Oy, gevalt, again with the lists??? 

Yes, indeed,  and it signifies a feverish recent Twilight Zone jones that as yet to be quenched.  I was thinking about the concept of the "top 10",  especially as it relates to something so impressively consistent as The Twilight Zone.  It seemed to me that,  with such a huge catalogue of good programmes,  that the penultimate 10 should be just as good, and, if anything,  more compelling for it's subtlety.  I was totally right.  These selections are just as beloved as my previous list,  and they beg the question, "why not do a 'top 20' list in the first place?".  A fair point,  but this is about the distillation of feeling,  and one can't get too picky about the details,  hahaha...

                        #20  KICK THE CAN

This is a childhood fave of mine.  As a 50 year old,  I laugh at myself back then;  I pitied old people for being old,  or being spent,  and really for the endless, dull waiting around for the inevitable.  In my way I was being magnanimous,  feeling sorry for those people who had lost what I had in abundance,  This episode really focused those feelings.

At this time of my life, this idea of elderly people playing kick the can to regain their lost youth is in no way possessing;  I'm fine where I am.  But, and its a mighty big but,  how will I feel in twenty more years?

      #19 STOPOVER IN A QUIET TOWN

One of the creepiest episodes in it's own way;  a fast-living couple recover from an alcoholic bender,  waking up in a town with no residents in sight.  It's no fun for them,  or the viewer, the entire way.

I had a day like this once, in Bellingham, Washington.  I got up,  the roommates were gone,  the neighbors were silent,  and no matter where I went,  there were not even cars on the street.  It was fifteen minutes before I saw even a single sign of life...it was a nasty wee chunk of time,

                     #18  ONCE UPON A TIME

The first time I saw this,  at maybe eight or nine years old,  I had no idea who Buster Keaton was;  it took a decade or more to reverse-engineer his identity, only to realise that the humourous elderly buffoon in this classic episode was actually a nostalgia figure at the time of this production.  I think of seeing the elderly Don Rickles on the Jimmy Kimmel show late nights. It brought back my memories of him on television during my childhood in the 70's, and I believe this Twilight Zone must have brought similar feelings of Keaton's silent films to people my age in 1961.  Great fun.

                          #17  THE SILENCE

This is a fun episode,  with a favourite theme of the show...that man who talks too much, and thus, must be punished.  There's also the setting of the gentlemen's club,  which shows up periodically.

The crux of this story, to me,  is the inherent humanity that exists even in those that society shuns;  that isolation that leads other members of the same society to believe that they can mistreat them with impunity.  Add to that the lengths that people will go in desperate situations, and you have a really dramatic setting. 

                  #16  DEAD MAN'S SHOES

A little corner fave of mine since childhood,  this story of a dead gangster's return for vengeance is a tidy and compelling ghost story with an almost M. R. Jamesian flair.

The only issue with the show is the casting of Warren Stevens as the hobo-turned-mafioso's avatar;  while he makes a wonderful 60's gangster,  he is far too 'put together' to be a convincing bum.  He does, however,  rock this episode quite hard...he's amazing.

                     #15  THE LAST FLIGHT

A time travel show featuring a lost WWI fighter pilot???  Deal me in!  This story of time, cowardice, and redemption is a lesson in friendship for the ages.    Being a WWI buff,  this really appeals;  though the "future" to which the pilot travels is very much in the past (both occurred before I was born),  it really shows how much of a different world that pilot came from than my own.

Watching a time traveler travel to a time that is in my history is a twist that adds to the fun.

      #14  THE ODYSSEY OF FLIGHT 33

Another in the "plane slips through time genre",  which,  to me at least, never gets old.  Having traveled quite a bit by plane,  I'll admit to hoping for such a trip many times on long flights!  The only issue,  for me,  with time travel in this manner,  is that there is no control over the destination.  Dinosaurs are fine,  the 1930's are also fine,  but if I'm going to be stuck with a bunch of strangers, I want to at least be in the gilded age when I do it!

A great script and a great cast makes this one to fully enjoy.

                           #13  THE HUNT

This one is close to my heart.  I grew up on a farm,  in the country,  I play banjo,  I had a faithful hound....the whole thing.  I'm also a fan of the Appalachian horror stories of the southern historian Manly Wade Wellman (a contributor to the show, even),  so this story of an old man, his dog and the Devil really hit home with me.

I remember roaming through the forest with my dog Smokey as a young teen;  I very much saw goblins and devils behind every tree!  Good thing Smokey was around...a faithful dog is a treasure.

#12 THE LAST RITES OF JEFF MYRTLEBANK

Another couplet in this little top ten poem of mine.  Another Appalachian ghost-type tale.  James Best is brilliant here as a son/neighbor/sweetheart returned from the dead...but is he the same?  It's actually very creepy in it's way.

The framework of the pacing is very sophisticated for such a simple story;  there is very much a strong push and pull tension between scenes.  I really like this feel, too.  The Appalachians are ripe for stories of this sort.

                         #11  BACK THERE

Well,  here it is,  the episode that kicked off this second list!

The setting, initially a gentleman's club (another couplet in the poem), after a debate about the possibilities of changing the past,  our chap is given the opportunity to do just that. 

So well done.

Our man here ended up in the same situation as most time travelers who try to save Abraham Lincoln from death...complete failure.  There's something about time that simply does not want to give up this particular ghost!

Ok,  that's it,  I promise.  Any more than this,  and I might as well write about the entire series!

It's rare for me to give the personal approval to a later incarnation of a beloved something.  The "new" this-or-that,  and so forth.  To me, the thing is the thing,  and once the line has been broken,  any later incarnation is a different critter, with all the responsibilities of any new enterprise;  it must make it's name in the world upon it's own merit.  Very rarely are the later things worthy of the original.  Ravi Coltrane is no John Coltrane,  The Phantom Menace is no A New Hope (I'll not mention the so-called "new" Star Wars catastrophe, which is basically a remake of A New Hope crossed with Driving Miss Daisy),  and, of course, the apocalyptically ill-considered remake of Ghostbusters...with an un-required gender-reassignment.

Sick-making, across the board.

Enter the 1985 horror/sci-fi anthology series,  The Twilight Zone.  I heartily admit from the start that it doesn't deserve the name;  it has so little to do with the Rod Serling original in either tone or execution that any name would have done,  and that, overall,  it doesn't rise above the level of watchable..  I'm sure the producers were,  as producers have done in the past, capitalising on the credibility of the original franchise.  Normally it would scratch at my soul with daemonic fervor,  but for a few very charming episodes.  A Message From Charity is one of those,  and is the most charming of all.

Based on a short story by pulp magazine writer William M. Lee,  it is a unique combination of the classic time travel and mental telepathy themes  Set in both colonial America and "modern" times (1985 seems like 1885 at this point), the story centers around a lovely colonial teen girl named Charity Paine (she was preteen in the story), and a handsome, but bookish, teen named Peter Wood.  In their respective eras,  each is seriously ill from a common source;  a bacterial infection from the local water.  During this illness,  each is somehow connected to the other telepathically through the ages;  what others mistake for delerium is actually what each is seeing in the other time in a fever state.  When the illness subsides,  they discover each other,  and they begin to converse.  It's love at first sight.

Peter Shares his modern world with Charity,  and they bond over innocently sensual experiences. He eats ice cream, and she tastes it;  he drinks a little wine with his father at dinner, and she gets tipsy, leading her father to believe her to be ill again.  They see each other in mirrored surfaces (he through a bedroom mirror,  and her on the surface of a pool at the edge of a brook),  and a sweet first love emerges.  The downside of this sharing quickly becomes a danger to Charity, as the future things she recounts to a female friend brings her into the reach of a witch trial...both Peter and Charity will have to think fast to get out of the grip of the magistrate, wot?

Kerry Noonan as Charity and Duncan McNeill as Peter were both brilliant.  Noonan was amazingly demure and strong in equal measure, and McNeill played the earnest and open young fellow with a likeable energy.  James Cromwell,  a character actor in a number of major films (L.A. Confidential springs to mind),  was very good as well, atop a small, yet charismatic cast.  Kerry Noonan is an instructor at a university these days,  after what seems to have been a small acting career.  This is the sort of story that blesses even a short career;  she was the perfect choice for this part. 

I was really impressed with the concise and clean progression of the story.  It has really become one of my oft-watched TV episodes, those that I put on when bored and in need of a pleasant time-passer.  I highly recommend it for a lazy Sunday afternoon,  especially if it is raining, and cold enough to sit under a light quilt in a well-favoured chair.

It will warm you up, of that I am certain.

I usually don't like to write about the most famous things in our culture...really, some things have simply been written to death. Why write about them, unless it's about a personal connection?  IMDB already has the details.   On the other hand, I do like making timelines and lists,  and I'm always looking for an excuse to do so.  I was going through my digital files of the complete Twilight Zone episodes, and I started to think about my favourites. It was odd, but a few were quite personal. Most, in fact, resonated with various aspects of my inner self quite closely, and have been favoured since I was age 8-10. These fit in with my general affinity with the subjects of time travel, immortality, alternate/parallel universes, and so on.

Here's my list of favourite episodes, in order.

                     # 10  IT'S A GOOD LIFE

This final episode would make the top of many 'best of' lists, and for good reason. Bill Mumy plays that omnipotent little boy psychopath, Anthony Freemont, the little monster with the ability to read thoughts, create monsters, eliminate entire parts of the universe, and, chillingly, has the power to banish anyone he doesn't like into “the cornfield”. Like “Living Doll, this episode is truly scary, and it doesn't get any less so over the years. In the later incarnation of the Twilight Zone, he reprised his role in 'It's Still a Good Life'. As a kid I also imagined having such powers, from levitation to mind reading, but it became terrifying when I imagined those things given to someone else. A good lesson here.

                      # 9 LIVING DOLL

Who doesn't love this episode? The terrifying little girl's doll, Talkie Tina, takes control of a household and terrorises Telly Savalas (with hair, even!). “My name is Talkie Tina, and I don't like you”, is something that I never personally want to hear. Frightening to the extreme. I'll admit, for the record, that dolls and Ventriloquist dummies scare the tar out of me, most notably the trailer for the 1978 Anthony Hopkins thriller MAGIC, which scarred my ten-year-old brain for life.

                            Evil, evil, evil, EVIL!!!!

               #8   THE BEWITCHIN' POOL

A little girl and boy escape from their bellicose parents into a magical world beyond the bottom of their swimming pool. It's a Utopian children's realm; a mystical Mark Twain fantasy with fishing holes and forests, whose caretaker, the motherly Aunt T., makes pies and cakes, and doles out bits of wisdom to all in her charge. As a country boy with similarly bickering grownups around (divorcing just a few years after my first viewing of this episode), I often escaped into the forests with it's streams and ponds, looking for such a wonderful place

                  #7  TO SERVE MAN

                                It's a cookbook!

This episode is a futuristic display of the credibility of the saying, “beware Greeks bearing gifts”. An alien race comes to Earth, promising to lead humans into a perfect future, and they leave a book written in an alien language. Lloyd Bochner plays a code breaker brought in to decipher the tome. In a tragedy of timing, just as he boards a ship going to the alien home planet, he finds out what, or should I say, who, is on the menu. A great little science fiction treat!

Note to aliens: I taste bad. Move on.

                    #6  QUEEN OF THE NILE

A reporter goes to interview and Elizabeth Taylor-like actress, who is apparently supposed to be stunningly beautiful (I never thought so, but I've never found Taylor that attractive, either). As the episode continues, her mother is revealed as her daughter, and our curious chap is reduced to dust by an ancient Egyptian scarab, who has transferred the poor man's youth to our vamp...a former Queen of the Nile. The combo of ancient Egypt and immortality, I've loved it since early childhood.

Apparently the reports of her death were greatly exaggerated.

                      #5  LITTLE GIRL LOST

I really love this one. A little girl and her dog are lost in another dimension, having crawled through a (rapidly closing) hole in her bedroom wall. Her distraught parents enlist the aid of a physicist friend, hoping to bring their precious child back. A great story, which finds quite a bit of support in actual current science, not to mention current science fiction.

I've looked for inter-dimensional doorways ever since, but, as yet, I've not found one. Check back from time to time...just in case.

             #4  THE HOWLING MAN

Beware of ancient Gothic castles with hirsute Monks within, for they may contain the Devil himself!



Not much more needs to be said, wot?

            #3  A STOP AT WILLOUGHBY

The story of a man trying to escape the rigours of modern life into the past is an oft-repeated theme on the Twilight Zone; Rod Serling must have had these issues himself, I think. In this one, a man with a battleaxe of a wife and a torturer of an employer finds solace on his commute to and from work. As he naps on the train, he awakes each time to see the quaint, turn of the century town Willoughby; a beatific place of band concerts in the square, with the nostalgic slower pace of life that he so longed for. I myself have sought that (and even found it for a couple of years), so I sympathise with this poor fellow.

#2  LONG LIVE WALTER JAMESON

Immortality again! Walter Jameson, who has lived for two thousand years, is found out by a professor friend, the father of his current fiance. Walter reveals that eternal life is a drag, like a very long day made immortal. It's an amazing story, and very similar to my introduction to old time radio, in the form of Arthur Conan Doyle's story 'The Ring of Thoth' (which I wrote about HERE).

Though I don't know from experience, I disagree with Jameson; I would LOVE another few thousand years!

              #1  WALKING DISTANCE

And the final entry, here at last, is the king of the hill for me.   Martin Sloan (played by Gig Young) is a man burned out my big city life and his fast-paced career. In an escape burst, he ends up within walking distance of his home town. Of course, this being the Twilight Zone, he ends up walking into his own past, complete with his parents and his ten-year-old self. As the episode rolls on, the adage, “you can't go home”. Is made starkly clear. I initially enjoyed this for the time travel aspect, but as I've grown into middle age, I've witnessed the reality of the story.

Special shout out to Frank Overton, who plays his father.

This show is a cultural behemoth.  I have rarely met anyone that doesn't love it,  and I've met a great many who have confessed that it has had a profound impact on the way that they look at life.  I am one of those.  I've been made to see deeper into various episodes of my life,  and also,  from time to time,  have been able to inject a little magical spice into otherwise humdrum moments.  That a show can have that kind of effect on a person is a testament to Rod Serling and his amazingly sharp ability to tell a story.  After all, aren't our lives just stories, after all?  

Let's just hope that we're not on an alien menu anytime soon, wot?

ADDENDUM

                             (hypothetical)

                  #11  BACK THERE

I'm not saying that there is a number eleven on this list,  for, after all,  this is a Top Ten list,  but if there were,  it would have to be this one.   It involves a modern man, who, after a discussion about the nature of time travel and the changing of history,  gets the opportunity to do just that.  It's a common subset of the time travel mythos,   in which modern people show a strong desire to save the life of Abraham Lincoln. 

It really speaks to how pleasant his legacy is to the average American.

I've stated a love for post-apocalyptic stories elsewhere on Phantom Empires, as well as an affinity for the 1970's;  my fondness for the TV movies of that era is also something that I blab on about quite often.  Well,  1974's WHERE HAVE ALL THE PEOPLE GONE? is the best of all these worlds.  Starring prolific 70's TV actor Peter Graves,  this is surprisingly uncompromising and grim coming from the small screen, though it was a time when the TV movie was often quite serious;  it was a decade of adult issues and stark visions, and here we have a theme that meets that mark.

Graves plays Steven Anders,  a man on a mountain camping trip with his family.  His wife, played by character actor Jay MacIntosh, needs to return home early, leaving him with his teen children David and Deborah, played by George O'Hanlon jr. (most recently seen in LOST) and Kathleen Quinlan (in everything from Ironside to CSI), respectively.  While exploring a cave,  mysterious waves of light (ostensibly freakish solar flares) flashed across the California sky.  The three come out of the mountain to a changed world.  As the mother had taken the vehicle,  they are forced to hike home to Malibu, on a quest to reunite with her.

The first thing they find is a near-complete lack of people.  The light flashes somehow have reduced the bulk of the human race to dust;  only a few survivors,  like themselves, seem to have a genetic immunity.  The few survivors encountered, as in most apocalyptic fiction,  are either frightened or hostile,  with a desperation that makes them dangerous.  Animals also seem to have been negatively effected, making any interaction with any living thing rife with deadly possibilities. To make things worse, the flares have rendered most running electronic devices useless.  Steven drives the family toward home with a steely determination...navigating danger while safeguarding his children's emotional stability.

This is a fantastic picture.  It sits in a special category of mine, with other such post-apocalyptic gems as the stark Ray Milland doomsday film PANIC IN THE YEAR ZERO, and well-known classics like THE OMEGA MAN and THE PLANET OF THE APES.  Peter Graves is a surprisingly strong figure here (much as Milland was in the aforementioned),  and the kids were both very good.  Verna Bloom is captivating as a distraught mother.  It's an unusual plot for television, and I think they pull it off memorably.

It's on Youtube for those that wish to see it;  I'd love to see a DVD release.

It took me quite a while to watch the commonly-held classic, Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid, and by "a while", I mean decades. Why?  It was that stupid song.  Yep,  and the stupid bicycle scene.  I'm a western fan,  and I was pretty sure that the film was so popular in the mainstream because it was barely western-like in nature.  It's a pet peeve of mine,  I have to admit; things in a genre that get mainstream attention for all the things that sit well outside of what made the genre great in the first place.

Well, some years ago I watched it,  and you know what?  It was pretty good.  Maybe a bit too fluffy at times,  too goofy-buddy (a big thing in 70's westerns),  but overall I feel that it's a very credible western...in spite of the accursed bicycle song.

Mrs. Sundance, it must be said,  isn't in the same league as that famous film.  In any way. But,  as a fun TV movie (a 1974 ABC Movie of the Week), mapped out as a sequel of sorts,  it was very entertaining and worth watching. It features the classic TV "Bewitched" star Elizabeth Montgomery as Etta Place, the character in the famous bicycle scene (played so charmingly by Katherine Ross, who played her again in the film Wanted: The Sundance Woman), and titular Mrs. Sundance.

She has been on the run from the law since the events portrayed in the original film,  hiding out in a small-ish cowtown in the guise of the local school teacher.  Things had been skaky of late,  with various people asking what a nice girl like her was doing in a place like that...a bit of panic sets in. So, when a moving stage production came through, acting out her earlier life with the Sundance kid and the Wild Bunch, she begins to think that it might be time to move on. She goes to that show, and at the theater she sees the lawman that has been on her trail; immediately she dresses up in men's clothes and jumps a train. Feeling like she had just dodged a bullet, another hobo (played by Robert Foxworth) hops into the railcar with her.

The chase is on, and from then on, nothing is what it seems.

I'm a sucker for TV-type movies from the 70's, a sucker for westerns in general,  and,  it must be confessed,  I've had a minor crush on Elizabeth Montgomery since I started to notice girls...a very long time ago. This was great fun for me. Sure, it was a teeny bit cheesy at times, and it did it's best to connect itself with it's superior parent film (you even see the bike from the original film,  bent and rusted from unuse),  but Montgomery is so serious and interesting, giving it her all, that I tossed my critical eye out the window. Robert Foxworth was good too; humorous and rakish, with a bit of a nebbish quality. Having only seen him as the apostle Peter in the incredible Peter & Paul miniseries (with a fiery Anthony Hopkins),  it was nice to add a different angle to my (thus far) favourable impression of his work. It's worht noting that he and Montgomery began a romance during this film, and that they lived together for twenty years before finally marrying;  he was he fourth and final husband.

If you watch it,  don't expect to compare it with the famous one; it's its own thing, and quite a fun thing when viewed with an eye receptive to fun.  It has only a wobbly connection to the actual events or the people involved,  but I enjoyed it quite a lot.

TALES OF THE 77TH BENGAL LANCERS is a show after my own heart.  As a fan of westerns,  of "ripping yarns"-type tales of the British Empire, and of the cultures and people of Central Asia,  it hits a number of sweet spots...if couched in the "Leave it to Beaver"-ness of 1950's telly production style.  At a time when westerns dominated the small screen (and the big screen, really;  the 1950's were one of the richest decades for cowboy pictures),  it was, on a surface level, anyway, an odd choice for a show about the recently dead British Raj.  It had only been eight years since the exit from India (and the needed, but disastrous partition period, in which millions died in the creation of Pakistan),  so this kind of northwest "frontier" yarn seemingly hadn't had enough time to generate any real nostalgia or mystery.  But,  in Hollywood,  the British Empire had long had narrative traction.  One needn't mention GUNGA DIN for it to come immediately to mind,  then LIVES OF A BENGAL LANCER (Gary Cooper playing a Canadian to avoid casting a more appropriate English actor) and a score of others follow.  The 1950's alone have a bunch of really good ones,  including THE BENGAL BRIGADE (with Rock Hudson),  and KING OF THE KHYBER RIFLES, with Tyrone Power playing a Pashtun half-breed in fantastic Talbot Mundy style.

Not much on TV though.  Beside a few orientalist episodes on an anthology show or two,  the Empire apparently never made sense to television producers.  Unlike the movies,  which played across the world,  the television audience in America had a taste for more domestic fare;  stories of American cowboys,  American families, and American crime.  Would a 50's (so-called) nuclear family gather around the set for pith helmets and fanatical tribal hordes?  Well, apparently not,  as The 77th Bengal Lancers was only broadcast for a six-month run on NBC.  1956 was probably one of the best years for the western,  but for the northwestern frontier of India,  the love was quite absent...particularly (as Wiki points out), opposite the CBS dreadnought LASSIE.

Starring the two (quite un-British) American actors Phil Carey (Captain Parmalee on LAREDO) and Warren Stevens (who rocked one of my  fave episode of the Twilight Zone, DEAD MAN'S SHOES), TALES OF THE 77TH BENGAL LANCERS told the kind of stories that made GUNGA DIN legendary.  Two stalwart pals stationed in the border regions,  using their cunning and bravery to protect the interests of the empire against the native forces (rightfully) working to (appropriately) kick Queen Victoria in her (greedy, racist, war-mongering) backside.  The scripts were very nice,  typical of the westerns of the time,  and also too was the quality of the production.  Although filmed at the ubiquitously used Ray Corrigan Ranch in sunny Simi Valley California, the costuming and sets gave a respectable frontier vibe.  Lots of rocky hills and deserts,  with plenty of gruff-looking shrubs for turbaned insurgents to hide behind.  It's good fun for fans of the genre.

The casting could be an issue for many of our more politically-sensitive watchers today.  Though it had a fun bunch of guest stars (pretty much always playing white people),  including John Dehner,  Reginald Denny,  Patrick Knowles and Eva Gabor,  all of the native people were played by either Caucasian or Jewish actors, and some Latinos (which is not actually any better).  Characters with names like Noor Ali, Muhammad Akbar, Faziz, Balwant Dari, and Yasin Karim were played by guys with names like Michael Carr, Lou Krugman, Mel Welles, Abraham Sofaer,  and Roy Kerwin.  Lots of squinted and/or wildly open eyes and dastardly poses.  All in all, though,  as a Muslim who deals with Islamophobia on a daily basis,  and who has traveled to the region in question in this modern era,  it really doesn't bother me,  at least in the way that it's done on the show.  It's no more offensive than the average western,  which I love dearly,  and honestly, these sort of Raj-tpe tales are either a love-hate thing.  One either loves a GUNGA DIN and admires out three stalwart soldiers,  or one doesn't, and despises them for the agents of an evil empire...which they technically were.

TALES OF THE 77TH BENGAL LANCERS is a very good time.  They're exciting,  full of pulp fiction flair,  and, if one can get past the socio-political issues,  is a rousing load of adventure.  Though unavailable on commercial DVD,  I managed to get a good handful of episodes from an Ebay grey market source,  with watchable to pretty fair quality,  having been taped from the telly with a VCR at some point in the distant past.  It's worth it just to see the shows.  It's a great curio in the Phantom Empires universe,  seemingly from an excellent, "I say, old chap",  alternate dimension.

For films of this kind, check out my film page on the menu above,  and also the BRITISH EMPIRE BLOGATHON that PHANTOM EMPIRES hosted a while back HERE

In honour of the sad, recent death of Dan Haggerty,  best known from his role as Grizzly Adams on the show of the same name,  I thought I'd put a marker here on Phantom Empires as a small testament to his effect on my young life.  To be honest,  Haggerty's passing was a bit of a shock.  I'd  got the DVD sets of two seasons of the show within the last couple of years, and his influence had just recently become clear to me.  I grew up in the pacific northwest, surrounded by fields and forest, on a farm between two small towns.  I very much saw Grizzly Adams as one of my own.  To me he stood tall with chaps like Davey Crockett and Daniel Boone, and with families like the Waltons, The Wilderness Family, (and especially) the Ingalls family in their little house on the prairie.  Grizzly Adams was a major friend of my imagination in the 70's.  That was the decade of my formative years, beginning at age three and ending at age thirteen, at just the time in one's life when personal values are best developed, and Haggerty's Adams was one of my many good teachers. I dreamed about his sort of life. I stalked the forests looking for bears to befriend (never found one, but my dog Smokey was just as good, and probably a bit more feral),  camped out in the wild forest (populated by fiercely docile cattle and lots of crows), and substituted a tobacco-chewing, banjo-playing neighbor for Adams' mountain man friend Mad Jack (played with the appropriate grizzle by the charismatic Denver Pyle). 

I watched the series religiously...it was cool.   

Initially I considered doing a review of the GRIZZLY ADAMS series for this occasion (I may still),  but that's not generally my style...I prefer less a direct sort of a eulogy. So,  in this spirit,  I present the fun and wholesome 1977 (or 1976, depending on whether you believe the titles or the credits) film BUFFALO RIDER.  Released under the "Starfire films" banner (of which I haven't heard),  it was directed by George Lauris and/or Dick Robinson and John Fabian (depending on whether you believe the titles or the credits).  It has a strong TV movie feel...and by that I mean a 70's TV movie feel,  which is very much a good thing in my book. At the core it's very wholesome.  That's the key here...wholesomeness. The 70's were the real beginnings of the mainstreaming of postmodernism,  and certain factions of the American public didn't (don't) like how fast (and where) this process was leading them.  I believe that shows like LITTLE HOUSE and THE WALTONS started cropping up as a refuge for those people to rest in.  GRIZZLY ADAMS was certainly one of these shows,  and no less so was BUFFALO RIDER.

Set in the late 1880's (otherwise known as the 'olden days'),  it centers around the subject of Buffalo hunters and the mass hunting of the Buffalo for hides.  As the film itself tells,  new techniques for the processing of the soft hides of Buffalo had made it more useful (as the hide of cattle had been),  which was bad news for the existence of those beautiful critters.  Before that era was finished,  herds of millions were brutally and wastefully whittled to hundreds.  

It was in this world that Jake Jones lived.  

Based on a real person,  the Jake Jones in the film was called "Buffalo Jones"  by both the Indians and the settlers.  He left a life in Texas, according to the narrator (rustically rasped by C. Lindsay Workman),  disgusted by the mass butchery of the southern Buffalo herds, and headed up north,  to live life of a wilderness hermit.  His character was known to be honest and respectful;  our wilderness hermits, as Grizzly Adams shows,  should be thus.  He wore the appropriate leather mountain man clothes,  and his long hair and bushy mustache would have been the envy of every trapper and "Griz" hunter from Colorado to Alaska.

It's exactly this sort of fellow that would tame and ride a Buffalo.

After saving a baby Buffalo from attack by hungry coyotes (which he doesn't kill, btw),  Jones takes him under his wing and keeps him safe for the winter.  During that time, the Buffalo,  by this time (appropriately) named Samson,  has grown into quite a beast...six feet at the hump,  and around two thousand pounds.  A bit bigger than Grizzly Adams' pet bear Ben,  wot?  So, Jones gets the crazy idea to put a saddle on his new critter,  and after a bit of creative negotiating,  they become a lean, mean, wilderness-hopping machine.  Cue banjo music.  Yep, banjo music.

Great fun.

The pair have some rollickin' adventures;  they fight a wolf,  chase a bear (a sort of dig at Grizzly Adams, if indirectly, I think),  get shot at by Indians (Samson is seen as 'big magic', so he's in great demand), champion a woman and her infant child, brave rough rivers, and, in much of the plot, get harassed by the evil Buff Hunter Frank Nesbitt (John Freeman), and his shaggy, mean, (and quite ugly) hide-skinners Ralph Pierce and Ted Clayborn (played by Rich Scheeland and George Sager, respectively). The climax is a gunfight in a saloon, and if you haven't seen a bar fight including a Buffalo,  I think you must. Shot in various wild locales,  it made me want to pack up and head right up into the wild country (if, in fact, that still exists anywhere).  This simple and relatively innocent story was, relative to what one sees these days,  quite refreshing and jolly (if a tad silly...and probably BECAUSE it was a tad silly),  and it was interesting enough for me to track down the historical Jake Jones...which is exactly what I did for the historical Grizzly Adams.

Full Circle.

I live in North Dakota,  and last year I visited a place where Buffaloes are kept (they have a white one there,  and a giant Buffalo statue...they're serious), and also was fortunate enough to go to South Dakota and experience a small herd of the big, beautiful, beasts.  In my imagination I tied these experiences together with this film,  which made for great memories of both. I recommend THE BUFFALO RIDER for that lazy Sunday morning (or afternoon, if you're church-folk) in which you crave something light and frisky to spend the time between breakfast and later plans.  I predict you'll want to go hiking afterward,  or maybe you'll try to find a way to pet a Buffalo.

...which is exactly what I did after I saw it;  North Dakota is good like that.

James Farentino  -  Charlie "CZ" Czonka
Elizabeth Ashley  -  Jannette Johnson
Fred Williamson  -  Snake McKay
Ed Bernard  -  Casey Styles

The entire series run of  POLICE STORY, 1973–1977,  sat squarely in the center of my prime childhood TV watching. I remember it being on, but it wasn't really my thing...It seemed too real.  I'd seen cops just like these guys, and the criminals were just like the ones on the news;  at the time I was more interested in colourful characters like Kojak and Baretta(each episode of POLICE STORY has different characters), and I liked my villains a bit larger-than-life.  Now, of course,  I like it all, and it's that stark reality that puts this show far nearer the top of the list. Right from the beginning the writing is top notch...that's why my first post on THE LONG STREETS is DANGEROUS GAMES...the first episode of the first season.

Undercover cop Charlie Czonka, called CZ, is one bad dude; he dresses to a 'tee' , decked out in a variety of stylish 70's getups (click the photos to enlarge), and he walks among criminals with a deadly ease.  As the story begins, though, he's more interested in hunting bighorn sheep on his upcoming vacation than hunting thugs and big-time mobsters.  That actually cracked me up.  I think that it should be in the TV cop handbook that top cops never get to take vacations!  The boss, of course, has a new challenge;  a hard, bad-mutha Kingpin Pimp called Snake has moved up his game, and he needs to get got...he's a slippery, untouchable cat. Apparently Charlie Czonka is the best man for the job, and he comes off that way; Farentino really has the gravitas to pull off this character.  He's a manly-type figure, very confident, and unlike many similar actors of the time, he really wears that 70's flashy style well.  You can buy him as a goodfella-type; one of the calm ones that control things, rather than the other way around.

CZ and his partner Styles go into Snake territory, their cover as pimps on the hustle in full effect, intent of making a connection happen.  They take a table at a fancy restaurant and observe him for awhile; Snake (played by the Black Caesar himself, Fred Williamson) is holding court across the room, his table populated by a bevy of foxy ladies.  Styles is nonplussed by the entourage:

Styles: [gazes at hookers]  "Fifty dollar tricks."
CZ:  "Seventy-five..."
Styles: [bemused]  "Seventy-five...?  That's class."

Fortunately CZ knows one of the women; he goes over and makes a connection, but is completely ignored by Snake; another approach is needed.  They leave the place and return to the station to plan.

It's here where POLICE STORY shows why it's so good. The writers take the time to insert a scene completely unrelated to the story, indirectly and wonderfully fleshing out the world of the episode.  CZ and one of the cops on his team interrogate a hooker that had been caught in an undercover bust.  She's pretty young and vulnerable, and has been beaten pretty badly.  She tells a gruesome story of being slowly "turned out" as a prostitute by a "friend", then of being drugged and raped consecutively by  a large number of men...all while in total captivity.  She escaped and was caught while trying to hook money for carfare back home to her parents. With no prior knowledge of her scenario, CZ showed her how typical it was by describing to her how it happened.  The actress who played the girl was really very good; it would have been easy to overplay this bit part, but she pulls it off with agonising emotion.  CZ lets her off the hooking charge and promises to get her back to her parents...Farentino really relates the right level of pity and mercy here, and also shows the compassion of a someone who has seen the same thing many times.  It's a great scene, and establishes CZ's other side, a regular cop...the pimp character completely absent.  It's a nice touch.

Now the team takes another shot setting up business with the bad man.  CZ goes through one of his contacts,  a madame named Faye, in order to meet one of Snake's key ladies, Jannette...his scheme is to get her to arrange a deal with Snake for the "purchase" of some hookers.  Jannette is one of those "hooker with the heart of gold types", and  CZ's plan is to control her...to use her as a pawn in his game.  He plays the pimp very well;  he does that controlling taffy-pull in his conversation with Jannette, taking her off balance, then using his own charisma to captivate her.  He's calm and charming one moment, then angry and dismissive...her weaker will is drawn to him.  He goes down on his knee, brushes the hair gently from her face and says, "If you were with me, you'd be my lady; that's a commitment."  From then on, she is his.  She makes the business connection between CZ and Snake, and the game is on.  Farentino plays all of these various stages of manipulation like a master, as if he'd done it in his own life! It makes you feel a bit sorry for the Hollywood starlets of his time.

A meeting is set up with Snake, who seems amenable to the idea of going into business.  He has only one condition; before even one of his ladies leaves his stable, CZ will have to show good faith by cutting up Snake's estranged wife's face.  This at once shows Snake's brutality and his cool character,  and a wily awareness  of  the benefits of limiting his personal involvement in major crimes.  CZ agrees, and goes to Snake's wife and arranges for her to hide away in a hospital, in order to imply that the deed had been done.  Snake, of course, betrays him, denying him the promised business opportunity...no honour among thieves, right?  Well, the CZ pimp character is outraged, and shows the right amount of anger and indignation at the confrontation in Snake's restaurant hangout.  Charlie Czonka the cop, on the other hand, is coolly playing the situation, taking the cards dealt and rolling with it. 

He immediately goes to Jannette with a scheme to steal Snake's girls out from under him.  The plan?  To force Snake into slipping up, so that he can be busted for something that can be seriously prosecuted.  Jannette cautiously takes the bait, and shows that she's fallen in love with CZ.  It's at this point that her relative innocence causes him to start feeling guilt over her involvement in the game, and his awareness that she may be killed in the process. I'm glad they put this layer into the story.  The criminal CZ character really  lives in that pimp world so deeply,  yet Charlie Czonka the cop, one of the 'good guys', is showing the the moral trade-offs that have to be made in this kind of thing.

Jannette goes to Snake and tries to negotiate a deal between him and CZ , but the situation turns dark, and Jannette is left with nothing but a deep dread.  Snake takes this information and jovially offers CZ a deal,  bad dude to bad dude...he just wants Jannette out of the arrangement.  CZ doesn't buy the act. He's convinced that Snake will play ball, but realises that Jannette is very likely in danger.  Soon after that, in spite of her being under protection, a hired thug gets in and beats her severely.  She's hospitalised, and in critical condition.

                                                   CZ is outraged, and by her hospital bed declares,  

                                                                                                                                            "I'm gonna get him...he's going to the joint!"

The final meeting with Snake is arranged;  there CZ will meet a couple of the hookers in the deal, and will have a "sample of the goods" arranged at another location for a couple of his ficticious customers.  In reality, the hookers will walk right into police custody; the johns are actually members of Charlie Czonka's team.  At the meeting, though, a little wrench is thrown in the works.  When the hookers are sent to meet the "customers",  Snake's "bottom lady" draws a gun on CZ under the table.  If a half an hour goes by and they get a call from the two hookers that the deal is legit, then they go into business; if not, then things will go badly for our undercover duo.  On top of that,  Snake has a thug hidden in a closet at the location, armed with a shotgun, should it turn out to be a setup.

Fred Williamson is really pretty awesome as Snake.  he's very cool and charming, and has in him a coldness and a sense of danger.  In these various confrontations he almost never shows anger, yet he relays a sense of  predatory sociopathy.  I'm actually mildly shocked at how well that a pro football player can pull these various levels of behaviour off so convincingly; there's nothing simple about the Snake character.  Williamson manages to inflate each scene with lots of emotional space, giving the script and the actors a lot of room to maneuver in.  Impressive stuff.

Well, suffice it to say that our undercover boys manage to warn their team, the shotgun thug is arrested, and CZ, after a few very intense minutes, manages to turn the tables on our villainous pimp.  With CZ's gun at his jugular, Snake asks him, "CZ...are you the heat...?"  He looks into the eyes burning behind the gun-barrel and says, "Yeah...you're the heat".  It was a very satisfying moment.  Because of the assault on Jannette, the order to kill the two cops, and his other various crimes,  Snake will go to the joint...and probably for a long time. 

In his final scene with Jannette, CZ the pimp is gone, and there is only  Charlie Czonka the cop. She now knows that he's "the heat', and she's pretty bitter about it.  She realises that the whole thing, the "commitments", the possibilities, the...love, were all complete deception. It's fairly agonising.  They really play the various tiers of the whole interaction very well, balancing the demeaning revelation that she's been lied to, with a muted undercurrent of what "might have been" subtly woven in to the background.  I really felt pity for Jannette, and it made me realise that there are probably quite a few women in this position, being used as tools by various factions, unwilling or unable to change what's happening to them.  Brutal.

POLICE STORY pulls no punches when going into that universe, and it relays these stories with neither sentimentality or moralising. You walk away from it with merely an experience, and you're left to draw your own conclusions from that experience.  I think that it's one of the most starkly honest shows that I've yet seen, even when compared to the conspicuously graphic cop shows of  today.  They manage to tell real stories, and at a time when you couldn't show lots of blood, they showed you the intense brutality of the streets.

NOTE:  James Farentino returns as Charlie Czonka in season two, episode two, titled Requiem for C.Z. Smith.  Sadly, I have not seen it, and it has yet to have been released on DVD.

When I grew up in Winlock, Washington,  big-rig truck drivers were mildly mythic figures; rolling down the highways across the country, moving from place to place in a colourful vagabond existence.  To me they were equal parts hobo, wagon master, pirate, and explorer, with even a dash of Robin Hood tossed in.  We listened to trucker songs around our house.  Red Sovine, Cash McCall, Jerry Reed and Dave Dudley were like family to us; we had a citizen's band radio(that's a CB in trucker parlance), and everyone had their special CB name, or "handle"...mine was "Night Crawler".  That culture was woven into my life through those years.  My father even became a trucker at one point(from working at a lumber mill), and when my mother ran off with another man,  he was a trucker.  Later, long after the divorce, mom married another trucker named Eric, and they're still married and trucking thirty years later.

So, now that I've established my historical link with the mythos, you might understand a little why I felt a warm nostalgia when I stumbled on the 1974 television series MOVIN' ON.  It stars Claude Akins as the old school long-haul trucker Sonny Pruitt, with Frank Converse as Will Chandler, an educated guy who takes to trucking for the adventure of it.  It had the same basic setup as ROUTE 66, with the duo going from place to place and situation to situation in search of paying loads.  In one episode they're caught between a mine owner and the miners,  and the next, they're helping keep an Amish settlement from being cheated out of a land purchase.  It's all good fun,  with Sonny's irritable 'don't get involved' nature well balanced by Will's light-hearted personality and strong sense of right and wrong.  They meet all sorts of interesting and refreshingly common characters along the way.  That's something that today's popular culture seems to be missing.  The common person, I mean.  The truck drivers, farmers...rural people, people with no grand schemes or high principles; just a desire to live life as best they can.

It was a nice afternoon TV discovery for me; it made me think of those crazy childhood days in the seventies.  The seventies to me were really not about Disco and SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER...we were country people.  When I look back, I still think of Conway Twitty, talking to cool strangers on the CB, and of listening to raunchy country comedy recordings my dad would buy from the truck stop, with his pack of Camel cigarettes and six-pack of generic beer.  The theme song, sung by Merle Haggard, is a favourite trucker song of mine to this day;  when I was a kid,  I had no idea about the show,  even though Will and Sonny are mentioned by name in the lyrics.

MOVIN' ON, for both bad and good, reminds me of those times...good stuff.

Recently I read a few nice reviews of 70's cop shows on a blog...I didn't know it, but it was going to start a crazed frenzy of watching.  BARETTA, KOJAK, MCCLOUD, BANACEK,  MANNIX and a legion of others have scorched my TV screen the last week,  and I'm loving it!  For a year or so the broadcast retro stations have been showing these things...I've seen an episode here and there and have enjoyed them.    I think those have just been prepping me for the madness to come!  Jeez, these things are fun!  They really bring back memories;  I was just the right age to watch these shows when they came on, and was left unsupervised and mostly free to watch whatever I wanted...a lucky kid!  I decided to review the TV movie SEE THE MAN RUN.  This television thriller aired  in 1971, and it starred a quartet of television heavy-hitters of the time:  Robert Culp,  Angie Dickinson(hubba, hubba), Eddie Albert & June Allyson.  To tell the truth,  because of the casting, I was a bit skeptical of the possibilities here.  I mean...June Allyson?  Eddie Albert?  I don't have all that many great memories of their acting. I'm really glad I took the chance;  both of them were very good, and Culp, playing off Dickinson, was SO good.  So good. 

Here's a basic rundown:

Culp,  an out of work, some- what spineless actor, is in bed with his wife, played by Dick- inson (lucky!).  He mistakenly receives a call from a kidnapper, who apparently doesn't know that the couple had just moved in...and were assigned the old number of the victim's father. The harsh voice on the phone demands $50,000 for the return of the girl, and Culp is told that if he says a word to the cops, "his" daughter would die. At first he thinks it's a joke, but then he realises the mistake and calls the real father, a doctor, played by Eddie Albert.  He relays the information the kidnappers had given him, but the father and mother misunderstand and panic,  causing Culp to hang up.

After that,  at the goading of the shrewish Dickinson(look at those pics to the left...nasty!),  he gets the idea to pretend to be the kidnapper.  The plan?  To take the $50,000 that the kidnappers demanded, add $100,000 to the total, pretend to be the kidnapper, pick up the money from Eddie Albert, skim off the $100,000, THEN pretend to be the doctor, deliver the $50,000 to the baddies, and finally, to rescue the daughter.  Simple, right?  No.  June Allyson, the crazy old biddy, has to blab.  The cops get involved...the fun begins.

I was on the edge of my couch cushion for the last half of this!  It had the pacing of a very good episode of ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS, down to the stinger ending.  Robert Culp and Angie Dickinson were really impressive here;  Culp was both convincingly weak and  extremely intense, and Angie...let's just say that that gal could play a total bitch extremely well!  This was a very satisfying movie.  I was impressed by how well everything tied together, and by how well everyone worked to tighten the knot.  Awesome.