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DVD Review: Mission: Impossible: The Fourth TV Season
In the season premiere, "The Code," the lot stands in for the Cuba-like Central American nation of San Cristobel. I don’t think one has to know the Paramount lot well in order to realize that many shots don’t even match up! One moment, a car is driving on a well-foliated park road, the next it’s passing through the famous Paramount Bronson Gate (too recognizable a landmark to successfully play a dictator’s compound), with no trees in sight. They don’t even bother to clear a golf cart (used for easy transportation from soundstage to soundstage) off the set! I guess it makes things look more exotic.
Even though the IMF has never been squeamish about sending villains to their doom (they did it in the series’ very first episode), they seem particularly cold-hearted in Season 4, and Phelps sets that tone in the coda of "The Code." The mission results in one of two conspirators (and national leaders, no less, albeit of a dangerously leftward persuasion) firing at another. Jim comments emotionlessly, "The mission is a success." But who fired? Jim responds to that inquiry by saying, "What difference does it make?" That’s cold! Especially for the hero of a Sixties TV series! But it’s a streak that continues throughout the season. Perhaps broadcast standards were relaxing a bit heading into the 1970s, but it seems to me that the team goes especially hard on its rogues’ gallery of thugs, dictators, Commies and racketeers this year.
We may be off to a good start, but it isn’t long before Jim and his team are already falling back on another variation of the "make someone believe it’s WWIII" scam they’ve pulled successfully before. The victim in "Numbers Game" strives to count himself among the dictator set of the IMF’s enemies. Our guys need to convince this would-be ruler (plotting to reclaim his now independent European country) that war has broken out in order to get him to give up a vital Swiss bank account number. Yawn. Same old, same old. This episode reeks of "been there, done that," but doesn’t manage to do it as well as it’s been done before–or would be again, for that matter, in this season’s far superior "The Submarine."
Season finale "The Martyr" is another bad one, but manages to be much more fun than the tired "Numbers Game" in the process. To combat pressure from "their country’s young people," an Eastern European dictator wants to use the Youth Congress to spread his wicked ways. There’s good use of stock footage to create the Eastern Bloc country this time, and even to fill its streets with youthful demonstrators. But it’s more dated than most Missions by its failed attempts to delve into the hippy culture and fashions of the time (even behind the Iron Curtain, I guess). Where the episode really falls apart is in having us believe that Paris and Barney could actually pose as "youth leaders." Nimoy was pushing forty at the time, and looks it! It’s laugh-out-loud ridiculous to see him playing a student. 
Barney actually looks good in his motorcycle-riding "youth" costume, but he can’t pull off lines like, "Say, baby, what’s botherin’ you?" and "If you don’t like it here, split, you dig?" and "Oh, this is funky, man. Real funky."
In addition to criminal overuse of the word "youth" and variations thereof, we’re even treated to a youthful "happening" so full of Hollywood’s version of hippydom it would seem more at home on Hawaii Five-O. This culminates in a horrible, horrible rendition of Bob Dylan’s seminal Sixties anthem "The Times They Are A-Changin’" courtesy of IMF "lady guest star" Lynn Kellogg (an actual folk singer). 
But the episode has a lot of good things to offer as well, making it a tricky paradox. There’s a very good spy plot going on amidst all this youthful exuberance, and it owes a lot to John Le Carré. The IMF creatively uses a double agent to make their enemies believe what they want them to. And those enemies–both the Boris Yeltsin-looking Premiere and his curly-haired chief of secret police (the usual duo)–are particularly wonderful villains, among the season’s best. Jim is programmed to withstand hypnosis and truth drugs, and even has a chip implanted in his ear so Barney can talk to him. All this adds up to an impressively intricate triple-blind dupe, the sort of con you always want out of Mission: Impossible. And even that awful rendering of "The Times They Are A-Changin’" is used very effectively at the end over footage of student protesters believably cut in with shots of the Premiere shouting from his podium. "The Martyr" embodies the best and the worst of the season, but unlike in "The Numbers Game," both are enjoyable. The espionage is top-notch, and I do get a Jason King-like kick out of seeing Paris lead a Youth Congress. But did I mention how badly that Dylan song gets butchered?
Fortunately, most of the fourth season is better than all that. Even a three-part episode manages not to drag too much (and also affords Meriwether her biggest role, and Paris the chance to do magic). And episodes like "Double Circle" and "The Submarine" are among the very best of the series so far.
What makes this a particularly exemplary episode is the fact that every member of the team has a very specific role to play, utilising their own unique skill set in a way that contributes to the overall whole. So often one team member doesn’t get to pitch in, or is asked to serve a function other than his or her primary one. Not so here. Willy even gets to use his strongman skills and lift up the huge false wall so that Barney can get out from behind it! (Rarely do the plots actually call for a strongman, causing the producer's to rethink Peter Lupus's role the following year.) Paris makes such use of his mastery of disguise that Nimoy gets to sit most of this one out, with another actor playing the role. Barney gets to be the techie he’s meant to be, plugging and unplugging XLR cables with the gravity of someone defusing a bomb. It’s a real credit to Greg Morris that he can do this stuff again and again, episode after episode, and still make it both convincing and suspenseful every time. Finally, Anne Francis’s Gilligan gets the best Barbara Bain part since Barbara Bain. Her role (and haircut) is the same one that Cinnamon usually found herself in, as an undercover operative reliant on her looks and charm to obfuscate her true objectives. Gilligan is the best written female role of the season, perhaps because it’s written like Cinnamon. On top of that (as I mentioned before), Francis is the best guest actress of the season, and the combination is a winner. She demonstrates admirably that she could have filled Barbara Bain’s platforms better than anyone–and looked even better than Bain in the process. It’s a tragedy that the producers apparently didn’t see this, and Francis never returned. She clearly should have been a regular.
On top of the team clicking so well, we’re also treated to a great villain in Laszlo. Guest star James Patterson plays the role so well (adding a fey "dear boy" to every order he gives) that he should have been named after a different Bogie foil: Kasper Gutman. I couldn’t help feeling a bit sorry for him when the IMF set him up for another one of the season’s typically violent ends. In an episode that represents all the aspects of the show working together so well, it’s appropriate that Paris (while disguised as Laszlo) gets a line which neatly summarizes the premise of the entire series: "People see what they expect to see." Paris may only get to perform magic in one episode, but the whole team performs masterful slight of hand week after week. I think that Brian De Palma and David Koepp may have been referencing "Double Circle" in the opening moments of their 1996 Mission: Impossible movie, which would make sense as it’s so representative. After that initial scene, the film (and its sequels) would stray far from familiar series territory. 
"The Submarine" is another prototypical Mission: Impossible episode. (So much so that the producers of the 80s revival saw fit to remake it–in a ploy to shoot "new" programming despite an ongoing writers' strike!) The premise of making someone believe they’re being transported in some sort of vehicle isn’t new for the series (they did it in Season 3 with a truck in "The Exchange"), but it’s so well executed here that that hardly matters. This time, they kidnap a Nazi war criminal from his own Iron Curtain captors, and trick him into believing he’s being secreted away by his compatriots aboard a U-Boat. In reality he’s still in the same Eastern Bloc neighborhood where he was being held by the other side. (The neighborhood is, of course, the familiar Paramount lot, and the general who orders his men to sweep the city might as well have ordered them to "Check every sound stage on the lot!") The IMF team manages to assemble a very elaborate submarine set in the middle of this Eastern republic: it’s even set up on a rig to simulate motion, diving and being hit with depth charges. The plotline is pretty predictable, but the execution is flawless. And the reaction from the old Nazi when he realizes what’s happened is priceless.
"Phantoms" is another episode that plays up the technology to an almost sci-fi degree–and another one that sets up yet another Eastern European dictator for a fall. It’s cool, though. The team sets up a fake television interview, blinding the dictator with really powerful lights. In that moment, they switch his glasses for specially treated infra-red ones. They then use an infra-red projector (hidden in a book) to broadcast "ghosts" on his wall that only he can see: the ghosts of those he’s ordered killed, including family members. The ghost trick is only the capper to a much more elaborate con, but it’s a great capper. The con itself is pretty good too–except for a rather unbelievable bit of mask business that requires Paris once again to play a man much, much younger than himself.
"Chico" treats viewers to a somewhat lighter note, revisiting a premise from the second season with an animal team member. That time Phelps selected a cat, this time it’s a cute dog (named Chico, of course) to slightly lesser effect. But the episode is pretty strong overall, even if we’ve seen the animal agent thing done before. Jim and his team pit two rival South American drug barons against each other. Once again, they’re both good villains–and intelligent, too. From the first scene, it’s clear that Jim will have to be at the top of his game to put one over on these guys. Luckily, one of them is a collector of rare stamps, giving Paris his in, posing as an Australian sailor. (And he pulls it off better than Artemus Gordon did in Season 4 of The Wild Wild West!) Chico is such a well-trained dog that Barney’s able to train him to pick out one certain stamp from the whole collection (all part of the elaborate con), and he lowers him into the air conditioning ducts in a basket. (Yes, it’s cute.) There’s no way that viewers will ever think of "Chico" as anything but "the one with the dog," but it does have some very suspenseful moments, and a circuitous plot that holds up pretty well.
As with Season 3, Season 4 shakes up the formula a bit with a few more personal episodes focusing on the characters as more than just mannequins for masks. Just when Jim’s limited expressions of varying degrees of concern are starting to get a bit annoying, along comes a love story for Paris or Barney to distract you. Since the show’s formula demands that its characters remain unattached, any Mission: Impossible love story is bound to be a tragic one, but that makes them all the more interesting.
Barney gets center stage for the first time in "Death Squad." He even gets a love interest: Alma (Cicely Tyson). Once more, there is no "your mission" opening, signifying another more personal episode. This one opens with Barney and Jim on vacation in Central America, where Barney is arrested for murder. It was an accident, of course, that came as a result of defending Alma. That seems like a bit of a cop-out to me; I think the premise would have been far more interesting had Barney been arrested for a murder he actually did commit, while on a mission instead of on vacation... but the Mission: Impossible wasn’t yet ready to intentionally tackle scenarios quite so morally ambiguous.
Unfortunately for Barney, the man he killed was a relative of the head of the banana republic’s secret police. Also unfortunately for him, the police chief runs a notorious death squad–and prefers his enemies to disappear forever rather than receive a fair trial. Jim mobilizes the team, and Paris and Willy show up fifteen minutes in. Working with Alma, they first attempt to mount a legal defense, but realizing that’s useless here, they instead do what they do best. This time, however, the stakes are higher than usual, because as in Season 3's "The Exchange," they’re playing for the life of one of their own.
I love these atypical, more personal episodes. When you have a show that’s so staunchly rooted in formula, it makes it all the more rewarding when that formula’s shaken up. "Lover’s Knot" and "Double Game" are the icing on the cake of another fantastic season of Mission: Impossible. Astoundingly, Season 4 manages to maintain the momentum of the excellent third season despite the loss of two stars. The lack of a strong, regular female team member keeps it from attaining quite those heights, but Paris is a more than adequate replacement for Rollin Hand, who’s loss I had expected to feel more strongly. One final note I should make about Paris, though: Nimoy brings a Roger Moore level of Seventies fashion to Mission: Impossible, including such Moore favorites as cravats and safari jackets. It’s a little jarring in a series that generally manages to appear fairly timeless (despite the odd attempt at cashing in on the "youth culture!"), but regular readers will no doubt be aware that I’m a sucker for Jason King duds, so I don’t mind it one bit. And appearance aside, his acting is top-notch. 
Tradecraft: From Paris With Love
Duffy Records Bond Theme After All
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Random Intelligence Dispatches For September 22, 2008
80s Patrick Macnee Movie Coming To DVD
SNL Spoofs 007
DVD Review: Mad Mission 3: Our Man From Bond Street (1984)
footing! Oh well. If you’re the sort of person who constantly asks those kinds of questions, then the Mad Mission movies aren’t for you. Surprisingly, all this Eiffel Tower action happens a year before 007 himself does it in A View To A Kill!
Sam’s escape from Oddjob takes him under the Seine, where he’s immediately devoured by a giant submarine with a SPECTRE space capsule-style mouth adorned with pointy shark teeth. Inside the cavernous shark submarine, he meets someone who claims to be James Bond while carefully avoiding any copyrighted phrases. Fake James Bond is played by a Sean Connery impersonator who perpetually wears a white dinner jacket and actually looks a little bit like Never Say Never Again-era Connery in certain light. Sometimes. He’s aided by the Oddjob lookalike we already met (who really likes to laugh and goes the real Oddjob one better by having a metal arm in addition to a deadly derby) and the Jaws lookalike, who’s named "Big G" and who’s actually played by the real Richard Kiel. Rounding out Fake Bond’s motley crew is the beautiful seductress/assassin who fired the initial missile at Sam, Jade East, and a woman who appears to be Queen Elizabeth II. Yep, it’s that kind of movie, and this scene really has to be seen to be believed. Fake Bond introduces himself with a very clever "fake arm" gag, and the "Queen" appears to emerge from a painting. All inside a giant mechanical shark, you’ll recall, with Jaws and Oddjob looking on. It’s an Avengers level of delightful spy surrealism.
For those just joining the series, or even those who have forgotten what’s gone before (it’s easy to do), we learn at this point that Sam is a famous jewel thief. "Bond" and "the Queen" convince him to steal the crown jewels for them, claiming they’ve already been stolen and his job is to get them back. The jewels are on display in Sam’s home city of Hong Kong. Sam thinks he’s doing this for James Bond and the Queen of England, so how can he turn them down? What we learn soon enough, however, is that Fake Bond is really a notorious international thief only posing as 007–and that the so-called Queen is really a notorious Queen impersonator! (Sam doesn’t realize any of this, though.)
There are so many spy movies with dull Bond-clones in the lead that it’s a very refreshing take to cast the Bond clone as a villain. And I just love the fact that a measly thief travels the world in a giant shark submarine with a Queen impersonator. I know I’m repeating myself, but this is stuff that bears repeating!
Peter Graves, meanwhile, plays the real "man from Bond Street," specifically from "Bond Street Exports," whose telephone exchange ends in "007." Fake Bond may have avoided potentially litigious terms, but in this case, "Bond Street" and "007" are mentioned again and again by the telephone operator connecting Graves. Other than hitting us over the head with the number "007," the whole phone call is rather superfluous, given that Graves receives his orders via exploding tape recorder, as he once did on Mission: Impossible. (And would again, for that matter, a few years later on the 80s revival of his signature series.) Unfortunately for him, though, the five second self-destruct delay doesn’t give him much time to escape the rickshaw he’s riding in, and the dead-serious Mr. Phelps (ah, that is, "Tom Collins") ends up the butt of a predictable physical gag. He then sits out the bulk of the movie until the finale. Presumably, the film’s producers could only scrounge up enough Hong Kong dollars to lure Peter Graves for a few days’ shooting at most.
Upon his return to Hong Kong, Sam quickly meets up with his old partners, police people Kodyjack and his wife Nancy. Sam and Jade East concoct an elaborate scheme to use Kodyjack as his alibi while Sam swipes the first of the jewels. Like many of the best moments in this movie, it involves fake arms, as well as Jade East’s seductive skills. While much of the humor falls flat to my modern, Western tastes (whether it's because its Hong Kong humor, because it’s dated 80s humor, or because it was never really that funny to begin with I cannot say), this alibi trick does lead to one of the movie’s genuinely hilarious scenes. Thinking he’s caught onto Sam’s trick, Kodyjack questions his old friend with the aid of a lie detector. Nancy operates the machine, and Sam carefully calculates all of his responses to incriminate Kodyjack ("You were too busy with that beautiful woman!") in front of his wife until she storms out, ending the potentially dangerous interview.
The bulk of the movie consists of a number of unnecessarily elaborate heists (utilising a lot of very early CGI) and lots of cool stunts, governed for the most part not by the laws of physics but by the laws of extreme silliness. We get personal jets (watch for the wires), car chases, dirt bikes ridden by Santa Clauses (yes, that's a plural), and dune buggies aplenty manned by leather-clad punks. Let’s discuss that phenomenon for a moment. It’s easy to underestimate the perplexing amount of influence Mad Max had on a generation of filmmakers. For some reason, though, no 80s action movie could resist leather-clad punks riding motorcycles and dune buggies and wielding medieval weapons, even if they’re totally out of place—which they always are, of course. Mad Mission III: Our Man From Bond Street falls into the leather punk trap as easily as so many of its contemporaries. 
Eventually, Sam realizes he’s been duped thanks to Peter Graves, and he begins collaborating with Nancy and Kodyjack against Fake Bond. Fake Bond arranges to sell the crown jewels Sam stole for him to a wealthy Arab sheik who’s already tried to purchase the Statue of Liberty. The exchange it to take place on the sheik’s yacht. Graves leads a team of helicopters to intercept the exchange, though, and uses powerful magnets to lift the Sheik’s yacht out of the water. A British submarine then surfaces, flips over and reveals itself to be a duplicate yacht on the other side! This fake yacht replaces the real one. All this leads to a couple of finales, an imperiled baby, and a final showdown with Fake Bond. They also manage to work in one final celebrity impersonator: Ronald Reagan. (Unlike the others, I think he’s supposed to be the real Reagan.) Yes, I realize that my summary doesn’t make a lick of sense, but neither does the movie. And that doesn’t matter one iota. The Mad Mission movies aren’t about sense-making; they’re about the crazy stunts, which I can’t really do justice to in mere words. If you have a soft spot for inanity and the bizarre, and if there’s even a part of you that smiles at over-the-top Hong Kong action, I promise you’ll get a kick out of Mad Mission III: Our Man From Bond Street. It’s surprisingly one of the only Bond parodies of its era, and one of the more enjoyable entries in that subgenre.
Another Way To Die
DVD Review: The Charlie Chan Collection, Volume 5
The movie starts out with lots of setup, introducing us to a plethora of potential suspects and victims, even for a Chan movie. Panama is presented as a mysterious, bustling Casablanca-like tropical oasis of agents and intrigue. There’s good footage of the canal spliced in, as well as lots and lots (and lots) of Panama hats just to hammer home the idea that we’re in Panama. In fact, when we first meet Charlie, he’s working undercover for the U.S. government posing as a purveyor of Panama hats! It’s never explained why a Hawaiian police detective is on assignment overseas for Uncle Sam, but that doesn’t matter. No sooner does Charlie meet his contact than that contact dies, the victim of an ingeniously poisoned cigarette. His murder was no doubt the work of the notorious enemy agent Reiner, and it’s up to Charlie and his ever-present Number Two Son Jimmy (Sen Yung) to uncover which of the many suspects that is, and stop him before he can sabotage the U.S. fleet. Is Reiner the doctor with the suspicious beard who’s been injecting lab rats with bubonic plague? The shady Egyptian with the suspicious fez? The shady club owner with the suspicious accent? Or the beautiful (and shady) ingenue with a mysterious past who’s performing at his venue? Or is it the ubiquitous Kane Richmond, who seems to turn up somewhere in every single Chan movie? Those are but a few of the options.
Jimmy gets to be really effective for once, pitching a heavy urn at a hand with gun and saving his dad’s life with precise accuracy honed on the college baseball team. But no sooner has he enjoyed this moment of heroism than he is set up with the old, “I don’t miss a thing!” line followed immediately by opening a closet and having a dead body fall out. Whether he’s pitching in or providing comic relief, Sen Yung remains a welcome presence in these movies and, in my opinion, a worthy successor to Keye Luke’s Number One Son in the Warner Oland Chan films.
Murder Over New York doesn’t need to be specific, because Charlie Chan has been to New York before (Charlie Chan On Broadway, one of the lost ones). There’s a twist this time, though in that the murder happens over the city! Oh, wait a minute; no there’s not. The murder does, indeed, occur on the ground, and in New York rather than over it. But the title still serves to evoke the movie’s topic: airplanes, specifically bombers–and the sabotage thereof. With war on everyone’s lips, sabotage at aircraft plants and naval yards was surely on everyone’s mind in 1940, and it’s clearly reflected in the entertainment of the era–including in these two Chan pictures.
The Humanist Spy To coincide with the U.S. roll-out of Tomas Alfredson’s fantastic new feature film adaptation of John Le Carré’s Tinke...
