No doubt that this offbeat Naked City segment is entertaining in a nearly campy way, but I felt quite often while watching that it was a leg-pull. As far as a police procedural it's ridiculous, thanks to series story supervisor Howard Rodman's first case of writing an episode for the show.
Highlight is the supporting part for Walter Matthau, not yet a movie star but presenting here a full-blown version of the indelible, fully-realized characters he would create after Billy Wilder promoted him to leading roles. He plays a cigar stogie-sporting, Rolls -Royce-owning self-made rich guy regularly buying his trophy wife Elizabeth Allen expensive jewelry. Their scenes together provide comic relief, but in Rodman's overly gimmicky script it turns out that it is Elizabeth rather than Matthau who figures in the crime story we're watching unfold.
Rodman's biggest writing mistake (odd for a story supervisor to make) is to give the audience lots of crucial information that our intrepid cops McMahon and Burke are not privy to, in order to let us in on the caper, while withholding key elements which it turns out are never explained. To put it bluntly, on a week when ace writer Silliphant was not involved, Rodman is the man who needed a supervisor to blue pencil his work.
The convoluted show is at its center a diamond robbery, heavily indebted to Jules Dassin's never-equaled classic 1955 French feature "Rififi". That familiar character actor Michael Conrad gets little to no dialogue, but plays a central role as chauffeur for segment's heavy Luther Adler (who unfortunately overacts his role as if auditioning for a Bond movie villain two years before the Ian Fleming franchise began) who doubles as a cat burglar readying to steal the world's largest (raw) diamond.
Plot thickens with Allen turning out to be a golddigger (to mix metaphors) working with a disgraced diamond cutter to have copies of all her jewelry from Matthau made and each substituted for the real thing, as they fence the actual gems and pocket the money. She's correct in thinking that someday her sugardaddy will drop her like a hot potato and she'll need a nest egg.
That diamond cutter happens to have wanted to cut the world's biggest diamond since 1946 (!) and he gets his wish via thief Adler at the end of the show in a preposterous Z-movie climax. We get to see Burke and even his boss McMahon (!) gun down the bad guys in the shootout just as the diamond gets illegally cut!
Weirdest element of this stew or gumbo of a show was the dry run safecracking of the jewelry store's vault by Conrad with a sci-fi movie theremin sound effect as the bad guys used sci-fi gadgetry to speed up a clock and defeat the vault's time lock -that eerie sound plus Matthau make this stinker memorable.
Highlight is the supporting part for Walter Matthau, not yet a movie star but presenting here a full-blown version of the indelible, fully-realized characters he would create after Billy Wilder promoted him to leading roles. He plays a cigar stogie-sporting, Rolls -Royce-owning self-made rich guy regularly buying his trophy wife Elizabeth Allen expensive jewelry. Their scenes together provide comic relief, but in Rodman's overly gimmicky script it turns out that it is Elizabeth rather than Matthau who figures in the crime story we're watching unfold.
Rodman's biggest writing mistake (odd for a story supervisor to make) is to give the audience lots of crucial information that our intrepid cops McMahon and Burke are not privy to, in order to let us in on the caper, while withholding key elements which it turns out are never explained. To put it bluntly, on a week when ace writer Silliphant was not involved, Rodman is the man who needed a supervisor to blue pencil his work.
The convoluted show is at its center a diamond robbery, heavily indebted to Jules Dassin's never-equaled classic 1955 French feature "Rififi". That familiar character actor Michael Conrad gets little to no dialogue, but plays a central role as chauffeur for segment's heavy Luther Adler (who unfortunately overacts his role as if auditioning for a Bond movie villain two years before the Ian Fleming franchise began) who doubles as a cat burglar readying to steal the world's largest (raw) diamond.
Plot thickens with Allen turning out to be a golddigger (to mix metaphors) working with a disgraced diamond cutter to have copies of all her jewelry from Matthau made and each substituted for the real thing, as they fence the actual gems and pocket the money. She's correct in thinking that someday her sugardaddy will drop her like a hot potato and she'll need a nest egg.
That diamond cutter happens to have wanted to cut the world's biggest diamond since 1946 (!) and he gets his wish via thief Adler at the end of the show in a preposterous Z-movie climax. We get to see Burke and even his boss McMahon (!) gun down the bad guys in the shootout just as the diamond gets illegally cut!
Weirdest element of this stew or gumbo of a show was the dry run safecracking of the jewelry store's vault by Conrad with a sci-fi movie theremin sound effect as the bad guys used sci-fi gadgetry to speed up a clock and defeat the vault's time lock -that eerie sound plus Matthau make this stinker memorable.
