Have You Heard About Vanessa?

A great finale to a great show. Lived them all and was sad to see it go. Loved Rock Hudson.

Rock Hudson made his farewell performance as Commissioner Stewart McMillan of San Francisco, the most hands on big city police commissioner in history with this story which was borrowed quite liberally from the classic Otto Preminger film Laura.

Joanna Cameron, TV's future Isis, plays Vanessa Vale a very much in demand celebrity model whose body with a pound of cold cream on her face is found at her apartment front door making the police think she jumped or had some help. Just like Dana Andrews in Laura obsessing over Gene Tierney, Rock Hudson now a widower starts obsessing over Cameron and is in her crime scene apartment when she walks in. Only then do we learn that the deceased is a travel writer who shared the apartment when she was in town, clothes, and occasionally men with Cameron.

Now if you were watching this and thought you knew where this was going because you recognized the Laura connection immediately, forget about it. The story goes off in a whole different direction, but of course Rock Hudson figures it all out.

What made McMillan&Wife was the good chemistry and banter between Rock Hudson and Susan St.James. When that was gone the show certainly lost something even though the widowed Hudson certainly was now paired with a bevy of beautiful women in the last season. None more so here with all the fashion industry types.

Still this is a pretty good story because it goes off Laura's beaten path.