cewilsonjr Reviews

Banacek: The Vanishing Chalice (1974) Season 2, Episode 4

Pure Boston and move over Sopranos

[27 January 2008]

Unlike some of the other Banacek episodes, this one looks like all the outdoor scenes were shot in the Boston area (no obvious Southern California shots anyway). Plus, long before Tony Soprano had a therapist, John Saxon's mobster Harry Harland was seeing a shrink. Look for the mention of it in the scene with the variation on Russian Roulette between Banacek and Harland. This episode is one of my favorite battles of wit between Banacek and Carlie Kirkland, aka "Holmes and Watson." And yes, a very good job by Eric Braeden playing the insecure and introverted expert on ancient art. No Captain Dietrich or Victor Newman here. Oh, and let's not forget that priceless shot of Felix's head between his puzzle companion's legs

Banacek (1972–1974)

Great show, but the one flaw was not sexism

[24 January 2008]

Banacek sexist? More a case of the show seeing men and women as they are before political-correctness forced us to publicly pretend otherwise. Very liberating to go back and watch it. The only real flaw with the show was too much outdoor shooting in obvious Southern California locations (mountains in the background, LA smog, semi-arid landscapes that would be at home on Columbo, industrial and small business areas with Emergency and Adam-12 written all over them, and signs with names like "Pacific Metal Company") and not enough in the Boston area. You get a heavy dose of real Boston footage in the opening credits (and it looks like they did some filming in the city) but a lack of studio money no doubt kept them from going east more than they did, but a great show otherwise! I still enjoy watching Banacek solve those cases while verbally dueling with Jay, Felix, and his competition from the insurance companies.

The Outer Limits: O.B.I.T. (1963) Season 1, Episode 7

Disturbing and ahead of its time!

[10/10 · 3 January 2008]

This episode could all too easily have become a standard liberal morality play about the evils of Cold War paranoia, but fortunately it avoids getting caught in that rut (though some will try to force the template onto it anyway). The danger facing us in the episode is not a clique of militarists and establishment scientists taking away our freedoms by hiding behind national security. It is a case of the real enemy being ourselves and what we all are inside, with aliens poised to take advantage of this weakness. The episode is pertinent to today not in regards to clichés about wiretapping of suspected terrorists, but as a prophecy of how we have become a paparazzi society that is obsessed with knowing all the private details of both celebrities and our neighbors. The really chilling part of the episode is when it is revealed that the individuals (whether military men or scientists) who have used the OBIT device to spy on others have done so not to create a dictatorship, but to satisfy personal curiosity and feed a growing addiction of wanting to watch the lives of others. In our case, the corrosive acid that threatens to dissolve society is not the White House or the Pentagon, but the supermarket gossip papers, confess-all talk shows (and the expectation that we are supposed to blab to each other about our souls and privates lives), personal monitoring devices, "reality" TV shows, and ravenous 24/7 news organizations which demand to know and report all. And we as a group enable all of this. People, whether celebrities or the average man, have much more to fear from a chance remark or action being spread like wildfire on the internet, on the news, or in the neighborhood and being used against them, than they do from being wiretapped by a national security agency. The growing hostility of celebrities against the paparazzi is just the tip of the iceberg of the fear and paranoia that can result from this desire to know all. Since it is part of our nature to want to know what is going on around us, we will never entirely put an end to delving into the lives of others. But a reasonable goal would be to balance the needs of our inquisitive nature with our need for privacy.

The Dungeon of Harrow (1962)

Soft porn moment edited out

[27 May 2006]

Wondering why the scene on the Alpha DVD where Ann (the servant girl) and Fallon were making out for a brief moment looks like it has been cut? It was cut on the TV station copy the DVD was made from because Ann bared her breasts for Fallon (and the viewers) when she came into his room. The first time I saw this movie was in the early 70's on the local UHF station in Baltimore. It must have been the first time they had shown it (and must not had previewed it, thinking it was just a low-budget horror flick), because nothing from the scene was edited out. On the DVD, you see her at the door with her top undone and cleavage showing, and then it cuts to the two of them making out before Fallon pulls away. In the uncut version that I saw, she walks in and opens her top even more to expose her breasts as she offers herself to him. I was in my early teens in the days before cable and the internet, so you could imagine about how I could not believe how I had lucked out and seen this! I told my friends about it soon after, and they thought I was making it up. Next time the movie came on I tipped them off that it was going to be shown again, but the TV station had gotten wise to it and edited out the bare breasts. Needless, to say we were a disappointed bunch, but at least my friends saw that something had been cut out. Anybody else get to see the unedited scene back when the movie first started being shown on TV? This might just start a hunt to see if there's still an uncut copy still in existence...