Taos New Mexico Deputy Marshal Sam McCloud, after capturing a murder trial witness who fled a subpoena, inexplicably gets the job of extraditing him back to New York City, a job that by all rights should have been assigned to a NYC police officer! On arrival, he's gassed, knocked unconscious and left handcuffed to the side of a road on Staten Island, while the witness is kidnapped to prevent him giving testimony at a retrial for a man accused of murdering a beauty pageant contestent. Aside from that already sounding more complicated than it should be, if any of this sounds familiar, it should. SOMEONE at Universal Television decided to blatently RIP OFF the premise of the 1968 Clint Eastwood movie, COOGAN'S BLUFF, which itself started life as an unsold TV pilot. It was so blatent, that writer Herman Miller brought on a lawsuit over it, won, and had his name attached to the resulting series, despite never working on it. But that's just for starters.
What we have here is one of the most overly-talky, dense, impenetrable and badly-told murder mysteries I have ever seen in my whole life of watching these kind of films. Much of the murder mystery is described from the point of view of an already-published non-fiction novel, "Who Killed Miss United States?", and the details don't even begin to come out until a full 37 miniutes into this overlong, painfully padded-out mess. (I clocked it; at 1:37:45, it's clearly at least 25 minutes too long, having been done as a two-hour TV-movie rather than the by-then-popular 90-minute format.)
The tragic thing is, I consider myself the world's biggest McCLOUD fan! Because of the networks' habit at the time of running pilots separate, before a show was sold, I never even saw this until 1978, a year after the show ended. When I did, I was shocked-- totally aghast-- at how BAD it was. Since that time, I have always ranked it as the single WORST episode of the series. I can still remember, the first time I watched it, when it got to the scene where the police pick Sam up, still in handcuffs, and drive across the bridge into the city, thinking to myself, "This? THIS is how McCloud first arrived in Manhattan? REALLY???" I couldn't believe what I was watching.
COOGAN'S BLUFF is one seriously-flawed film. But at least it's NOT AS BAD as this thing!
One thing that most TV series that have been based on, inspired by or ripped off from hit movies tend to have in common: the TV counterparts of the characters are ALWAYS far more likable. And that is certainly true here. Dennis Weaver is "Sam McCloud", who, as a southwestern cop, is not only smarter than most, he's also far more polite than most. He reminds me of a western version of Charlie Chan, or Hercule Poirot, when it comes to being so warm, friendly, ingratiating, but also such a deep intellect, often utilizing lateral thinking, that those around him can barely keep up with his unexpected lines of reasoning. "Walt Coogan" HE AIN'T! Having lost his prisoner, McCloud is determined to rectify that, and the deeper he goes, the more personal it gets for him, especially when, 3/4ths of the way in, the witness he ALMOST got back is murdered to keep him quiet.
Diana Muldaur is "Chris Caughlin" ("Christopher" on her book covers, "Christine" in private), cousin of the Police Commissioner whose connection has given her too much arrogance and smugness for her own good. It takes awhile and some substantial effort to convince McCloud that she really does mean well, especially when he starts off suspecting SHE might be behind the kidnapping, in order to prevent her book sales from going down. Over the course of the story, she clearly warms up, and you can see it really hurts her when she realizes Sam has hatched a dangerous scheme to make himself a target of the REAL murderer.
Mark Richman is "Chief Of Detectives Peter B. Clifford", a stiff, stuffy, by-the-book guy who would prefer McCloud be out of his hair, but by mid-story one can see hints that he kind of admires the guy-- though he'd never want to admit it. Unfortunately, through either the writing, the directing, or his acting, Clifford is almost a non-entity in this film, and I wonder exactly why Richman didn't return for the series. Was he unavailable-- uninterested-- or was he just fired in favor of his FAR-BETTER replacement, J. D. Cannon? Richman had MUCH better luck as a regular on the series LONGSTREET, with James Franciscus!
Terry Carter is "Sgt. Joe Broadhurst", well-dressed, well-spoken, perennial nice guy, who takes an instant liking to Sam, and even moreso when Sam returns the sentiment. At one point Joe says, "Sometimes a fish out of water can see something we city boys might take for granted." Carter's been one of my favorite actors since I first got hooked on this show, and I've long joked that he was basically playing the same character (under a different name, and with a promotion in rank) when he was on BATTLESTAR GALACTICA.
Craig Stevens is defense attourney "Whitman", and while the story structure is completely different, anyone who's a regular viewer of COLUMBO might be suspicious of him from the moment he shows up, always seems to be around, asking questions and "trying to be helpful". Yeah, as a matter of fact, he WAS behind the kidnapping, and the reasoning behind it can give you a headache. This really is the kind of film that Raymond Chandler might have loved-- where the emphasis is all on mood, character and atmosphere, but trying to make sense of the plot can make you want to kill the writers.
Other familiar faces pop up, including Raul Julia as Priest Father Nieves, who senses McCloud really believes the convicted man is innocent; Shelly Novack as "James Waldron", the runaway witness; Albert Popwell as a prison guard (the ONLY actor this film has in common with COOGAN'S BLUFF); Gregory Sierra as a member of a Puerto Rican community group; and Julie Newmar as a model who'd been a rival in the ill-fated beauty contest. Most are wasted here.
Something that somehow totally escaped my notice until I got my hands on the 2021 VEI DVD box set, was the guy in charge of this atrocity was Leslie Stevens-- the creator of THE OUTER LIMITS. On that show, his own scripts tended to be overly-tehnical and overly-wordy, while his best move was hiring Joe Stefano as chief writer & story editor. Stevens was also involved in both BUCK ROGERS IN THE 25TH CENTURY and BATTLESTAR GALACTICA (both times with Glen Larson), but I can't honestly say exactly what his contributions there were. WAS this horrific mess ALL his fault, or was he just someone Universal decided to hire to do their dirty work? One detail caught my eye: the very 1st OL episode I ever saw (at age 4) was "The Borderland"-- and the star of that episode was Mark Richman. That CAN'T be a coincidence!
The writers also leave me a bit baffled. The story was concocted by Stanford Whitmore. I know him mostly for no less than 4 1st-season episodes of THE FUGITIVE-- including the pilot! This ties in with the early sequence here of a police officer transporting and then losing a prisoner, as happened to Lt. Gerard and Dr. Richard Kimble! (I love spotting "connections" like that.)
The screenplay was written by Whitmore and a pair of all-time TV mystery LEGENDS-- Richard Levinson & William Link-- the creators of COLUMBO! Check out their resumes-- EVERYTHING they've ever done has been Agatha Christie-level BRILLIANT... except THIS thing. How on earth did 3 terrific writers like these guys manage a finished script THIS BAD? I guess that's a mystery that may never be solved.
The director was Richard A. Colla. When I realized that this was the same guy who also did the GALACTICA pilot-- and that I considered both were the WORST episodes in each series-- I looked further, and noticed the odd fact that Colla was repeatedly hired to direct an episode of many different series-- but only one, and never asked back. Did he have some kind of "connections" to get himself work, and overcome his lack of talent? I don't normally single someone out this badly, except each time I've seen this pilot, it's consistently gotten worse and WORSE the longer it goes on. And in this case, once again, the climax is even worse than everything that came before it. All the confusing talkiness was bad enough. Here, they replaced the high-speed bike chase in broad daylight with a chase on foot in almost total darkness-- and it's the hero who's running from a pair of killers. But it gets EVEN WORSE when the showdown is accompanied by a Salvation Army band doing Christmas music-- louder and louder-- with repeated, incessant cuts back to see mimes in whiteface performing to this sappy stuff.
By the end, I wanted to kill the producer, the writers, AND the director.
So then we have a tacked-on epilogue, in which McCloud discovers that his boss back in Taos has decided it would be a good idea to have McCloud "assigned" to the New York Police, to learn big-city police methods. WHAT? Okay, I saw that coming, after watching all 7 seasons of the show beforehand. But the way it was done here was just awkward, contrived... the only good moment was Chris offering to show Sam his "new territory". I don't remember Sam ever repeating the word "country!" over and over as he does here. I have to assume that was dropped when the series began.
Some guesses: during the 7 months between this and the next episode, Herman Miller had and won his lawsuit. Also, McCLOUD may have been made a 6-week try-out in the FOUR-IN-ONE anthology, because after this, NBC may not have been too confident about it as a regular series.
2 different print sources have the original title as "McCLOUD: WHO KILLED MISS U. S. A.?". It was changed to "McCLOUD: PORTRAIT OF A DEAD GIRL" for syndication, presumably to tie it in with the pilots for both Columbo and McMillan And Wife. The VEI box print has "McCLOUD"! The picture & sound on the DVD is CRYSTAL-CLEAR. That really helped this time around!
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