by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
When Charles came home after a
long work shift we stayed awake long enough to watch a rather intriguing but
ultimately unsatisfying 1958 half-hour TV movie called Counterspy, a pilot episode for a show that ultimately didn’t become
a series — and one can see why. It begins with one of those sententious Cold
War-era forewords saying that with the enemies of the U.S. and freedom itself
ever vigilant, our ability to survive as a free and democratic nation-state
depended on the heroic efforts of the U.S. Counterspy Intelligence Service (or
whatever it was called in the movie, scripted by Jack Anson Finke and directed
by the usually reliable Ralph Francis Murphy), and in particular on two agents
thereof: David Harding (Brad Megowan) and Keller (Brad Johnson). This story
takes place in England and begins at the beach resort town of Brighton
(probably best known to U.S. moviegoers as the locale for the Fred
Astaire-Ginger Rogers film The Gay Divorcée), where a dead man in a deep-sea diving suit washes up on
the beach (and none of the other beachgoers seem to notice). The rest of the
episode is a flashback detailing how that happened: a Russian naval vessel
captained by Admiral Gilhs (Gerald Milton, whose idea of a Russian accent is as
shaky as writer Finke’s idea of a Russian name) manages to make it into
Portsmouth harbor without the usual assistance of the on-site local pilot.
Thinking the Russians have developed some technological breakthrough which
allows them to navigate without local assistance — which they have; on board is
Dr. Jasny (John Mylong from the cast of Robot Monster, whose idea of a “Russian” accent is to use the “German”
one that probably got him jobs as World War II villains), who’s invented a
system using TV cameras to give a ship’s captain multiple images of where he is
and where he’s going. Essentially he’s invented GPS about four decades early.
Our counterspies hire an Irish diver from World War II, Terrence “Finnie” Finn
(Robert McQueeney), who’s bitter about how he was simply dismissed from the
British navy after the war and who’s living in poverty with his wife Nora
(Phyllis Stanley), to descend in the Russian ship’s vicinity with a camera and
photograph the bottom of its hull to try to figure out its navigational secrets
— only on the day Finn is supposed to do his dive, Gilhs invites a group of
diplomats to tour his ship and the counterspies want to call off the dive, but
they fail to get to Finn in time (the suspense editing of Finn going under just before he can get the order countermanding the dive is the
most effective part of Murphy’s direction), and so Keller has to sneak on board
the ship, knock out a Russian diver, take his place and fight off the other
Russian diver to save Finn’s life. The plot works out in some of the most
boring underwater footage ever filmed, and of course it ends the way you think
it will: Keller rescues Finn and the dead diver who washed up at Brighton (ya
remember the dead diver who washed up at Brighton?) is actually the Russian whom Keller killed to save
Finn’s life. At the end there’s a tag scene in which Keller — or is it Harding?
Frankly I can’t remember which one was which — announces that next week’s
episode (of course there never was a
next week’s episode, just this one) will be about the counterspies foiling an
attempt by Russian agents to steal America’s secret formula for rocket fuel.
This could have been a nice little vest-pocket suspense thriller except it has
little suspense and virtually no thrills; it doesn’t deserve the ridicule an
archive.org reviewer heaped upon it but it’s not exactly thrill-a-minute stuff
either, and all those murky (in more ways than one) shots of divers filmed at
Silver Springs, Florida (for a while I was wondering if they actually shot in
Britain to take advantage of frozen funds, but no-o-o-o-o) look pretty much the same and get awfully dull after a
while.
