User Reviews

Jim and Arte receive a worried letter from 'Governor Bradford' ( Henry Beckman ). When they show up at his office, they do not know he has been abducted and replaced by a double called 'Sam Jameson'. The governor's secretary - 'Miss Piecemeal' ( Sigrid Valdis ) is in on the plan. Its real leader though is 'Professor Horatio Bolt' ( Alfred Ryder ), owner of the Bolt Museum of Fine Arts. The fake governor tells the secret service men that someone wants him dead. He is due to attend the unveiling of a new statue, but refuses to cancel the engagement. Bolt intends buying the Mona Lisa with the money he makes from the operation. Jim notices that the governor is suddenly right-handed. The real one is not...

Co-written by Philip Saltzman - later the Executive Producer of Conrad's 'A Man Called Sloane' - this episode works very well. Viviane Ventura is seen as 'Angelique' - this stunning beauty also graced a number of British films such as 'Finders Keepers' and 'Battle Beneath The Earth' ( both 1966 ). The climax in the museum has Bolt aiming a large crossbow at West. Beckman is very good as both 'the Governor' and 'Jameson'. Arte's impersonation of an art expert is among one of the most amusing in the whole series.

In an opening sequence that can rightly be described as "Wild", the governor of California gets the shock of his life when a bronze bust in his likeness suddenly opens it's eyes and looks back at him. Next, the governor is slipped a paralysing injection and placed into the hollowed out table from which his double has disengaged himself. So begins "The Night Of The Torture Chamber" as the ersatz politician now in charge sets about diverting state funds to an art-obsessed collector who schemes to buy all the great works of art. A strange plot to be sure, but also a refreshing break from the megalomaniacs with a yen to control the world generally favoured by "WWW"'s writers.

Orchestrated with zest by frequent director Alan Crosland Jr., "Night Of The Torture Chamber" benefits from a brisk pace as well as some fine action sequences including a street fight with a pack of thugs that ranks among the most exciting of the series. A well-cast Henry Beckman effectively plays both the kidnapped governor as well as his nervous double. Also noteworthy is the return of the duplicitous secretary to the governor, Miss Piecemeal played by Sigrid Valdis. Previously seen working in the same office in "The Night The Wizard Shook The World" for Dr. Loveless, Miss Piecemeal apparently is an evil secretary for hire. Ross Martin has fun assuming the guise of a stuffy French art appraiser who dupes the villainous Prof. Bolt into thinking his prized collection is one big pile of forgeries. Alfred Ryder, playing art-hungry professor may not be quite among the best of the WWW villains, but this does little to de-value what is otherwise a genuinely entertaining episode.

This was a run - of - the - mill WILD WILD WEST episode, but it is amusing because of a current art scandal going on today in California and Italy. If you have not been following the newspapers The Getty Museum has been negotiating with the Italian Government (while legal action is going on in the Italian courts) regarding a large number of stunning acquisitions in Etruscan, Roman, and Italian art that were bought over a decade or so by the Getty for its collections. Most of these items were stolen or gotten from people with "illegal" title to them. It looks like the Getty will be returning most of these.

This particular episode recalls the Getty mess because it deals with a Governor of California (Henry Beckman) who is manipulated into handing over the treasury of the state to one Professor Horatio Bolt (Alfred Ryder). Ryder is trying to build up the greatest art collection in the world for California - he's purchasing art for millions of dollars of public money.

Don't ask...that's the evil plot of the episode! At least the Getty is privately financed. This plot is ridiculous.

The conclusion, a confrontation between Ryder and James West (Robert Conrad) deals with Ryder holding a weapon at Conrad's body, but Conrad picks up the one painting of all (you guessed it: THE MONA LISA) that he knows Ryder would never risk damaging. More artistically sensitive than Burt Lancaster or Paul Schofield in THE TRAIN, Ryder reluctantly surrenders his weapon because he loves art too much! Apparently he never heard of art restoration.

I had fondly remembered, from back in the day, the giant crossbow showdown at the close. I must have liked the idea, but viewing it now, the scene totally misses the mark. The mechanism is simply too cumbersome for us to imagine that West can't easily dodge it, and the holding-the-priceless-paintings-in-front-of-himself bit is downright corny. Jim insists that he values his life above all else, even while risking it on such a silly, almost comical gambit. And Ryder is surprisingly lifeless in the villain role--he seems too good an actor to have turned in such an uninspiring performance. Maybe he was annoyed by the terrible dialogue ("symmetry," "perfection," "success"), at having to suffer what may be the series' worst villain speeches. And, though plausibility is normally not a concern in any WWW outing, this one had me asking questions all the way. Chief among them: How or why could someone as uncharismatic and unpleasant as Professor Horatio Bolt command to-the-death loyalty from his underlings? Surely, his followers could have found a more inspiring (or, at least, less grouchy) maniac to serve. When we have an amazingly vibrant and fun psychopath like Dr. Loveless, we don't hesitate to suspend disbelief. We don't wonder, for example, how it's possible for Miguelito to fill a room with scientifically impossible gadgets in the five moths since he last escaped prison. But here, we have to wonder about the dungeon-style basement in an art museum, how all the henchmen were recruited in the first place ("Wanted: People willing to die for a drab and cranky con artist"), how it can be so easy to more or less take over a state (or its economy, at least), and why the heck Bolt didn't simply shoot Jim. Giant wooden arrows are more efficient? Or how the actor hired to impersonate the governor happened to have the same voice. When this show works, we don't worry about such things. And something has gone painfully wrong when the episode's flunkey (Henry Beckman) gives a far more compelling and entertaining show than the bad guy.