"Blues for Sally M" was another enjoyable episode, but hardly a suspenseful one! This was more like a COLUMBO in that the perpetrator of the crime is revealed in the opening scenes. When Buzz is flipping through his scrapbook and lands on a full-page photo of Peter Warlock, it was so obviously Keir Dullea in a bad makeup job. And then when Buzz got all twitchy and took up that dagger, there was no doubt he was about to stab himself.
Warlock himself was a plot hole. Mac visits editor Jack Carter in his fleabag office and asks about Warlock's tenure writing reviews for his "shopper" newspaper. Wouldn't Mac have done his homework and conducted a background check on Warlock, discovering the man never existed until three years ago (when Buzz's father died)? How does a person get a job and a radio show and such a level of notoriety as Warlock enjoyed without anybody learning that? Without a Social Security Number, how would Warlock cash his checks or rent an apartment? And did Warlock review other musicians or exclusively Buzz? I wrote off the fact Sally was inexplicably working two days a week for Warlock as just a necessary plot device to make her a connection, but if one stops to think about it, that side gig of Sally's made no sense.
Sally should never have been a suspect as she was in the company of the police commissioner all the time leading up to the stabbing. I couldn't understand Enright and the D.A. riding Mac about insufficiently interrogating his wife. Sally is guilty on all charges, however, of being a spoiled little rich girl. She was especially childish when she kept feeding quarters to the monkey one after another after another and laughing like a little girl on her first visit to the circus. That scene was prefaced with her on a spree in a quaint little shopping village by the bay. And then her pouting and stomping upstairs to her room like a teenager when she fears Mac doesn't believe her. Mac, having been down this road before, pours a couple drinks and maybe for a moment rues the day his vanity led him to wed this child-bride.
One more plothole: how did Buzz/Warlock shred Sally's clothes (and why?) if at the time he was following Sally and Mildred, wearing a rather conspicuous trenchcoat and clenching and unclenching his gloved hands?
That Buzz was Warlock was hinted at again when Buzz was furious that Warlock failed to show up at the concert. He never shows up, it was said, but listens over the radio. Wouldn't people like Mac and Enright start putting the pieces together? Though I guess Lois Lane never lit onto the fact that Clark Kent and Superman never appearing together meant they were the same man. I really thought Mac finally had it figured out when he flung open Warlock's curtains and watched Warlock cringe and cower, but apparently not.
A shortcoming in all these NBC Mystery Movies is their stretching out a solid 50 minutes of story into 73 minutes. Padding is welcome when it's with such fun albeit not essential to the plot scenes like Sgt. Enright's visits to the Drakes and then his mistress the mad housepainter ("you painted the phone?"), but a drag when it's a protracted foot chase through the streets culminating with an anticlimactic everybody just stops running and talks calmly in a dead-end alley. That's just filling time and goosing the audience with an appearance of action and suspense. Even the jazz concert got a little long, with the camera lingering lovingly on the musicians and the over-emoting Buzz. With a little trim and "here a tuck there a tuck," as Mildred put it, this could have been a tight hour-long drama.
Universal spared no expense in its mystery movies and always secured stellar guest casts. Don Mitchell moonlighting from IRONSIDE was a welcome face. I strongly suspected this show was filmed about the same time Mitchell was making SCREAM, BLACULA, SCREAM. That 1973 film also boasted the beautiful and buxom Barbara Rhoades--who had a brief scene here playing the flirty waitress with eyes only for Mac. Tom Troupe is among my favorite character actors, and he had a rich role here as the underappreciated impresario. His contempt for the musicians he managed and made his millions from reminded me of the Beatles' Brian Epstein or the narrator of Pink Floyd's "Have a Cigar." But most memorable to me among the guest cast were a pre-JEFFERSONS Ned Wertimer and pre-DIFF'RENT STROKES Charlotte Rae. Their hilarious scene was ripe with spinoff sitcom potential!
After all the false leads, stuntman's union-mandated splashdown in the bay and fight scene at Manny's, and the awkwardly inserted description by the Baroness of Buzz's eccentric father, the show concludes in the concert hall with a pastiche of PHANTOM OF THE OPERA and SVENGALI. Once again, the producers earlier telegraphed Buzz's love for old movies with the one-sheets that adorned his dressing room. It was a sad even if not surprising ending, with pathos, pop psychology, and a pre-SYBIL peek at multiple personality disorder.
Even with its shortcomings, this was an entertaining episode all the way through. It fell a little shy of the second season opener, "Night of the Wizard," but maybe because in my arithmetic Keir Dullea plus Don Mitchell don't add up to Cameron Mitchell in a campy role tailor-made for his talents. Jazz aficionados will find more to enjoy in "Blues for Sally M" than I did, though I did find a lot, and I even learned a lesson--don't use those cheap 99-cents for a three-pack cassette tapes that allow the old recordings to bleed through. Of course that lesson came about 40 years too late!
Warlock himself was a plot hole. Mac visits editor Jack Carter in his fleabag office and asks about Warlock's tenure writing reviews for his "shopper" newspaper. Wouldn't Mac have done his homework and conducted a background check on Warlock, discovering the man never existed until three years ago (when Buzz's father died)? How does a person get a job and a radio show and such a level of notoriety as Warlock enjoyed without anybody learning that? Without a Social Security Number, how would Warlock cash his checks or rent an apartment? And did Warlock review other musicians or exclusively Buzz? I wrote off the fact Sally was inexplicably working two days a week for Warlock as just a necessary plot device to make her a connection, but if one stops to think about it, that side gig of Sally's made no sense.
Sally should never have been a suspect as she was in the company of the police commissioner all the time leading up to the stabbing. I couldn't understand Enright and the D.A. riding Mac about insufficiently interrogating his wife. Sally is guilty on all charges, however, of being a spoiled little rich girl. She was especially childish when she kept feeding quarters to the monkey one after another after another and laughing like a little girl on her first visit to the circus. That scene was prefaced with her on a spree in a quaint little shopping village by the bay. And then her pouting and stomping upstairs to her room like a teenager when she fears Mac doesn't believe her. Mac, having been down this road before, pours a couple drinks and maybe for a moment rues the day his vanity led him to wed this child-bride.
One more plothole: how did Buzz/Warlock shred Sally's clothes (and why?) if at the time he was following Sally and Mildred, wearing a rather conspicuous trenchcoat and clenching and unclenching his gloved hands?
That Buzz was Warlock was hinted at again when Buzz was furious that Warlock failed to show up at the concert. He never shows up, it was said, but listens over the radio. Wouldn't people like Mac and Enright start putting the pieces together? Though I guess Lois Lane never lit onto the fact that Clark Kent and Superman never appearing together meant they were the same man. I really thought Mac finally had it figured out when he flung open Warlock's curtains and watched Warlock cringe and cower, but apparently not.
A shortcoming in all these NBC Mystery Movies is their stretching out a solid 50 minutes of story into 73 minutes. Padding is welcome when it's with such fun albeit not essential to the plot scenes like Sgt. Enright's visits to the Drakes and then his mistress the mad housepainter ("you painted the phone?"), but a drag when it's a protracted foot chase through the streets culminating with an anticlimactic everybody just stops running and talks calmly in a dead-end alley. That's just filling time and goosing the audience with an appearance of action and suspense. Even the jazz concert got a little long, with the camera lingering lovingly on the musicians and the over-emoting Buzz. With a little trim and "here a tuck there a tuck," as Mildred put it, this could have been a tight hour-long drama.
Universal spared no expense in its mystery movies and always secured stellar guest casts. Don Mitchell moonlighting from IRONSIDE was a welcome face. I strongly suspected this show was filmed about the same time Mitchell was making SCREAM, BLACULA, SCREAM. That 1973 film also boasted the beautiful and buxom Barbara Rhoades--who had a brief scene here playing the flirty waitress with eyes only for Mac. Tom Troupe is among my favorite character actors, and he had a rich role here as the underappreciated impresario. His contempt for the musicians he managed and made his millions from reminded me of the Beatles' Brian Epstein or the narrator of Pink Floyd's "Have a Cigar." But most memorable to me among the guest cast were a pre-JEFFERSONS Ned Wertimer and pre-DIFF'RENT STROKES Charlotte Rae. Their hilarious scene was ripe with spinoff sitcom potential!
After all the false leads, stuntman's union-mandated splashdown in the bay and fight scene at Manny's, and the awkwardly inserted description by the Baroness of Buzz's eccentric father, the show concludes in the concert hall with a pastiche of PHANTOM OF THE OPERA and SVENGALI. Once again, the producers earlier telegraphed Buzz's love for old movies with the one-sheets that adorned his dressing room. It was a sad even if not surprising ending, with pathos, pop psychology, and a pre-SYBIL peek at multiple personality disorder.
Even with its shortcomings, this was an entertaining episode all the way through. It fell a little shy of the second season opener, "Night of the Wizard," but maybe because in my arithmetic Keir Dullea plus Don Mitchell don't add up to Cameron Mitchell in a campy role tailor-made for his talents. Jazz aficionados will find more to enjoy in "Blues for Sally M" than I did, though I did find a lot, and I even learned a lesson--don't use those cheap 99-cents for a three-pack cassette tapes that allow the old recordings to bleed through. Of course that lesson came about 40 years too late!