A routine episode, notable for having name talent in the cast for a change: veteran character actor Paul Cavanagh as a judge who's been targeted for revenge by both an escaped con and his helper , both of whom have a serious grudge against the good judge. It's a dull role, played boringly and briefly by Paul approaching the end of his lengthy career that dated back to the end of the Silent Era.
Having watched the show frequently in first-run when I was a kid, it''s dismaying to watch it again 65 years later (ouch!) on MeTV and see how flat and uninteresting the presentation is. All creativity and style has been stripped away from filmmaking so that purely functional, grinding out 25 minutes of footage to set up and wrap up a crime a week. It looks just like any old B-movie of the '40s and '50s, but without any of the colorful characters and acting that made Elisha Cook Junior and hundreds of other memorable players stand out. It's just dullness separated by commercial breaks, plus Brod spitting out his dialogue so fast it's barely intelligible at times.
Many immigrants to America will remark that they learned English by watching our tv shows, so my mind wandered to ponder how listening to Crawford would have seriously stymied such self-education.
Having watched the show frequently in first-run when I was a kid, it''s dismaying to watch it again 65 years later (ouch!) on MeTV and see how flat and uninteresting the presentation is. All creativity and style has been stripped away from filmmaking so that purely functional, grinding out 25 minutes of footage to set up and wrap up a crime a week. It looks just like any old B-movie of the '40s and '50s, but without any of the colorful characters and acting that made Elisha Cook Junior and hundreds of other memorable players stand out. It's just dullness separated by commercial breaks, plus Brod spitting out his dialogue so fast it's barely intelligible at times.
Many immigrants to America will remark that they learned English by watching our tv shows, so my mind wandered to ponder how listening to Crawford would have seriously stymied such self-education.
