m2mallory

Even those with a high tolerance for 1940s rubbish films will have a hard time getting through "Crazy Knights" (aka "Ghost Crazy"). It was poverty-row studio Monogram's attempt to create a viable comedy team in the wake of the success of Abbott and Costello, and the continuing popularity of The Three Stooges. The idea was to team the ubiquitous Billy Gilbert with Shemp Howard (who at the time was between his stints with the Stooges) and Lennie-like boxer Maxie Rosenbloom. The three don't act as a trio; Gilbert (who is costumed exactly like Oliver Hardy) and Shemp work as a team, and Rosenbloom joins in about half-way through. The rest of the cast in this haunted house "comedy" is largely unknown, save for John "Perry White" Hamilton, who at this point in his career was bouncing back and forth between major and minor studios. Oh, and since this is a 1940s scare farce, there's also a gorilla. Gilbert--who acts as both slap-happy straight man and overacting, spluttering comic--Howard--who plays it with a tough guy edge--and Rosenbloom pull out every stop to try and get a laugh, but the script (the fault of Tim Ryan, who also plays the detective), the premise, and the utter cheapness of the film defeats them all. Seen today, the picture is a time capsule of the kind of no-budget, no-talent movie-making that existed during the Golden Age, but it's awfully hard to imagine audiences so starved for entertainment that they'd actually pay to see this.

The creatives behind "Murder, She Wrote" often tried to shake up the formula and present something different, and a lot of times it worked. For "Truck Stop," it doesn't. In fact, this episode represents one of the series' biggest belly-flops. Mike Connors guest stars as a screenwriter who is supposed to be adapting Jessica's book into a movie, but instead he practically kidnaps her and takes her into a small town somewhere in between Vegas and L.A. where connected to a seedy diner start turning up dead. The diner is run by Connors' old flame Vera (played by Elizabeth Ashley, and named after the femme fatale of "Detour," in case you didn't get it), who is married to a boorish drunken slob named Pete (played by Ron Karabatsos, and named after the doomed husband in "The Postman Always Rings Twice," in case you didn't get it). Pete turns up dead and there's a shootout between a would-be blackmailer and Connors, in which both end up dead. But before he dies, Connors tape records a confession to both killings, which are dramatized in neo-noir black-and-white as his voice narrates. This isn't a spoiler, because Jessica instinctively senses that things just aren't adding up, tape or no tape, though even she can't figure out who the mysterious, hobo-ish Desmond is (Kristoffer Tabori, doing an excellent Roddy McDowall impression, for whatever reason), what his purpose is in the story, what he knows about the sheriff (Ken Swofford), or why the sheriff doesn't recognize him. It's a mostly great cast, with Ashley making silk out of her sow's ear role as a put-upon waitress, and the usually blustery Swofford standing out in a low-key, rather menacing performance. On the down side is Karabatsos, channeling Lon Chaney, Jr., who demonstrates that the specialty of the house at this particular diner is ham, and Connors attempt at being Bogart, which is a disservice to them both. The real problem, though, is the script. The noir dialogue is downright laughable, with Connors' hard-boiled narration sounding like it was written for Leslie Nielsen for a "Naked Gun" movie. Just when it almost seems like things are coming together Peter Haskell shows up, quite late in the show, as an insurance agent, and plays his role as though he doesn't know whether he'll turn out to be the killer or not. In fact the solution to the mystery and how it fits with everything that has come before is so wobbly that it seems like NO ONE knew who the killer was until they drew straws on the set. Maybe "Truck Stop" was supposed to be a two-parter that got cut down to one hour, and that's why nothing makes sense. But as it is, nothing makes sense.