User Reviews

Michael Sloan follows up on his "Bonnie and McCloud" misfire with a show that by all rights should get a zero rating, but scores some points for sheer audaciousness. As with the previous show, Sloan (who co-produced this one with Ronald Satlof) spends money like water and created plot devices to leave the viewer slack-jawed with astonishment at how bad they are. Rookie director Ivan Dixon (a former "Hogan's Heroes" co-star) stages action scenes well, but character development is sorely lacking. And you gotta love how an illegal Israeli immigrant has a perfect American accent, while his Israeli-army sister speaks very UK English (Jane Seymour was new to America at the time ... she used the accent to her advantage in her later shows). In the chopped-down version I have on tape, third-billed Patricia Quinn has almost nothing to do. And why is Simms, the least interesting of the supporting-cast detectives, given the big part as the hireling to the villain? For that matter, does Simms survive the shootout at The Arches (apparently in the Battery district and serving as a garage for the cabs) ... he rolls over when McCloud comes to him and later McCloud gets on the horn and tells dispatch that "there's a wounded man back at The Arches ... all the other villains except the fleeing Keith Hampton are stone dead). Although having an apparently friendly character be a bad guy is common now, it was way out of place in 1976-77. Logic takes a huge powder in many sequences -- the odds had to be a million to one that the bullet that killed David Kessler would wind up lodged in a park bench (which is not in the long shot when McCloud hears the shot and returns fire) ... and if McCloud's description of events is correct, David Kessler was running straight toward him! (The bullet is also face-high to McCloud -- he describes it whistling by his ear -- so how did it dip to hit the bench?) But Michael Sloan -- who evidently had naked contempt for his audience -- gets some points for being this brazen.