WesternOne1

This is a film so far from any reality, it should be a classified as a phantasy, though not a clever or interesting one.

Two pals, Jerry and Buddy (O'Keefe and Pendleton) are rural nobodies, living off of crummy farm jobs. Buddy is an idiot savant of sorts, though he's obviously middle aged, he's got the smarts of a child, except he's a mechanical miracle worker with automobiles.

Jerry is an undisciplined, flippant twirp who is obsessed with cars. For instance, behind the wheel of a tractor, he drives it like a maniac because he's trying to do plowing at high speed.

He buys a wrecked, mangled midget racer, which Buddy magically sets right, and it launches Jerry's pro racing career.

The story involves a string of supposed jinxed racers in the team Jerry finds work in; and when it comes due for Jerry's date with fate, he's ready because he suspects the drivers have been drugged and losing their sight somehow at a crucial moment in their matches. So in advance of his, he literally memorized the race course BLINDFOLDED.

So during the big race, having been doped like the others, races on, confident he doesn't need sight. But Buddy, now also blinded, knows that a certain part of the course has been altered in a way that will cause a crash if Jerry relies on his memorization. Luckily, he always makes a left turn if he hears Buddy whistle a specific note, which, though he's blind, knows the exact time to sound off so Jerry makes that opportune turn, and win the day.

When I was a child I lived near the now long ago Langhorne Speedway. When it was race night, so much high decibel raw noise from the cars and crowds drew from the track, you could hardly get to sleep, though we were miles away. Imagine what it would be like trying to whistle a note at a driver speeding by in the centre of that cacophony! Couldn't happen. That and other moments, supposed to be funny or charming, like the midget racer towing a tow tuck, make this a nothing more than a kid's programmer.

The story has Dr. McDonald trying to establish a man's perfectly "sound Mind" as specified in a Last Will and Testament. This is at the request of the one who's will is being composed, played by great character actor Charlie Ruggles.

His desire is to make sure his will can't be disputed due to his being declared unfit post mortem, as his desire is to make sure his sister and her son don't get a nickel. She's been running his life ever since he was a child, and the nephew's a smug, superior freeloader.

With this setup, The good doctor and Rhoda spend a weekend with the three of them at their mansion.

Almost immediately, Ruggles gets up the nerve to talk back to his tormentors, and they retaliate with just about nothing but worried looks. He's supposedly been enduring in silent fear of her for a lifetime, (Though he's obviously decades older than she is) and even after spilling about his plans for the will, no screaming, no arguments, no big scene. Ruggles decides that Rhoda should get the boodle (ten million dollars), because he declares her such a deeply "Human" girl. Ironic, ha? But to establish this attitude, all Rhoda has done is flatly repeat the last thing that's said to her. There's probably no perfect stock behaviour a humanoid robot should have, Robbie the Robot or the Lost in Space version, one might guess, but Julie Newmar's choice for Rhoda always seems more than anything else, like a drunk. She walks unsteady and slurs her speech.

The creepy nephew decides that the sure way to sabotage Ruggles' will and his chosen heir is to sabotage her via hypnotism. You can't monkey with the subconscious psyche of a machine, so Rhoda just keeps doing the same thing, repeating things and obeying commands, and here she tells them she's a robot, and all the relevant specs on how she was slapped together. Now everyone thinks she's nuts, and so, Charlie reluctantly switches the will to now donate it all to mental health research.

Everyone, even his sister and nephew think it's a fine idea. Gee, they didn't really want it or need it that much after all, and it would seem they weren't such bullies after all. The anaemic construction of the story and characters didn't produce any laughs.

The problem with the whole series is the main character. What is a robot? Would a girl robot have a feminine personality? Should She? Julie doesn't ever show any, preferring to play her as a soulless zombie, an automaton with no opinions, no will, no personality. Why didn't they give her some? There's little doubt that's why the series was short-lived.

For years, they tried to get Danny Kaye to do series TV, and when he took the plunge, he delivered a good, watchable show aimed at adults. Not "Adult" in the sense of the word abused to mean prurient or crude, but that of mature taste and comprehension.

In this episode, his guests are timeworn veteran Eddie Foy Jnr. And bright newcomer Mary Tyler Moore. With her, he parodies television with sitcom couples as seen in the US, in France and Japan, with wild overacting caricatures of the cast members, with an overly passionate French pair, and a Japanese man easily moved to threaten Suppuku. Funny stuff, in the spirit of Sid Caesar. It never would happen today.

With Foy and Mary, a Gypsy operetta is satired, complete with a silly dialect song Kaye was famous for. The other two segments were a soft shoe dance where Danny sings a medley of wheezy WWI era tunes while Eddie and Mary soft shoe dance, I guess for nostalgia's sake, and lastly, a comment on technology , a song where city names are substituted by the new phenomena of Area codes, which are replacing the phone exchanges. An enjoyable programme, pity they're not easy to come by.