Best of Route 66

Season 3 two cents con'd. "handball with cannons"

26 "peace, pity, pardon" and Pul-eaasee tell me what the hell is going on in this episode? You've got a rooming house in Tampa full of Jai-Alai players, including Alejandro Rey, mooning about the struggle and the war. Which war? The Spanish Civil War? The Vietnam War (nope, that's Linc's), the anti-Castro revolutionary war? Okay. We're getting warmer. There's a guy in a very fake Castro beard and Cuban army hat with a machine gun on a boat at one point. And he's muy malo. So, I guess we're fighting Castro here. But it's hard to tell for the first three quarters of the episode, and without the context of what was going on historically OUTSIDE of the television the year before this aired (Bay of Pigs, anyone?).

There's some fantastic acting by the man who plays Rey's brother, Ramos (Victor Junquera). There's a nice little action sequence at the end. There's the usual pained Tod bookend voiceover, "How did this all happen?" sequence. And there's some out-of-focus Jai Alai action. The only touchstone for me on this episode was the fact that our own local Jai-Alai fronton just closed this very week after 48 years. No more "handball with cannons" here. No more obviously dropped pelotas. The last time I saw anything unscripted at a Jai-Alai fronton it was Jethro Tull teetering on one leg improvising his flute solo in the middle of "A Passion Play." Let me moon over that one for a moment.

Season 3 two cents con'd.

27 "what a shining young man is our gallant lieutenant" Dick York plays a man stuck with an eight year-old mentality ... which means he's a slightly more mature than Darrin Stephens. I keed, I keed. But seriously, he does a nice acting job playing a war buddy commander of Linc's who had a brain injury and is now trapped in a child-like state. Not so funny when you consider that with munitions what they are today, your brain can be permanently injured just by the shock wave of a IED blast, or a full speed head on head helmet collision in the NCAA. Still, it's a moving portrait of one of the more unheralded casualties of war.

There's not much more here than that sketch portrait and some nice supporting actors (hey, there's James Olson). There's some fake suspense that Linc will somehow regress from his own PTSD and be lost in a child-like state with his former lieutanant. There's the car which York is polishing to give to his mom so they can ride to the 'big city' together. But, of course, the car has no wheels, and is little more than an obvious and somewhat cliched metaphor. (Howard Rodman is credited with this script).

York isn't the only casualty of battle fatique here. This series, which has often reached emotional heights few dramas of the era can match, in the second half of its third season is beginning to resemble that wheel-less car with the spinning rotors going nowhere.

Agreed that "Peace, Pity, Pardon" is a clunker, but I feel strongly that "Fifty Miles From Home" and "Shining Lieutenant" are two of the best episodes of the series, a powerful, early anti-Vietnam diptych unlike anything else on American TV at that time.  Just those two episodes are enough to redeem the introduction of the Linc Case character, even for Glenn Corbett-haters.

I've always assumed that Silliphant lifted "The Cruelest Sea of All" from Curtis Harrington's Night Tide (1961), which has an almost identical is-she-or-is-she-not-a-mermaid premise (and a similar ambiguity of resolution).  But the Harrington film had such a patchy theatrical release that you'd have to do some legwork to verify that Silliphant might've plausibly seen it.

The "Lieutenant" episode has long been a favorite of mine, although I agree the metaphor of the stationary car becomes a hair too unsubtle by the end.  The process of Linc's unconscious descent towards his friend's regressed mentality is deeply unsettling subject matter, and not something unfamiliar to those of us who've had to care for elderly relatives as they sink into senility and witness their worldviews collapse inwardly.  It's very easy to be drawn into (and ulitmately dragged down by) their little worlds, all while under the altruistic motive of providing care.  This episode really captured that. 

Anyway, I'm enjoying the reviews very much.  I have yet to crack open my season-3 set, but I do know the episodes pretty well, courtesy my ragged old Nick-at-Night tapes, which I revisited repeatedly over the past two decades.  Hope we hear word of season-4 before too long. 

I liked the episode and, in the context of the time, it must have been a pretty shocking indictment of war, and the denial of its impact on the individual (everyone around the veteran just pretends things are okay).  I just wish a better actor had tackled Linc's conflict, and really made us really believe he was at risk to slip irretrievably into that same never neverland.

Season 3 two cents con'd. "That's the difference between men and women ... 40 miles per hour."*

28 "but what do you do in march?" Here's a fun episode. Janice Rule and Susan Kohner play extremely wealthy women jet-setters who spend March in St. Petersburgh, Florida, trying to beat each other with the fastest speedboat (toy) and the cutest driver boy (toy). Guess who the boy toys are in this episode?

Did anyone write more powerful or forward-thinking women roles in the early 60's than Silliphant? I doubt it. When you consider this is the same era of Mad Men and witness a version of the limited roles of women in the workplace, let alone on television, the scripts for women on this series have been revolutionary. Consider Vicki. Then, consider Sydney Brookes here (Janice Rule), who flies her own plane, has a Blackberry multi-task mind ever spinning, and the joke is she took her father's paltrey $15 million company and ... ran it into a $150 million company. 

Sydney hires Linc to drive her boat, and be her latest boy-thing, and he, of course, falls in love with her and tells Tod he's going off with her after the race. This is the third time in three episodes Linc has threatened or stated he was dropping out on Tod. If I were Tod, I would cut my losses on this shakey cruise partner and head to Brooklyn to find another Buz ... fast.

The boat race scenes are pretty well done. I've seen a few of these Gulf races that run at about 200 mph, and all it takes is an errant wind under the hull on a moderate chop to send one of these boats flipping through the air in a fatal fashion. I like the fact that the winner of the race here is also the loser. Figure that out if you watch the episode.

Guy Lombardo shows up with his orchestra, a brother named Carmen, and an awesome tan. Realize that huge developers had bought up chunks of Florida and were using every angle possible to lure retirees into their canal-dredged and sand lot communities on the Gulf coast in the early sixties. So Guy Lombardo was essentially the Pepto Bismo Pied Piper of St. Petersburg. Today, it's Andy Williams, the Osmonds and everyone else over 70 in Branson, Missouri. It's too late for me ... I already live in Florida, indirectly a victim of that same migration that Lombardo and others contributed to luring my parent's generation down to this drained swamp. 

*There are so many great quotes in this episode that would stand alone. And what other television series in this or any other era  quotes Tolstoy ... and in the right context (material gratification leading nowhere)? Writer's who wrote television in the sixties still read books and went to plays. Today, the source material for everything is either a comic book, a previous movie, or television show. The medium may be the message as McLuhan noted, but the message has now been mostly diluted into illiteracy and inanity.


Edited by Hollywoodaholic - 11/10/09 at 12:14pm

Season 3 two cents con'd.

29 "who will cheer my bonnie bride?" Linc is comandeered to drive for a couple of motel robbers trying to escape the law and get to a wedding in time to stop the bride from marrying someone else. The robbers (and prospective bride groom thief) are played by Rip Torn and Albert Salmi. A witness is played by Gene Hackman. And Glen Corbett ... he's a minnow swimming with sharks when it comes to acting chompers. And Linc, who is supposedly from Texas, you want to hear a REAL Texas accent? Pay very close attention to Rip Torn.

This episode hits all sorts of touchstones for me. I believe it's the first example of blatant product placement in a television series ... for a land development corporation. Cape Coral was a sandy and swampy peninsula on the Gulf coast of Florida that was purchased by the Gulf Land Development Corporation, razed of any trees by bulldozers dragging chains between them, dredged with canals, and sliced into little lots that were sold to Northerners for about $600 a pop. Mostly after the time this episode aired, when Cape Coral was merely a big welcome sign and the Nautilus Motel (scene of the robbery). Both are featured prominently here, as is the credit thanking the Gulf Land Development Corporation for their "cooperation." By cooperation, I'm going to go out on a limb and say the producers or the network were compensated handsomely. And that Cape Coral sign was featured prominently at least three times.

So, my parents bought one of those $600 Cape Coral lots and lived their happily for the last 23 years of their lives, and are buried there now. My mother was practically the walking chamber of commerce for that community, never hesitating to praise it to her friends back in Maryland. And, amazingly, she did this without any compensation or cooperation from the Gulf Land Development Corporation. I always made fun of the fact the place had no big trees (they were all planted since the early sixties, remember?). But it was a nice place to decompress after many years in Hollywood, and to hang out at the Tikki bar at the Del Prado Inn (formerly the Nautilus Motel).

Another personal touchstone, if you will indulge me one more moment. My mom appeared briefly in a cameo in a film shot in Pennsylvania many years ago as an Amish woman. She just happened to be vacationing with a friend in the area and got tapped for the cameo (and was horrified to have to go without makeup), much as many of the locals you see in Route 66 episodes were cast. The name of the film was Birch Interval and one of the main actors who she met and made friends with ... was Rip Torn.

So it's tough for me to watch this episode shot in the sandy barrens of Cape Coral, and starring Rip Torn and not think of another R.I.P. I love you, Mom. I miss you.

Season 3 two cents con'd.

30 "shadows in the afternoon" Or, as I like to call it ... "To Kill a Dachsund in the Heat of the Garden of Good and Evil with a Crucible" to reflect the Southern crime, bigot sheriff, town secret, false accuser plotline. Linc, rotating shifts with Tod as a housekeeper and pet-sitter in Charlotte County, Florida (just above Cape Coral) is accused of attacking the absent owner's beloved Dachsund with pruning sheers, which, in this blue hair neck of the of woods is probably a hanging offense.

Miriam Hopkins plays the local widow biddy who swears she saw Linc committ the crime. And she's much scarier here playing the trusted eyewitness than she was playing the looney toons abandoned bride in The Outer Limits episode, "Don't Open Til Doomsday" (which is saying a lot). It's a terrific peformance and, if I was ambitious, I'd check to see if she was nominated for an Emmy for this performance. The whimpering Dachsund wasn't too bad, either. The script is by Alvin Sargeant (and Leonard Freeman), who I'm sure has a few Emmys stacked on his mantle. It's not your typical Route 66 episode. It really digs deep into the Southern gothic legal drama like a worthy Grisham short story. And the last shot uniquely  features the Miriam Hopkins character having a meltdown in a close up, not our boys.

One big legal quibble: The story makes big hay out of the locals not trusting Linc and Tod because they are 'drifters,' and yet Linc easily makes bail on a felony charge. Isn't he the very definition of a 'flight risk' by their suspicions or criminal profile of him? Perhaps it was just Ralph Meeker's superior charms as the local attorney to sway the judge (or a nice bottle of Jack). And, speaking of charms, there's the beautiful Kathryn Hays ("Empath" episode from Star Trek) as Tod's latest smooch interest. And Richard Mulligan (S.O.B. and Custer in Little Big Man) playing it straight as the prosecutor.

The switch on The Crucible here is that the pre-pubescent girls are the reliable witnesses and it's the respectable old lady who can get you hung just for having memorable baby blue eyes.

Edited by Hollywoodaholic - 11/16/09 at 7:05am

Season 3 two cents finished.

31 "soda pop and paper flags" This episode was on the Producer's Picks best of released a few months back, but it's a solid tale (by John McGreevey), so I watched it again. I still don't understand why it's on the 'Best of' disc, except those are randomly chosen around some guest star who became much bigger later on, rather than the full merits of the episode. This one features Alan Alda as a stone-faced doctor and the bipolar opposite of Hawkeye Pierce. Chester Morris plays a hobo who, coinciding with Tod and Linc rolling into this small town, is detained by the police as a possible transmitter of a potentially deadly sleeping sickness that two of the town's beloved kids have contracted. With the H1N1 flu currently hanging over us, and the particular vulnerability of children at stake, this story gains an eeriely timeless quality.
 
Linc's story plays in lighter counterpoint, as he is off on a rubber sales assignment and drafted by a sleazebag version of Tom Bosley to do pimp duty attracting babes at a local watering hole. Linc, it seems, has very little command over his fate and is always getting drafted or commandeered one way or the other so far in this series.

Small town paranoia of strangers and ignorant fearmongering is on full display here, which is also a timeless reflection of an epidemic that has spread far wider in our culture than those closed-minded little towns featured in so many classic television episodes in the early sixties (See "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street" from the The Twilight Zone as a prime example). Frank Overton plays one of the fathers and the voice of reason here, but I'm beginning to get the impression this is the only note he plays as an actor. It's the same tone and gravity he brings to perhaps my favorite episode of The Twilight Zone ... "Walking Distance."

Tod and Linc survive to ride off in the '63 Corvette to Season 4, while the other hobo has to take the train. He needs a better agent.

That's it for my Season Three comments and opinions. I had a most enjoyable time returning to these episodes, which I either haven't seen in 20 years (Nick at Night), or since they originally aired in 1963. I also hope you may have had a little enjoyment reading them.

One last comment; again purely my opinion. The Fugitive, also primarily an anthology 'road' series from the same era, was a very solidly scripted and beautifully rendered (and scored) set of mini film noirs. It stands the test of time. But to me, the appeal of the show was somewhat limited by the consistently pinched emotional performance Janssen had to play as the hunted and haunted character. He just didn't have the palette of tones from grim to comical that Maharis and Milner were allowed to bring to Route 66. It also didn't have the wide open vistas of actually being on the road like Route 66. And, most importantly to me, as a writer and a humble truthseeker, although the scripts were excellent, they weren't reaching for something beyond the story - an effort that Stirling Silliphant brought so consistently and eloquently to his Route 66 tales. He was always searching, exploring, just like these characters were, for the greater truths in life, and usually finding them in the very human connections they made along the way. May we all continue to make those connections.

Edited by Hollywoodaholic - Yesterday at 1:04 pm