corny but, yes, they truly don't make them like this any more
i'm sitting at home in London, 3.00 in the afternoon watching an old episode of the first Star Trek series when i should be working.the episode featured Sharon Acker as "Odona" and she was so striking i looked her up on IMDb and found that she was a regular in all those truly fantastic 60s and 70s shows - her career touched my formative years intimately: Star Trek, Mission Impossible, Wild Wild West, Love Boat, Streets of San Francisco, Cannon, Rockford Files and of course, Alias Smith and Jones.
I hate to get sentimental, but suddenly the 60s and 70s seems like such a great time to have been growing up - particularly for me in San Francisco, just a little too young to be a hippy but old enough to find the whole thing hilarious.
I would be glued to every episode of Smith and Jones - why was it so good? Pete Duel's laconic, knowing character, Ben Murphy's more macho delivery. what a great piece of casting - there seemed to be a genuine bond between them that created a "buddiness" rarely seen on the screen. And there was a sensitivity and vulnerability to Pete Duel that seems even clearer given his suicide. Too far to call him a poor man's Steve McQueen? No, he was a rich man's Peter Deuel.
Then I see that Douglas Heyes, the writer, also wrote a load of episodes for Twilight Zone, Naked City and 77 Sunset Strip (now there was a series). There has to be a PhD thesis here - why were so many of the low-budget TV series of the 50s and 60s so cool, so well-written, so effective and compelling with no money, no special effects, no computer animation, no mega-stars. Oh, yeah, I see...
Pete, Ben, Sharon, Douglas - thankyou so very much.
score 10/10
jarvis-33 7 June 2007
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw1669590/14476
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