User reviews

Confusing but entertaining yarn with David Janssen trying to solve the case of a young girl who went missing years before.

Brad Dexter plays a movie star who, as usual, gives off enough vibes to make you suspect he's a rat. His secretary is bumped off, and since she seemed to have an interest in the missing person's case, enter Janssen. Jeanne Crain plays Janssen's old flame. Dina Merrill plays Crain's friend, who ultimately becomes an important part of the case. Everything gets wrapped up in the final ten minutes or so, but it's a bit of a mess getting to that point.

There is some good work by others, including William Demarest as a drunken former reporter who had written about the case, and Jacques Aubuchon, as a mysterious guy who wants Janssen to find his missing brother. It was a little odd seeing Aubuchon in a suit, since I was used to him walking around in native garb as Chief Urulu in "McHale's Navy." Silent screen star Gertrude Astor plays a dead body.

Worth a look, just to see Jeanne Crain in one of the tightest black dresses ever made.

The film starts with the murder scene of a woman who manages the fan mail for film star LeRoy Dane. Private detective Tom Alder (David Janssen) is told about the details of the case by a cop friend of his who drops by for a drink. Actually, Alder is a particular kind of private detective - He tracks down the long-lost beneficiaries of estates for a cut of the proceeds.

But the murdered woman's entire estate was less than three thousand dollars, so why the interest? Alder looks around the murder scene late at night - apparently crime scene tape was not in the budget - and finds some old clippings in the murdered woman's apartment concerning a rich couple's 16-year-old daughter who went missing 13 years before. This is what apparently piques his interest, although there is no estate involved, and nobody has hired him, and thus nobody is paying him to do any investigation. And yet he spends more on airlines and hotels than the Beatles on tour as he goes about looking for answers. Along the way he meets a host of colorful characters, none of whom seem related to any of the others, but all with an interest in his investigation. Complications ensue.

The "Big Sleep" this is not, but it has some of the same problems and features, but for its time versus the time of The Big Sleep. It's a great example of an industry in transition - one that is exiting the production code era and entering the swinging sixties. It's just not quite there yet, and it has a great jazz score. But the plot just wanders all over the place.

It scores some in the casting department - William Demarest as a washed-up homicide detective who has turned alcoholic and waxes poetic. And it busts some there too - Brad Dexter looks more like the muscle for the mob than he does some matinee idol that teens go crazy at the sight of. And I always liked Jeanne Craine in her 20th Century Fox vehicles, but she is cringeworthy here as someone from Alder's past who sees him one night in a bar after ten years apart, and then pesters the guy, apparently proud that her breaking his heart years ago caused him to become hard and cynical - at least so she believes.

This disjointed film noir is hobbled by a rambling narrative that spends too much time on a flashback and then devolves into a silly ending in North Dakota (with some hideous rear projection).

David Janssen stars as a finder of missing persons, especially heirs. He gets involved in a decade-old mystery in which a movie star vanished. Seems her rich daddy paid lots of hush money and she's long forgotten until her name comes up again after a woman is murdered.

Somehow, the case seems to involve a famous movie actor who seems to show up in odd places. Then there's an erudite fat man following him as well as an ex-wife who suddenly pops up.

Janssen gets hooked after visiting a a boozy ex-reporter who lets slips a few juicy details about the dead movie star. After a visit to her mother, he's on the trail that takes him, ultimately, to a shack in North Dakota.

The mystery isn't much and is given away in the flashback, after which the viewer just waits it out. But there are several excellent performances in this film. Janssen is solid. Jeanne Crain is wasted as the ex-wife. Dina Merrill is surprisingly good as Nikki. William Demarest is excellent as the boozy reporter as is Agnes Moorehead as the flinty mother. Jacques Aubuchon is also very good as the fat man, and Will Wright has a nice bit as the records keeper. Robert Strauss is good as Janssen's pal. That's TCM host Robert Osborne as the sailor with dance tickets. Brad Dexter is badly cast as the movie actor.

Certainy worth a look for some great acting and Gerald Fried's driving jazz score.

A lawyer begins a search for a woman who went missing as a teen ten years before. He is also forced at gunpoint to take on a search for the missing brother of "the king of the confidence men." He interviews colorful characters, knocks on doors, has flashbacks to his own life, and it all comes together at the end.

The plot is intriguing. It is complicated enough to demand your full attention, but not so complicated to be hard to follow. The jazz score has been done many times before and since. It goes well with the movie, but it is inappropriately intrusive here and there.

All in all, a nice, neat job. My one complaint is that costar, Jeanne Crain, has little to do here. The costar should have been Dina Merril. I am not so much concerned about billing, I am just a devoted fan of Jeanne Crain

This certainly should not be classified as a real "thriller" but, as a mystery film it was a decent watch. I was intrigued to hear the story behind special investigator Tom Adler's (David Janssen) American born geisha girl Nicki Kovacs (Dina Merrill). The story has flashback scenes to when Tom Adler was a lieutenant stationed in Japan when he meets Nicki Kovacs at a Japanese nightclub.. Nicki is one of the private dancers/geisha girls at the nightclub who provides the sombre looking Tom with an ear to listen to his woes, and a couch to sleep on overnight. By morning Tom has fallen in love with the mysterious Nicki but he loses touch with his war time crush and over the following decades he cannot get her beautiful mysterious face out of his dreams and thoughts.

Do not expect any James Bond or Mike Hammer physical action scenes as David Janssen is not your action Jackson type of detective. No, Tom Adler is more a wussy heartbroken type of detective who is good at his job at finding missing persons to which his firm gets a handsome reward for finding long lost loved ones. In this film, ironically enough Tom Adler is having a difficult time finding his own long lost love, his American born geisha girl Nicki Kovacs.

No spoiler here. Suffice to say that Twenty Plus Two is a decent mystery film with a decent ending to which I give the film a decent 6 out of 10 rating.

It's a mostly intriguing story... a young girl had gone missing years ago. now, when a woman is murdered, people start looking into the missing girl again, for various reasons. David Janssen (two years before his very successful series The Fugitive) is an investigator, and bits of his own past start coming out. some twists and surprises along the way. but also some pretty big plot holes that really should have been ironed out. pretty weak script. the acting is fine, but just some sloppy directing and creaky screenplay. some fun co-stars here.. Agnes Moorehead was so good in Dark Passage and the many projects with orson wells. Bill Demarest was in so many old films and My Three Sons... both actors getting up there by now. Demarest's character was so old, wrinkled, and ornery, I didn't recognize him when I saw him in the bar scene. Dina Merrill, who I knew from Desk Set. 20 + 2 directed by Joe Newman. never did anything too big. written by Frank Gruber; wrote lots of westerns and murder stories. and has an interesting quote that there are really only seven basic westerns. check it out on his imdb page. the film is very watchable, but has its flaws. Janssen died at 48... heart attack, according to wikipedia dot org. check it out... some huge names at his funeral. we should all be so lucky.

This is not the worst film I have seen, but it is among the most incoherent. My two stars are for splendid over-the-top cameos by the great William Demarest and the great Agnes Moorehead and a valiant try by Jacques Aubuchon. What are we supposed to make of an allegedly crack investigator who relies entirely on research by others and wildly improbable coincidences? What are we to make of the Jeanne Crain character whose only role is to look lovely, introduce the "hero" to another woman, reunite passionately with said "hero," and then vanish without trace? What above all are we to make of our hero's deep love for the Dina Merrill character when he fails to recognize her when sitting next to her and talking to her on a long plane flight? The story is ludicrous, the lovely Dina Merrill is seriously miscast, most of the male actors are stiffs, the denouement is absurd, and none of this farrago makes any sense at all.

Not everyone liked this film as much as I did, and maybe some were better at second-guessing the ending than I was. I thought the plot was artfully constructed, with the realization of the ending dawning on us gradually, step by step. I didn't detect any false clues, just clues that became more and more revealing as the story went on.

David Janssen and Jeanne Crain put in fine performances, and most of the minor characters did well, too. Agnes Moorehead, who usually has enough presence to fill any role, was not convincing as a Park Avenue blueblood. Her lines didn't help, but it just seemed like she didn't have her heart in the role.

Overall, the writing was good, as was the staging. Unlike some reviewers who found that this seemed more like something written TV, I thought it was well put together.

"Twenty Plus Two" is a stylish, ambitious movie with a great look. It's a shame that it's filmed after the height of film noir, but it still has a few great scenes that are noir-ish, and plenty of night scenes in general. The movie starts off in Hollywood 1961 and follows Tom Alder (actor David Janssen) from coast to coast as he figures out a murder mystery and finds a missing person, all the while dealing with a LOT of different characters. I thought it was really well made.

The main problem with "Twenty Plus Two" is the casting of Dina Merrill as the female lead. Her character is about 30 years old at the time of the movie, and in flashback scenes, she's about 20. Merrill was 37 when she made this movie and she looked older. She was hardly believable as a 30-year-old woman, and definitely not as a young 20-year-old. She was badly miscast and it affected the movie.

Jeanne Crain fares better as a sort of "girl next door" but fifteen years down the line. She plays Linda, who was engaged to Tom before he was sent to Korea, but married someone else while he was away. Now, 11 years after they last saw one another, she wants him back, but he doesn't want her, and she spends half the movie chasing him. She and Janssen are kind of funny in their scenes together.

Agnes Moorehead as the missing girl's mother was superb in her scene with David Janssen. It's a long, pivotal scene. I give credit to both actors as their give-and-take was spot on. There's a lot of dialogue in this movie and these two could really deliver lines.

The most stylistic and atmospheric scene in the entire movie is a shot of Tom sitting alone in his hotel room, thinking about the past, smoking, and the camera follows the smoke as it rises to the ceiling. It is fantastic.

David Janssen is very, very good in this movie. He's cool, and the film's black and white visuals and jazzy score help to underline this. He should have become a major feature film star. As it was, he became a major TV star, and deservedly so.

The producers were able to assemble a usually fine cast for this mystery movie, but the problem is, they all really ham it up so much that it almost becomes laughable. The worst hams are Jeanne Crain, Agnes Moorehead, and William Demarast, but Janssen does his share of chewing up the scenery, too. The mysterious plot is somewhat interesting but another problem is that the script just calls for these hams to stand, sit, or sometimes even lay around talking, talking, and talking even more. There is very little action here, just a bunch of verbalization that sometimes goes on and on. After seeing the scene when Janssen visits Moorehead, who is over the top with her hamminess, I concluded that the producers of TV's "Bewitched" must have seen it and said - oh yeah, we just found our outrageous Endora.

I still give this six stars, only because it is interesting to watch - and you really can't turn it off, waiting to see just which of these usually good actors it going to out ham the other ones !

In Hollywood, Julia Joliet is murdered. She's a small time secretary answering fan mail for a movie star. What catches the attention of private investigator Tom Alder is that she has collected clippings from the Doris Delaney case. Delaney was a missing heiress and her parents spared no expense to find her with no success. Alder decides to follow the clue.

I generally like the hard-boiled detective style and this has an intriguing start. I don't particularly like his meandering investigation. It seems a little slow and I'm never sure about his moves. Then it loses me in a flashback. The problem is that the flashback happens without much context since the audience isn't shown the old photographs. She's also a little older than I expect. The case is over a decade old but it may need to double that. It is also very coincidental. It's unlikely that he would be investigating the case without any pictures at the start. The whole thing is a house of cards built on a knife's edge.

This film is not what I expected, I sat through it, because I always liked Dina Merrill, but David Janssen comes across as too laid back in his role, as if he's just half-interested..and the story itself doesn't stir any great emotions in me, I honestly didn't care enough for the plot to like how it ends..

This poor excuse for a movie only has one line in the whole film that has any sparkle. It was when the woman says to David Janssen that he wouldn't make the first move. You can imply from this that he would fancy a woman, but not chat her up, especially if she is giving him any signals to offer friendship. Instead, he is quite prepared to spend $100 on a call girl just to talk to him. The one scene with Agnes Moorehead lifts the film in terms of performance, but it doesn't make it a good film. It comes nowhere near the quality of any Moorehead projects like 'Black Jack' or 'The Invaders' from season two of 'The Twilight Zone'. In short, stay away from this poorly made film because it's not a movie. I don't know what it is.

"Twenty Plus Two" is an unusual film in that I re-started it about 20 minutes into the story. This is because although I was watching, I was distracted by other things....and this is NOT a film to watch when there are any distractions! It's complicated...and still worth seeing.

David Janssen plays Tom Alder, a man much like his TV character Richard Diamond, the detective. But Alder is not quite as smooth and isn't quite as irresistible to the ladies...though two women in the film clearly adore him.

Alder makes his living finding lost people. One old case that has been unsolved for well over a decade involved a rich young lady who just disappeared. The film shows the steps Alder takes to eventually find this woman and solve the mystery of her disappearance.

While I'd quickly admit that Janssen's acting is sometimes a bit wooden, I like him in his various shows and movies. He's quite good here and the story is good but almost needs a map to help you keep up with all the twists and turns. My only complaint, and it's minor, is that too many things seem coincidental...but this is a small matter. Well worth seeing.

I always find David Janssen interesting to watch, even when he's delivering lines in an annoying hesitance only suited to his Richard Kimble on-the-run in The Fugitive (1963). But poor David can't save this mess. Granted, it predates made-for-TV movies but it has all the earmarks of one in its threadbare budget and trying to pass off the San Fernando Valley as one of the Dakotas!

Jacques Aubuchon is on hand to make sure this doesn't get elevated above television quality. Dina Merrill is lovely but too old for the part and lacking the real acting chops required for the role. Jeanne Crain has no chemistry with Janssen and she continues to cause wonderment as to why she ever had a career (like Joanne Dru, with whom she is interchangeable, her looks aren't quite movie-star enough and her acting talent is quite lacking).

As muddled as the story is, without a satisfactory denouement, the most puzzling thing is the movie's title. It's all based on producer/screenwriter Frank Gruber's novel of the same name (they even make sure to add that credit directly under the main title). But as has been explained in another review, because Janssen was younger than the novel's hero, the storyline shifted his background from a WWII vet to a Korean War vet. In doing so, it lost the relevance of the title, that referred to a crime which took place in 1938 and was resolved twenty-two years later in 1960. Why no production meeting was ever held to rename the movie while keeping the based on credit with the novel's title is totally incomprehensible.

By the time this movie was made in 1961, the theaters were empty and closing, because people chose television for their leisure hours. What were studios to do? Producer Scott R. Dunlap's B-movie company (previously known for westerns), made an imitation of what was popular on television at the time, and bought a script from a TV writer, Frank Gruber, who got his start writing pulp fiction novels and stories sold to detective magazines (at a time when writers were paid by the word!), but switched to the lucrative new TV market. At the time, TV was changing from unrealistic westerns to unrealistic detective shows, but Frank Gruber had written plenty in both genres.

Dunlap then got a cast of TV stars. Movie stars were too expensive, so they got David Janssen who had success starring in TV's "Richard Diamond: Private Detective," Jacques Aubuchon, who was familiar from frequent appearances on "Perry Mason" and "McHale's Navy," as well as other faces familiar on TV.

The result is a movie as good as any 1950s TV show that you can find on the back-channels of your TV.

By the time the convoluted plot is revealed, you just don't care. A waste of Janssen and Moorehead and an insult to Jeanne Crain. The only cast member to luck out was the talentless Dina Merrill who was 15 years too old for her part.

Despite a decent cast, you can pass on this film without fearing you have left a significant gap in your personal viewing history unless you are an Agnes Moorehead fan The plot is based on ridiculously improbable coincidences that ruined the film for me. There was an obvious attempt at character development but again plausibility was sometimes a glaring problem. The film's best feature for me was was an accurate depiction of the 1961 ambience and a look at what an early 1960s film noir could have been. That was about the time I stared high school and it depicted a culture of cocktails and capitalist conformity that we rightly rejected. The other plus was a bravura performance by Agnes Moorehead.

As other reviewers have mentioned, the leading female role, Nikki, plated by Dina Merrill is worthy of an Oscar for miscasting. She is decades too old to play a character whose role in the plot is based on her youth. Merill's character appears as a woman of about 29 and in a long flashback at about age 19. She is not even credible as a 29 year old. Another actor who could get viewers to care about the 19 year old "Nikki" could have been a saving grace for the film. Merrill was OK as a woman who has been around the block a few times but not as a late teen on first round the block trip.

David Janssen played his usual character. Unfortunately that role suffered the most from poor development. A couple more more minutes explaining the inconsistencies in his personality could also have saved the movie. They tried to give some idea of what made him who he was, and that was good, but a minute or two more that may have been left on the cutting room floor could have made him sympathetic and believable.

Even in film noir...especially in film noir...the characters and their relationships have to make some sort of twisted sense. So what do you do when your hero, an investigator who searches for missing heirs, meets a beautiful woman and doesn't recall that they were lovers a few years before? Just because she changed her name and her hairdo. You figure it's about as logical as his investigation into the brutal murder of a fan club secretary for which no one seems to have hired him. There are some nice touches in the film -- William Demarest is terrific as a boozy newspaperman, Agenes Moorehead nails a salty old dowager and Jacques Aubachon makes an elegantly talkative con artist. On the other hand, Janet Leigh is mostly window dressing and David Janssen spends too much of the movie muttering moodily.