CLARENCE E. MULFORD – The Coming of Cassidy. A. C. McClurg & Co., hardcover, 1913. Reprinted several times, including Tor, paperback, 1993. Also included in Wild Western Days: The Coming of Cassidy, Bar-20, Hopalong Cassidy, Forge hardcover, 2010. Also available online.

   When asked what he thought of the huge Hopalong Cassidy revival of the late forties and early fifties that made Bill Boyd a superstar and millionaire, Clarence E. Mulford, who created the character and made no little money from Boyd’s popularity was purported to say: “He has his Hopalong, and I have mine.”

   It’s an accurate statement because Bill Cassidy the top hand of the Bar 20 has little in common with Bill Boyd’s avuncular paragon of virtues. Mulford’s Cassidy can drink any man under the table, has — to say the least — a colorful vocabulary, is deadly fast and doesn’t bother to shoot guns out of anyone’s hand, smokes, gambles, brawls, and has an eye for the ladies. He’s a tall lanky cowboy that looks more like John Dierkes Rafe in Shane than Bill Boyd’s immaculate man on the white horse.

   This is from The Coming of Cassidy, a collection of integrated short stories, some merely vignettes. telling how young Bill Cassidy came to Buck Peters’ Bar 20 and became the leader of the Bar-20 Three, with Red Connors and young Johnny Nelson.

   Bill Cassidy is a lanky young man who started riding north and arrives at Buck Peters’ ranch just as the ranchman is having trouble with a group of buffalo hunters. It’s not long before Cassidy is butting heads with one of them.

   Mulford’s stories may be dated by today’s standards, but in many ways his easy style and classic approach to the Western makes him a more modern read than Max Brand or Zane Gray. It’s not that you will find anything unsavory about Hoppy and his crew, but you get the impression they have skirted close to unsavory in their past. Mulford never says it, but he knows those knights of the saddle were actually homeless virtual bums who often owned nothing of their own but their boots and spurs — certainly not a horse, gun, and saddle.

   Many a real cowboy worked for a horse and a saddle and little pay.

   This collection includes the story “How Hopalong Got His Hop” that explains how he got his famous name and the limp that dogs him throughout the books. Ironically Bill Boyd and the production company of the first Hopalong Cassidy film had no intention to utilize Hoppy’s limp, but Bill Boyd broke his leg early in the production.

   Reading these stories and the other books in the series it’s easy to see why the first choice to play Hoppy on screen was grizzled character actor James Gleason and not handsome Bill Boyd. Over the course of the films Hoppy changes partners a few times but remains the same kindly tough respectable man about the ranch, but Mulford’s Hoppy ages, drinks too much, gambles, and even gets married. At times he almost becomes respectable, much to his chagrin.

   In one story he even gets shanghaied, and he and the boys have to start a mutiny.

   Mulford stayed true to his creation even when his readers wanted the Bill Boyd version. It may have been Boyd on the book covers later, but the man inside was Bill Cassidy. Louis L’Amour, who wrote the Hopalong Cassidy short lived pulp magazine as Tex Burns, was caught between the two, but reading his books you can see it was Mulford’s Hoppy he preferred. His Hoppy looked more like Bill Boyd but it only went skin deep. (*)

    Somehow I can’t see Bill Boyd’s Hoppy leading the pretty girl on without telling her she has the wrong man, but Mulford’s Hoppy does without turning a hair.

   The books move quickly. Hoppy and his pals can’t stay out of trouble for more than a few paragraphs, if that. Gunsmoke curls in the air; keen eyed men stare across tables at each other and glance anxiously at five cards in their hand that could mean fortune, or death; cowboy’s slump in the saddle eyes staring into the darkness as they listen to the lowering cattle; horses throw them; rough humor dogs them; hand-mades hang from lean dry lips lighted by a lucifer; chaws of tobacco are spit with terrifying accuracy; men die; women weep; outlaws, Indians, gun men, crooked towns people, lynch mobs, buffalo hunters, skinners, stage coach drivers, whisky drummers, renegades, school marms, saloon girls, diamond-backs, mustangs, and longhorns, all the pantheon of the old west cross their path.

   This is Ur-text, cowboy style. The age of Remington is not that far in the past. Charles Russell is still writing and painting. It has not been that long since Owen Wister’s The Virginian or Emerson Hough’s The Covered Wagon. Names like Jesse James, Billy the Kid, Buffalo Bill, Wild Bill, Butch Cassidy, are not that distant a memories. Zane Gray, Eugene Manlove Rhodes, and Max Brand are his contemporaries. Tom Mix, William S. Hart, Harry Carey, Bronco Billy Anderson, Buck Jones, Colonel Tim McCoy, and a young unknown named Gary Cooper ride across the for now silent screen waiting for him to join him even he is unrecognizable when he does.

   It is to his credit that Mulford’s Hoppy has survived and not just Bill Boyd’s. His books can still be found on paperback racks and not so many years back a film, The Gunfighter, featured Martin Sheen as the older Hoppy, and one much closer to Mulford than Boyd.

   Bill Boyd’s Hoppy will always have a hold on my heart, but in a real way Mulford’s creation is timeless as the film Hoppy is not. Boyd’s Hoppy seems a bit quaint now, not quite real, a little too perfect, he rides and lives in a West that never was, but Mulford’s Hoppy, swearing, spitting, guns blazing, cards held close to the vest, eyes squinted beneath his sombrero, a top his horse Ring-Eye, has a feel of authenticity. We know the West wasn’t like Boyd’s, but if it wasn’t like Mulford’s (and it wasn’t really) it should have been.

    (*) It was the revival of L’Amour’s Hoppy novels, especially The Rustlers of West Fork, that inspired Tor Forge to revive Mulford’s Hoppy in modern paperback form. As for the true face of Hoppy, you’ll find it among the illustrations the giant of modern American illustration N.C. Wyeth did for Hoppy’s magazine appearances, but I warn you, Bill Boyd it is not.

   On a similar note, while Bill Boyd is known for dressing in black that is an illusion of black and white film. Boyd is actually wearing a red shirt, yellow kerchief, and blue jeans in the early films. Only the hat and the boots were black. You just can’t tell on film. Later on the outfit conformed to the image and the comic book version, but early on he’s dressed almost as colorfully as Mulford’s Hoppy.

SPENCER DEAN -Price Tag for Murder. Doubleday, hardcover, 1959. Pocket #6048, paperback, 1961.

   This is one more in the series of interminable — if this novel is any guide — adventures of Don Cadee, Chief of Store Protection at Ambletts Fifth Avenue. As information comes to Cadee’s attention that an entire warehouse of merchandise, a warehouse that should have had no existence, has disappeared, he is simultaneously faced with the suicide or murder of a key employee in the store’s purchasing department.

   Some minor problems for Cadee are the installation of a closed-circuit television to scan areas in the store and the perhaps imminent departure of a company executive to Mexico, possibly accompanied by some of the store’s funds and one of the store’s best buyers.

   For those who like action, or what seems like it, and dialogue, with very little description or writing style and not a whole lot of plot.

Bio-Bibliographic Notes:   Spencer Dean was the pen name of (Nathaniel) Prentice Winchell (Jr.) (1895-1976). Other pen names he used were Jay De Bekker, Spencer Dean, Dexter St. Clair, Dexter St. Clare & Stewart Sterling. The latter is perhaps the most well-known. According to Al Hubin Crime Fiction IV, he was “born in Evanston, Illinois; died in Tallahassee, Florida; worked for an advertising agency, then newspaper man; editor of trade publications, journalism lecturer; wrote and produced over 500 radio mystery shows, wrote for films and TV; published some 400 magazine detective stories.”

   A long article by Richard Moore about Stewart Sterling and his various “specialty detectives” can be found here on the primary Mystery*File website.

      The Don Cadee mystery series —

The Frightened Fingers, Washburn, 1954.
The Scent of Fear. Washburn, 1954.
Marked Down for Murder. Doubleday, 1956.
Murder on Delivery. Doubleday, 1957.
Dishonor Among Thieves. Doubleday, 1958.
The Merchant of Murder. Doubleday, 1959.
Price Tag for Murder. Doubleday, 1959.
Murder After a Fashion. Doubleday, 1960.
Credit for a Murder. Doubleday, 1961.

TANGLED. Ben’s Sister Productions, 2001. Rachael Leigh Cook, Shawn Hatosy, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, Estella Warren, Lorraine Bracco. Director: Jay Lowi.

   There are a lot of gaps in my movie-watching career, and the period from the mid 1980s on to, well, practically now, is the largest one. I’m trying to fill in the gaps in that period, but the doing is going a lot slower than I’d like. There are just too movies from the 30s and 40s that are on my Want to See Next list, that films like this one just have to work their way in somehow.

   Which is a roundabout way of saying I picked this one at random out a box in the basement that’s been there for at least four or five years, maybe even longer. I’m not sure why I bought it in the first place, but after watching it last night, I’m glad I did.

   It wasn’t because of the actors in it, as I couldn’t have placed names with faces with any of them, except one, that one being Lorraine Bracco (of The Sopranos fame, but I saw her first in Medicine Man with Sean Connery). In any case, of the players in the three leading roles, I can tell you now that I was impressed.

   Taking Rachael Leigh Cook first, she plays Jenny, the center of this romantic drama, a diminutive young girl with plenty of spirit and two suitors, sort of, but that’s the story. One of them is David (Shawn Hatosy), an almost baby-faced lad who’s known Cook longer, but theirs is a friendship only, platonic you might say, although you know from watching him that he’d like it to be more. The other is David’s former roommate, Alan (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers), who’s another free spirit, dashing, adventuresome, with dangerous-looking eyes, and everything David is not.

   But even though sparks between Jenny and Alan are obviously immediately, the latter takes the time to ask the David if the way is clear, and David reluctantly says yes, although you know he’d like to say no. He even warns Jenny about Alan, telling her that falling for him would be a bad idea.

   The story of this doomed three-way relationship is told in flashback by David to female detective Andersle (Lorraine Bracco), having been picked up by the police who have found the bodies of the other two in a secluded wooded area.

   It’s been a while since my college days, both undergraduate and graduate, but I recognize pieces of each of the three major players in the students I knew back then, and the love affairs they had, the rivalries, the break-ups, and the getting back together again. Not a whole lot has changed, except nobody I knew back then ended up in a situation anything like this one. Not that I knew about, anyway.

   In any case, it’s the skill of the actors that reminded me of my younger academic days more than any movie or book I’ve seen or read in quite a while. All three leads were convincing, and the next time I see a film that they’re in, I’ll be sure to take more than a quick glance at it.

   One other thing. I’m sometimes annoyed when a film exists in the form of extended and sometimes overlapping flashbacks, but in this case, it was the only way it could have been done. I enjoyed this one.

JO BANNISTER – Striving with Gods. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1984. First published in the UK by Robert Hale Ltd., hardcover, 1984. Reprinted as An Uncertain Death, Severn House, UK, hardcover, 1997. No paperback edition.

   New to the mystery-reading public, Jo Bannister has produced an excellent medical thriller in Striving with Gods. Her heroine, Clio Rees, is a physician turned mystery writer who makes a further transformation to amateur detective when her dearest friend dies. Clio’s friend, a gay man named Luke, was found dead with a young boy in an apparent suicide pact. Clio doesn’t buy the police scenario, and uncovers evidence of a double murder and cover-up. Dr. Rees further finds a medical conspiracy behind the murder.

   Bannister’s novel is more thriller than mystery. And Clio is more avenging fury than detective. Early on it becomes clear to Rees and the reader who the prime villain is. The greatest mystery is whether Clio will be able to bring the malefactors to justice and avenge her friend before she, too, falls victim. Despite our faith in a happy ending, Bannister does a good job of sustaining the suspense. The murderous confrontations are dramatic, though an extended chase scene goes on a bit long.

   But it is the character of Clio Rees and her first-person narration that are the making of Striving with Gods. There is a wry quality to her voice that nicely balances the more melodramatic aspects of the plot. She is by no means the omnipotent and omniscient detective. She is a caring, fallible woman. She is also strong and resolute and totally devoid of the feminine failings of the mystery-Gothic heroine. She has, in fact, all the makings of a series sleuth. If only Jo Bannister will oblige.

         ———
   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

Bibliographic Notes:   Kathi Maio’s wishes were to be fulfilled. Among Jo Bannister’s 30 or more mystery novels are three additional ones in the Clio Rees series. Many of her other books are thrillers and/or police procedurals in several other series. Her next one will be Buying Freedom, scheduled for publication later this year.

      The Dr. Clio Rees Marsh series —

Striving with Gods. Hale, 1984.
Gilgamesh. Piatkus, 1989.
The Going Down of the Sun. Piatkus, 1990.
The Fifth Cataract. Severn House, 2005.

“LADY KILLER.” An episode of Thriller, ATV, England, 14 April 1973. (Series 1, Episode 1.) US title: “The Death Policy,” as part of ABC’s late-night program Wide World of Entertainment. Robert Powell, Barbara Feldon, Linda Thorson, T.P. McKenna, Mary Wimbush. Screenwriter & series creator: Brian Clemens. Director: Bill Hays.

   I have some good news. According to TVShowsonDVD, the complete version of this highly acclaimed British TV series will be available on DVD in the US sometime early this year. The first series of 10 episodes came out here in 2006, but while I have a copy, the set has been out of print for quite some time. All six series, 43 episodes in all, have been available in the UK for a while, but that’s been it for anyone in the country without a multi-region player.

   This is good news, indeed, so I wish I didn’t have a few nits to pick with the story line. It isn’t the players. Robert Powell (The Italian Job, The Thirty-Nine Steps) does a villain very well, and Barbara Feldon (Get Smart) is a marvelously wonderful victim, an innocent from Indiana and on a leisurely visit to England, only to fall prey to a clever con man’s scheme.

   Part of the fun of watching a program such as Thriller are the twists and turns of the plot, so I’ll do my best not to tell you more than I should. Linda Thorson is part of the story, and she’s excellent as well, something I thought I’d never say, having “hated” her for such a long time for her audacity in replacing Diana Rigg in The Avengers.

   Even though I think the world of Brian Clemens, who died about a month ago — the producer of such noted shows as The Professionals and the aforementioned The Avengers among several other ventures — it’s the writing, most surprisingly, that I had a few issues with. Perhaps it’s the British style, or perhaps it was in 1973, but the suspense in “Lady Killer” is allowed to build only gradually, and then sputtered along on matters that puzzled me more than thrilled me.

   You know from the beginning that Jenny Frifth is going to be the victim, but of what? An ordinary scam, with only money involved, or does Paul Tanner (Powell) have murder in mind? (Well, so says the title.) And who is his accomplice?

   But here’s the rub. If I were to be carrying out a plot such as his, I’d be sure to carry out my conversations on the telephone with my accomplice somewhere other than in a room downstairs when my victim is supposed to be asleep upstairs with a phone next to her bed. I would also confront and take care of an interloper in my plans the same way, not downstairs with the lady sent upstairs.

   And for a gentleman supposed to be such a cool-minded criminal, why does he go to pieces when the lady decides to please him by putting on makeup and redoing her hair?

   What for me was even more off-putting was the business with the phone and the lady picking it up. For whatever reason, it was never brought up again. The aforementioned interloper also played his role very poorly, not thinking his plans through carefully enough. Here was a perfect example of Too Little Too Late, or at least Too Late, but thankfully (and luckily) not for Barbara Feldon’s character.

   You may think at this point I hated this little play, but I didn’t. The acting is superb throughout, and so are the settings, including a manor house of some magnitude, of course, and an isolated path along a rocky cliff overlooking the sea. I enjoyed this first episode in the series immensely, trying to outguess the writer at every step of the way, maybe even trying too hard. I’d still have to say that I’d have staged it a bit differently. It would not have been difficult. My nits are just that, major in their own inimitable way, but they could easily be overcome.

VICTOR ARMSTRONG – The Free-Lance Spy. Major Book 3051, paperback original; 1st printing, 1976.

   Every once in a while I try to dive into my latest stack of obscure paperback originals by unknown writers, hoping to find a nugget or two. Sometimes I do. More often I don’t. Here is such an example.

   This is the only book by Victor Armstrong in Al Hubin’s all-inclusive Crime Fiction IV, and there is no information there about the author. I suspect that Victor Armstrong is only a pen name, but if so, I have no idea who he might otherwise be.

   It reads as though it might be the first in a series, but if so, it never came to be. The primary protagonists are Eric Walden and his constant companion Sachi Lee. Walden is a professor of English at Columbia University, working on a paper “tracing the etymology of four-letter Anglo-Saxon dirty words,” but he also has an extensive background in cards, dice and other forms of gambling, with hints of secret undercover activities preceding this particular venture.

   As for Sachi, you need to know little more than that she is exotically beautiful and that she never “wore a bra — nor needed one.”

   In Free-Lance Spy Professor Walden is hired to investigative an immensely wealthy and ultra-ultra-conservative self-styled General Dobbs, who owns an entire county in Arizona immediately adjoining the Mexican border. Making the case urgent is that Dobbs is buying all of the gold and silver available on the free market. What are his intentions? Taking over the US by economic means? Walden fears he is in over his head. Sachi is only along for the ride.

   The book is inoffensive fun for a while, otherwise I would never have finished it. Armstrong often writes in short fragmentary sentences, sometimes with neither subject nor verb, and sometimes the witty byplay is almost witty.

   Unfortunately the book ends with the good guys parachuting into Dobbs’ isolated and well-guarded compound, and taking over with no casualties nor even any sweat upon their assorted brows, including the always well-composed Sachi’s. After over 160 pages of buildup, you’d think there’d be a lot more resistance than this. Maybe 176 pages were all there was budget for.

CHARLOTTE MacLEOD – The Palace Guard. Doubleday/Crime Club, hardcover, 1981. Avon, paperback, 1983.

   If you like mysteries made in Boston, here’s one for you. (Strangely enough, not since radio’s long-running Johnny Dollar series has there been much going on in Hartford. Janice Law’s recent Death Under Par is an exception that comes first to mind.)

   I’ve missed the first two books in this series, but apparently Sarah Kellings has lost her husband, a man much older than herself, and as a result she’s been forced to take in boarders. They are a motley lot, taken from many different segments of Bostonian society — none very high.

   One of them is an art expert named Max Bittersohn, who combines romancing his landlady with helping her solve the murders of two guards at one of Boston’s lesser-known museums.

   Keep your eye on the motive. Many digressions later, cleverly disguised as part of the murder investigation, it turns out to have been the missing essential ingredient. Charlotte MacLeod has a knack for inventive characters and an eye for the humor in a situation, and besides — it also keeps our eye off the shell that’s had the pea tucked safely inside it all along.

Rating:   B.

Bibliographic Notes:   This was the third of twelve recorded adventures of Sarah Kelling and Max Bittersohn, who at one point in the series became married. The leading character in Death Under Par by Janice Law, mentioned in the review, was PI Anna Peters. There nine books in that series, but whether she was based in Hartford for all nine, I do not know. According to Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV, her cases took her all over the world.

THE BLACK CASTLE. Universal, 1952. Richard Greene, Boris Karloff, Stephen McNally, Rita Corday, Lon Chaney Jr., Michael Pate, Henry Corden. Written by Jerry Sackheim. Directed by Nathan Juran.

   You watch this and that trite old praise-phrase “for kids of all ages” comes irresistibly to mind. Black Castle is packaged as a horror flick, but it looks more like a swashbuckling adventure film, with sword fights, suave villainy, chases through the eponymous castle and a last minute “save” that presages The Princess Bride.

   The story is an appropriately simple affair: Richard Greene, the definitive Robin Hood of my youth, is an 18th-Century British nobleman who travels to Austria incognito to find out what became of two old war buddies who disappeared after visiting the estate of Count Karl Von Bruno. (German villains had not yet gone out of fashion in ’52, and this one is played by Stephen McNally.) It seems that Green and his vanished comrades apparently had some sort of run-in with McNally years ago in Africa, but the script is vague on this point, and for plot purposes they have never actually met.

   Von Bruno’s castle is filled with all sorts of kiddie-delights: crashing gates, alligator pit(!) murky dungeon and a host of sinister players, chiefly Boris Karloff as the Royal Sawbones, Lon Chaney Jr. as the Castle Goon, and Michael Pate as a fawning toady. There’s also Rita Corday (not to be confused with Mara Corday, another Universal starlet of that era) as the requisite Damsel, but writer Jerry Sackheim keeps her in distress, so the story doesn’t get slowed down by mushy stuff.

   And soon enough we’re running through all the thrills I enumerated earlier, handled very stylishly indeed. Black Castle was produced by William Alland, who was responsible for a series of above average 50s sci-fi flicks, but will always be remembered as the half-seen reporter in Citizen Kane.

   Cinematographer Irving Glassberg (The Web, Bend of the River, The Tarnished Angels, etc.) underlines the mood with appropriately bizarre lighting, and director Nathan Juran….. Well, Juran was never considered much of a stylist, but with cult films like Seventh Son of Sinbad and Attack of the 50-Foot Woman to his credit, you can’t write him off completely.

   And then there’s the cast: Stephen McNally was one of those actors who should have gone all the way to the top and I can’t figure why-the-hell he didn’t. Or maybe it was his performance here; don’t get me wrong, it’s marvelously full-blooded and perfectly suited to this movie. But it’s not the sort of thing that gets you noticed at Awards time.

   Boris Karloff and Lon Chaney Jr. don’t have any scenes together and in fact aren’t in the film all that much. Henry Corden gets more screen time than they do, and if you don’t know who Henry Corden is, shame on you. Still it’s nice to see them headlining a horror film once again, particularly since most of the music here is cribbed from House of Frankenstein — their only other co-starring film.

   In all, a truly enjoyable waste of time, and one I recommend heartily.

   Before you begin, may I suggest you read my earlier review of T.H.E. Cat here.

   Since the sixty-minute drama became common in the 1960s, it has become rare for a half-hour drama to be successful on prime-time TV. Today the thirty-minute drama has virtually vanished from television.

   I decided to take one of my favorite TV series T.H.E. Cat and examine how it worked and how it didn’t due to its thirty-minute format. Would adding a half-hour to each episode have made the series a success?

   Airing in the TV season of 1966-67, the series was a rating failure in a way that made the audience rejection clear. T.H.E. Cat aired on NBC, Friday at 9:30-10pm. It followed rating success Man from U.N.C.L.E. With the last half hour of U.N.C.L.E. beating the first half hour of ABC’s hour long Milton Berle and competitive with CBS’s Friday Night Movie, one would expect the audience not watching the movie to stay with NBC’s T.H.E. Cat. Instead much of the audience changed channel to the movie on CBS and to a lesser extent ABC’s Milton Berle.

   Chicago Tribune (September 17,1966) critic Clay Gowran liked the series citing “the spectacular photography, dramatic change of pace, and the human talent…” He also believed many would be upset by the “bloody action and the bizarre plots.”

   Later (October 31,1966) Gowran would interview star Robert Loggia who was on a publicity tour for the series. Gowran expressed his surprise that there had been no complaints about the violence. Loggia claimed that was because of how the violence was visualized and the “bizarre quality of the show.”

   One can argue that the failure of T.H.E. Cat was not due to its episodes’ length but to the series surreal world. This may explain the series ratings failure but what about creatively? What worked and what didn’t and could it have been fixed with more time per episode?

   One of the things that worked best for the series was the opening. There was no time to slowly introduce the hero or the story of the week. Instead episodes began with an action scene. At the end of the short scene someone would ask Thomas who he was. In the style of the famous “Bond, James Bond,” Cat would reply, “Cat. T. Hewitt Edward Cat.” One of the best TV intros ever would follow featuring exciting animated titles with a great jazz theme written by Lalo Schifrin.

   Arguably, the most successful form of drama for the thirty-minute TV series is the morality play. A good example of this is the episode “Crossing At Destino Bay.”

   Special note: this is one of the few T.H.E. Cat episodes where some of the color remains. The series color consultant Alex Quiroga would be disappointed to learn that the quality is so poor in most of the surviving prints that the color has usually vanished.

   â€œCrossing At Destino Bay.” Written by Robert E. Thompson. Directed by Boris Sagal. Guest Cast: Robert Duvall, Fred Beir and Suzanne Cramer. *** Hired to protect a man he has yet to meet, Thomas finds Scorpio a paid killer holding four people, including Thomas’ client, hostage. They are waiting for Scorpio’s client to arrive and tell the assassin which one of the four to kill.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66hmHB1T12c

   This is a morality play, so it is no surprise that all four of the characters held hostage have reason to fear, each guilty of his or her own sin. The adulterer couple, the killer, and the embezzler who had associates hire Thomas, all are trapped not just by the killer but their own fears and guilt as well.

   As all wait to learn who will die, killer Scorpio’s attention turns to Thomas. Duvall plays Scorpio with an odd soft-spoken accent and pride in his professionalism. He sees Thomas as his equal and knows one of them will not survive.

   This is one of director’s Boris Sagal’s best works, as he takes the stylized dialogue and heavy symbolism of this virtual stage play and makes it visually interesting. Thompson’s script with one great twist is another plus for the episode. Thompson wisely sets the action in the waiting area for the Destino Bay ferry, a place where people escape from one side to the other, but now it is a prison for the characters surrounded by walls and an iron gate.

   More time would have weakened the story, exposing the logic flaws and plot holes. Realism had no place here — expanding the mystery, developing the characters or the story would have just distracted from the story’s point.

   Another way to create a successful story for the short format is with a simple plot and stock characters. The episode “The Sandman” did this well.

   â€œThe Sandman.” Written by James D. Buchanan and Ronald Austin. Directed by Boris Sagal. Guest Cast: Signe Hasso, Lee Bergere and Dennis Patrick *** Once the world’s greatest thief and mentor to Cat, a man known as The Sandman has returned for one last crime. A return to his first crime where he stole a famous jewel, now he plans to steal it back and return it to the museum he had stole it from many years ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnEe448qrqg

   Hour long series such as Perry Mason would spend a great deal of time introducing the mystery and characters. But by using standard characters such as the great old thief in the tradition of Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief, the patient forgiving lover, and Thomas as the old thief’s former student, the audience fills in the blanks reducing the need for exposition.

   While at times dull, series such as Perry Mason used the extra time it had to give the story a more interesting complex mystery, its characters more depth, and showed us exposition rather than having the characters artificially tell us.

   Set in such a strange world T.H.E. Cat entertained through its unique style. Yet sometimes an episode needed more. In “Payment Overdue” there are too many characters, too many story lines, to fit in just thirty minutes.

   â€œPayment Overdue.” Written by Robert Hamner. Directed by Boris Sagal. Guest Cast: Laura Devon, Paul Stewart, and Dean Harens. *** Why does the Mob want press agent Arnie Bliss dead? Arnie wishes he knew.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C59UoH_HjQA

   The plot of Arnie and the Mob could have filled the thirty minutes without adding the subplot of the relationship between Arnie and his client Jerri the singer working at Casa del Gato that week. The backstory of the singer and her guilt about her past was wasted, and it distracted from the central plot.

   Worse, the viewer was left half satisfied, wanting to know more about the Mob that used a mortuary as a front, more about loser Arnie, more about the relationship between Arnie and the singer, and more about the life of the regretful singer. This is a story that would work well in today’s modern sixty-minute drama with a main plot and subplot.

   So why has the thirty-minute drama vanished from television? Ignoring the commercial reasons, the longer hour series offers an easier path to better drama. There is more time to develop the characters, not only the guest characters of the week but the regulars as well.

   One of the appeals of the weekly series are the regular characters who become like friends, people we want to spend time with every week, people we want to learn more about. In these times of long story arc and an audience that care about continuity, it is difficult for the half-hour series to find the time to satisfy those needs and still tell a story. It is not that it is impossible for the thirty-minute series to entertain us it is just easier for the hour-long episode to tell a story and satisfy the audience other needs.

   If I were to pick one TV series I think should be remade it would be T.H.E. Cat. Its style and bizarre world would fit in well with today’s popular series of fantasy, strange mysteries and superheroes. More importantly an hour long weekly episodic series would have the time to develop Thomas and his world, a world where I would have liked to spend more time.

MINNESOTA CLAY. Ultra Film, Italy/France/Spain, 1964. Orinally released as Le Justicier du Minnesota. Cameron Mitchell, Georges Riviere, Ethel Rojo, Diana Martín, Antonio Roso, Fernando Sancho. Director: Sergio Corbucci.

   Sergio Corbucci’s Minnesota Clay has all of the great elements of a Spaghetti Western: a man wrongly imprisoned, a town held hostage, an outlaw who becomes a lawman, a corrupt Mexican general, beautiful women, and a hero with whom the audience can identify. Most importantly, it has Cameron Mitchell, an actor whose work I’ve increasingly grown to appreciate. (My earlier reviews of his The Unstoppable Man and The Last of the Vikings can be found here and here).

   Mitchell portrays the eponymous title character, a man who has been wrongfully imprisoned in a U.S. Army labor prison camp. After making his escape, he seeks out the man responsible for his confinement. As it turns out, Minnesota Clay’s problem is neither his willingness to seek vengeance, nor an inability to locale his nemesis. It’s that he’s gradually losing his eyesight, a unique twist on the gunfighter-seeks-villain theme.

   While Minnesota Clay may not have much in the way of memorable dialogue or the breathtaking cinematography of John Ford’s or Sergio Leone’s westerns, it nevertheless has its moments. The final fight sequence, in which our bloodied and battered hero uses his hearing, rather than his sight, to identify and kill his antagonist, is one for the ages.