have worked in at least one curvy blonde.

The First Flat Tire on Route 66

[GaryPeterson67 · 2/10 · 18 November 2017]

The fledgling series takes an ugly turn with this ill-conceived episode that attempts to glamorize the dubious undertaking of Nazi hunting.

The cast is acquitted of all blame for the episode's failings. And this cast had a lot to offer fans of THE TWILIGHT ZONE and STAR TREK: Frank Overton, Michael Conrad, Alfred Ryder and Roger C. Carmel. Wasted in cameos were Ed Asner and fearless Zanti-Misfit fighter Bruce Dern.

But the spotlight is on Lew Ayres, playing against type and pulling it off admirably--he's a talented actor. There's nary a hint of kindly Dr. Kildare in his Frank Bartlett aka Daniel Torvald, icy and unsmiling, zealously reading his Old Testament at every opportunity to fuel his eye-for-an-eye ideology. Torvald ignores the commandment not to bear false witness, however, as his entire life as Frank Bartlett is a lie. He goes on to lie about planting the photograph and about his fall from sabotaged planking. Men who strive for virtue but deceive themselves into believing they can cherry pick which virtues or which commandments to live and obey are at best hollow and worst dead men walking.

And in that is the episode's irony: the "villain"--easily discerned by the episode's title--has left behind the ugliness of war, embraced American values, and is living an honest, productive life. Conversely, the "hero" has been wallowing in hate for fifteen years, suffered arrested development as a human being in 1945 and is effectively as dead as the victims he seeks to avenge. Torvald is a victim of the Nazis who didn't stop being a victim when the war ended. He's been drinking poison ever since and hoping the other person will die.

Torvald gets his wish in a silly and unsatisfying ending. Nazi-hunters wanted to relish their captives being tried, vilified, and executed on the world's stage as would happen to Adolf Eichmann in 1961-62. As another reviewer noted, the May 1960 capture of Eichmann surely served as Stirling Silliphant's inspiration for this "torn from today's headlines" episode. But I wonder if Silliphant penned the ending we got with Otto's crazed and ill-fated leap for and inevitable fall from the departing helicopter. I could see network executives insisting on such a pat ending that gave the audience immediate closure. Torvald departing with his captive implying Otto will be tried and executed in Israel may have been deemed too murky.

I wished Tod had stuck to his initial instinct to oppose Torvald after calling him out over the parlor trick with the photograph that subjected a locker room full of innocent men to an awkward and unjust accusation. In their defense, Tod and Buz weren't privy to the later psychological stunts pulled by Torvald--the Hitler speech record that unnerved the innocent cook, or the voodoo doll planted on the pillow of the guilty party. Torvald's reckless stabs in the dark hoping to hit the guilty hit many innocents, but in Torvald's skewed morality ends justify means.

This episode was a misstep in many ways, a whodunit lacking suspense and satisfaction, morality as seen in a funhouse mirror, and a promising cast that was squandered. This was a story celebrating those who look back instead of looking forward. I'm glad Tod and Buz have their eyes set on the road ahead, and I'm eager to join them wherever that road takes them next.

10/28/60: The Man on the Monkey Board

[schappe1 · 31 March 2015]

The first great episode of Route 66. It's a strange one, considering the location, but is carried by a quietly dignified but determined performance by Lew Ayres as a college professor who is also a Nazi hunter. One of the war criminals he's after has gotten a job on a Gulf Coast oil rig, where he sits on what is known as the "monkey board", the highest perch on the rig, looking down at everybody else. Ayres, a gentle-looking man with no callouses on his hands, is obviously out of place and over-matched by his job as a roustabout Tod and Buz are drawn to him by sympathy and curiosity, sensing that he's there for a purpose other than withdrawing oil from the ocean floor.

The two men who send Ayres on his mission are played by Ed Asner and Bruce Dern, making among their earliest appearances on TV. They would both become ubiquitous on the tube in the coming decade. (And either might have been a better choice to become a roustabout but somehow the incongruousness of Ayres make the episode more interesting.)

Ingenious roundabout scripting

[lor_ · 6 September 2023]

The writer behind "Route 66" -Stirling Silliphant, loved strange titles and more importantly was immensely creative in framing his stories in unusual ways. "The Man on the Monkey Board" refers explicitly to a sort of "Crow's Nest" job on an offshore oil rig, standing 125 feet above the rig's deck to do a dangerous job.

\ He's dealing with a very serious subject, the job of Nazi hunters -topical at the time (Eichmann was arrested in Argentina in May 1960, 5 months before this episode was broadcast). Yet he rather cleverly sets the story and next destination of our wandering pair Milner & Maharis at an oil rig off the shore of Venice, Louisiana (majestically filmed on locations courtesy of Shell Oil), That's where Lew Ayres, famous historically for his Pacifist beliefs in real life, plays the reluctant but dedicated agent searching for a Nazi who can be identified by his handwriting, after a letter turns up, now in Lew's possession. By happenstance M&M are assigned as roustabouts on the rig arriving in the same crew as Ayres and befriend him, though Milner is immediately suspicious of the older fellow.

The vast scale of the rig plus its title hint at the highly dramatic climax of the piece. Like Hitchcock or more generally the Bond films, having a magnificent, stiking setting goes a long way toward maximizing suspense and thrills in storytelling (see: Mount Rushmore for Hitch's "North by Northwest"). The oil rig is clearly arbitrary here, but Silliphant loves to utilize strange and often cryptic elements in his work.

Many things are atypical here, first the all-male cast, not strange but often tied to genres like a submarine movie; the really grimy, unappealing nature of the labor, paying only $1.70 an hour, at odds with the freedom the boys are always seeking, as they are literally trapped on the rig, accessible only by a helicopter shuttle (wouldn't Liev Schrieber be perfect casting for a remake in the Ayres role, as an Israeli agent fresh from his Blade helicopter commercials?). Also, the usual cultural clash is largely absent, as the boys are not exposed to an insular local or ethnic community, but instead the closed-off specialized profession of the roustabouts slaving on the rig.

A brilliant touch during the mystery/suspense portion of the show in which we wonder what Ayres is up to, has the classic German song of the Nazi era "Lili Marleen" quietly but insidiously introduced on the soundtrack as a hint of the revelation of Ayres will make.

Ayres, fully capable of reciting Silliphant's required soliloquies on the human condition, does a very fine job, and M & M are solid in a show in which they are more the bystanders who become involved in a larger story (Hitchcock-style) rather than the central players of Ayres versus the Nazi.