Fri 14 Apr 2023
A TV Mystery Episode Review: BOB HOPE PRESENTS CHRYSLER THEATRE “The Fatal Mistake†(1966).
Posted by Steve under Reviews , TV mysteries[6] Comments
BOB HOPE PRESENTS CHRYSLER THEATRE “The Fatal Mistake†NBC, 30 November 1966 (Season 4, Episode 10). Roddy McDowall, Arthur Hill, Michael Wilding, Marge Redmond, Laurence Naismith, Alice Rawlings. Teleplay: Jacques Gillies. Director: Mark Rydell. Currently streaming online here.
The Chrysler Theatre, often hosted by comedian Bob Hope, a fixture at NBC at the time, was a general 60-minute anthology series which ran from 1963 to 1967. Included among its offerings were musicals, dramas, comedies and mysteries. This (not surprisingly) is one of the latter.
The two male leads, playing off each other magnificently throughout the show, are perfectly cast. Roddy McDowall plays a smarmy “insurance agent†who comes by the home of an accountant (Arthur Hill) to pick up a monthly blackmail check. There is something in Hill’s past he does not want either his wife or 17-year-old daughter to know about, much less the rest of the world.
Posing as a friend of the family, McDowall showers the two women in Hill’s life with small gifts and flattery, while all Hill can do is stand there and take it, all the while seething inside. The fact that he keeps a small collection of reptiles in a back room, some rather deadly, tells the viewer exactly where the story is going.
Which of course it does, with a small mild twist in the tale, unfortunately well telegraphed in advance. It’s a perfectly acceptable story, and well acted. (Roddy McDowell is superb, as always.) It’s just not quite up to the standards of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, for example, but then again, what is (or was)?
April 15th, 2023 at 6:59 am
Nice job, as always, Steve, and it’s a pleasure to see this relatively obscure series get some “ink.” One of the many things I love about Robert Wise’s The Andromeda Strain is a rare lead role for Hill. (When I interviewed Wise, he told me that he deliberately picked people who were fine actors but NOT big names for the four leads, because viewers would be better able to accept them as scientists.)
If anyone can give me a lead on Richard Matheson’s episode “Time of Flight” (9/21/66), directed by Joseph Sargent and starring Jack Klugman, Jack Kelly, and Juliet Mills, I’d be profoundly grateful.
April 15th, 2023 at 2:01 pm
Arthur Hill, other than THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN, is remembered most– by those of use who remember such things, which in this case I do, barely – -for the lead role in Owen Marshall, Counselor at Law, which ran for three years on ABC in the early 70s.
April 15th, 2023 at 4:27 pm
Arthur Hill was my Dad’s favorite TV star.
Hill was terrific in The Silver Curtain on Colonel March.
And as an industrialist on The Invaders.
April 16th, 2023 at 1:42 am
Definitely, ‘Andromeda Strain’ is what I associate with Arthur Hill. He shone.
#2? He was the lawyer pal in Paul Newman’s “Harper”. Did a good job there as well.
I recall him too, in ‘A Little Romance’ with Sally Kellerman and Larry Olivier.
When I hear ‘Owen Marshall’ mentioned, for some reason, I think of Lee Majors. Was Majors maybe his assistant?
April 16th, 2023 at 12:16 pm
Yes, indeed he was. Not in every episode, but often. Says Wikipedia:
“Hill starred as Owen Marshall, a former prosecutor turned compassionate defense attorney, who defended various clients in Santa Barbara, California, with the help of his young assistants. During the series run, several actors appeared as Marshall’s assistants, including Reni Santoni, David Soul, and Lee Majors.”
Joan Darling played his secretary throughout the entire three year run. Quite a few episodes can be found on YouTube.
April 16th, 2023 at 7:32 pm
These and Kraft and one or two other anthology series of the period varied greatly from surprisingly good to pleasant but a bit flat as this one is. They seldom came up to the level of Hitchcock, but then Hitchcock had Hitch, Norman Lloyd, and Joan Harrison on hand. Hitchcock was particularly literary too, ranging far and wide for good stories beyond the television standards of the day.
Most were original stories, but once in a while you would get something with teeth like an adaptation of Rogers RED RIGHT HAND or John D. MacDonald’s THE DROWNER and casts could surprise you with stars like Gig Young, Peter Lorre, Aldo Ray, and Jeffrey Hunter along with more familiar television faces.
I recall them as comfort watching. There was nothing special about most of them, but they had a few stars, the endings weren’t too cookie cutter, and a little social commentary got thrown in once in a while with stories sometimes spreading to foreign ports and a decent bit of scenery.
It was far from the heyday of live television anthology programming, but most of these were medium level entertaining and a bit above the level of most episodic television stories. Today they function as small time machines back to my youth and pretty good reminders of the virtue of solid plotting, acting, and direction.