The Untouchables (TV Series) The Jake Lingle Killing (1959) User Reviews

Can we trust the double-crosser?

[planktonrules · 8/10 · 13 November 2015]

This episode begins with the murder of a reporter, Jake Lingle. Apparently, Barney Birch (Charles McGraw) wanted Lingle scared but one of his thugs decided to silence Lingle for good. Apparently, there's a turf war going on between the Birch and Viale gangs and Lingle is just one casualty in this violence. For some reason, one of Birch's lieutenants, Bill Hagen (Jack Lord), offers to help Ness- -presumably to allow him to move higher and higher up in the mob. However, Hagen's motives are difficult to discern and whether or not this double-crosser can be trusted by the feds is the major theme of this episode.

This is a particularly good episode--mostly because it's not a complete fictionalization of real life gangsters. Plus, Lord was a fine and handsome actor--and he makes for an excellent guest star. Well worth seeing.

Great List Of Guest Stars, But Needed More Zip

[ccthemovieman-1 · 7/10 · 14 April 2007]

Walter Winchell sets this episode up right in the beginning with a narration that explains that "Geographically, Chicago always had its North and South side. In the early 1930s these terms had a very special significance. They referred to the territories of rival gangs......the line of demarcation was never clearly drawn and territories overlapped and were often in dispute. The result: gang wars."

After the last one, a newspaper writer, Jake Lingle, gives the details of it and is shot the next day. It is first time that the mob has killed a reporter, and the public is furious. This then, is the story of what happened afterward.

Jack Lord (Hawaii Five-O), Charles McGraw and John Beradino, three famous actors of the 1950s and 1960s (McGraw goes back to the film noirs of the late '40s) are guest star in this episode. None of them play "good guys." although Lord's character proves otherwise in some respects. He's the most interesting of the people in here as the double-dealing "Hagen," who winds up working for Ness but not liking it.

It turns out the newspaper guy who was killed wasn't on the up-and-up, either, but Ness and boys race for time before the public hears about that, hoping to capitalize on the furor of the murder.

Overall, an episode that should have been better considering the premise and the interesting guest stars. It's main fault: too talky.

Pre-Hawaii Five-O Training

[pattersonros · 10/10 · 17 March 2013]

This is one of my favorite episodes of the first season. Jack Lord is ex-con Bill Hagen, who collaborates with Eliot Ness to collect the $25,000 reward for the killer of a prominent newspaperman. There seems to be a genuine respect between the two men; and while Hagen's honesty is in question through the entire episode, in the end, he seems to have been a better (read: honest) man, than the "beloved" newspaperman, Jake Lingle".

One of the most ruthless scenes in the series is watching the two mob leaders casually give away their "boys" in a game of Black-Jack, where the stakes are a dime.

Made no sense to me

[bkoganbing · 3/10 · 1 June 2012]

The revised series of The Untouchables with Tom Amandes as Eliot Ness did a much better episode of the famous Jake Lingle killing. In that one the real figures of Al Capone and Bugs Moran and their various supporters were all involved and the unsolved killing got a more plausible explanation.

Herb Vigran plays the reporter who was a crusader to the public who read his columns, but after his assassination was quickly discovered to have been a go between shuttling for news and payoffs from any mobster who had it to pay. After his death Lingle's public image eroded rapidly and in real life Robert Stacks's crew of Feds were peripherally involved at best.

The main character here is Jack Lord who is a puzzle to me after I've watched the episode. He's a self styled cynical hood who offers to go inside one of the mobs to get information on the killing for a price. The mob he goes inside of is Charles McGraw's.

After seeing the film the story made absolutely no sense either in character or motivation. A really nice cast with some of the best players around is really wasted here.