John Baer Movies

Elizabeth Ashley, whose guest-star turn as a pathetic alcoholic on the sixth-season Mission:Impossible episode "Encounter" won her the praise of critics and viewers alike, again tackles a difficult and demanding role in the seventh-season entry "The Question." This time, Ashley is cast as IMF agent Andrea, who poses as an operative of the "Federal Intelligence Service" to find out if alleged defector Nicholas Varsi (Gary Lockwood) is telling the truth to his Federal captors. George O'Hanlon, best known to TV fans as the voice of cartoon favorite George Jetson, appears as Captain Douglas. First broadcast on January 19, 1973, "The Question" was written by Stephen Kandel. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

In the top-rated 1964 episode "The Giant Jackrabbit," Granny mistook a kangaroo for a rabbit. In this fourth-season installment, Granny assumes that an ostrich is the oversized chicken that has been raiding her tomato patch. Reportedly, during filming of "The Big Chicken," actor Raymond Bailey (Mr. Drysdale) became impatient with the trained ostrich used in the show and at one point tried to punch the bird in the beak! The episode first aired on February 2, 1966. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

George Cukor directed this sanitized version of Irving Wallace's tawdry best-seller concerning a survey of the sexual habits of American women. Psychologist George C. Chapman (Andrew Duggan) arrives in a Los Angeles suburb with his assistant Paul Radford (Efrem Zimbalist Jr.) in tow. They are looking for volunteers for their sex survey, and four women raise their hands: Sarah Garnell (Shelley Winters) is a middle-aged woman who is having an affair with young theater director Fred Linden (Ray Danton); Teresa Harnish (Glynis Johns) is a happily married woman who becomes attracted to brawny football player Ed Kraski (Ty Hardin); Naomi Shields (Claire Bloom) is an alcoholic nymphomaniac who takes up with an unsavory jazz musician; and Kathleen Barclay (Jane Fonda) is a young widow who thinks she is frigid -- that is, until Radford makes her his personal project. ~ Paul Brenner, Rovi

A young woman on a business trip travels by train from L.A. to San Francisco and finds herself implicated in a murder in this crime drama. The trouble begins as she retires to her sleeping compartment and is knocked unconscious. The next day she wakes up beside the dead body of the woman she had been sharing it with. A police detective arrests her and escorts her off the train. She escapes and is picked up by a passing motorist. He takes her to her home where she discovers another corpse, a friend of hers who was an alcoholic writer. She was letting him stay at her apartment while she was gone. The distraught woman tells the motorist all she knows. She then admits that she is a former mental patient. The motorist becomes suspicious and takes the woman back to her boss, who denies that he sent her on the business trip. Trouble ensues until they learn that the boss was behind it all. The first corpse was his wife. He put the body beside the girl so that so she would be suspected of being a homicidal maniac. The boss kidnaps his hapless employee and takes her to the mountains where he plans to kill her and make it look like a suicide. Fortunately, the motorist trails them and saves the day. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi

The familiar rocks and rills of LA's Bronson Caverns are seen to good advantage in Night of the Blood Beast. The story begins when a manned space rocket develops trouble and plummets back to earth, apparently killing its occupant, Major John Corcoran (Michael Emmet). Unfortunately, Corcoran's body has become a breeding ground of extraterrestrial embryos, picked up while the rocket was in outer space. The tiny monsters grow and multiply, and before long Corcoran revives from the dead, literally impregnated by the alien beasts. After this promising and decidedly unorthodox buildup, the film goes downhill, settling for standard eek-eek shocks and a most unconvincing "blood beast", whose costume wouldn't have even passed muster at a Halloween party. Still, Night of the Blood Beast is at least half of a good, well-constructed horror flick. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

A soldier is expected to never question the actions of his commanding officer, but when a Marine sees his CO breaking the law, he finds himself facing a difficult dilemma in this provocative war drama. The trouble begins when the officer kills another soldier during a battle. The Marine who witnesses it wants to report it, but fears that the other superior officers will not believe him. As the battles rage on, the officer and the Marine are frequently paired; the tension between the two mounts. Things get really sticky when the CO marries the Marine's sister and the Marine falls for the slain man's widow. Just before the Marine files formal charges, the CO ends up dying in battle. It seems to be a heroic death. As the story ends, a general, preparing to award the officer a posthumous Medal of Honor, asks the Marine about him. The Marine cryptically quips, "Nobody knows anybody...." ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi

After several years of supporting parts, Victor McLaglen once more landed a leading role in Republic's City of Shadows. McLaglen plays Big Tim Channing, an ageing but powerful gangster who raises young newsboy Dan Mason as his own son. Upon reaching adulthood, Mason (John Baer) becomes a law student, with the covert (and illegal) help of Channing. Despite his checkered past, Mason opts for honesty when he falls in love with Fern Fellows (Kathleen Crowley). This decision ultimately spells the doom for Mason's mentor Big Tim. The all-character actor cast includes such familiar faces as Anthony Caruso, Paul Maxey, Frank Ferguson, Richard Travis, and Kay E. Kuter. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

In this western, a shotgun rider on a stagecoach must clear his reputation after some outlaws accuse him of being a crook. Gunplay ensues. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi

Terry And The Pirates was a short-lived television series based on the long-running comic strip created by Milton Caniff. The daily strip, starting in the 1930s, initially depicted a boy's adventures in the Orient in search of a lost gold mine, and advanced as time went on to show the young hero, Terry Lee, growing up and joining the US Army Air Force during the Second World War. The TV series picks up more or less where the comic strip was in 1946-47, in post-World War II China -- though filmed in 1953, the show was clearly set in the period between the end of the war and the takeover of the country by Mao's forces in 1949. John Baer played ex-USAAF Colonel Terry Lee, a veteran with years behind him in China, now flying cargo and passenger runs for Air Cathay, a shoestring airline operation run by the somewhat larcenous Chopstick Joe (Jack Reitzen). Terry's sidekick is his co-pilot, Charles W. Charles (aka Hotshot Charlie) (William Tracy), also ex-USAAF. The two pilots have a knack for finding trouble, whether it concerns the machinations of the nefarious Dragon Lady (Gloria Saunders) or such equally duplicitous recurring characters as Burma (andra Spence), a blonde singer-turned-adventuress with a larcenous streak.

The series did have its interesting wrinkles. Baer's portrayal of Terry Lee retained something of the wide-eyed, bushy-tailed nature of the original comic strip character, whereas Tracy's Hotshot Charlie was more of a knowing cynic, and also much more likely to get into trouble because of some foolhardiness or other, usually in pursuit of a woman. And while Chopstick Joe -- portrayed by Jack Reitzen for all but one episode (in which, according to the credits, Jack Kruschen took over the part) -- was depicted as not far from dishonest and even larcenous, the makers were careful to put him on the side of the angels at the end of the day. He might try to grab his share of a dirty business deal, but drew the line at kidnapping, doping (an amazing lapse in the censors' vigilence where drugs were concerned), and otherwise harming people in any lasting way. Similarly, the Dragon Lady, though cunning and often untrustworthy, was depicted as having some boundaries -- in one key episode, she takes offense at Terry Lee's accusation that she is involved in a blackmail and smuggling racket involving badly needed medical supplies, saying that she has no problem with running lotteries and other criminal enterprises, but would not sell people phony or diluted serum. And beautiful blond Burma, a somewhat fallen woman, was shown as trying with limited success to stay on the side of good, especially when the bad guys turn to crimes such as kidnapping and murder.

The Terry And The Pirates comic strip originated in 1934, and was ultimately one of the longest running adventure strips of the mid-twentieth century. There was a radio show, on which William Tracy (this series' Hotshot Charlie) played Terry Lee, and there had also been a movie serial in 1940 (also starring Tracy) produced by Columbia Pictures. [Though Tracy, who continued to play quasi-juvenile roles in his twenties -- a la William Benedict, Huntz Hall et al -- was right for the part of the younger, pre-World War II Terry in the serial, and had no problems voicing the character on radio, his stocky build wasn't right for what the producers were looking for in a television hero when the series went into production].

The TV series was a production of Dougfair, a company owned by Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and produced by Don W. Sharpe, who went on to produce feature films, but Terry And The Pirates never fared as well on television as the comic strip had in newspapers. Partly, this seems to have been a matter of unfulfilled expectations -- the show's title sequence, depicting Terry and Hotshot flying into danger in a DC-3, set to a fierce and rousing musical accompaniment, promised a lot of action; and the show did deliver on some of that with stories depicting robbery, kidnappings, murder, natural disasters, and all manner of other crises. But the emaciated production, characterized by the most threadbare of sets and the one-take nature of the action, without the high-quality stuntwork to back it up, ultimately disappointed audiences. This is especially true when the series is seen in the twenty-first century -- Terry And the Pirates was one of the earlier action/adventure shows to be shot on film, going into production perhaps a year after such programs as the Adventures of Superman -- one of the true pioneers of high-quality filmed television -- and using some of the same stock music, especially in the title sequences; but where the Superman series had mostly impeccable, bracing, exhilerating stunt work (and the services of top action directors Thomas Carr and Lee Sholem), Terry And The Pirates had lesser hands at the helm, and, seemingly, a tighter and hastier shooting schedule to judge from the number of obvious first-takes and badly rehearsed moments that made it through to the public. Counter-balancing those flaws, since the 1970s, is the inherent nostalgia factor of the series -- for some people, the combination of two heroes in a post-war Chinese setting, a DC-3 in flight, and lots of greedy characters with guns, offers plenty of appeal, especially in black-and-white. The accompanying difficulty there is that, because of the series' being neglected for decades, most (if not all) of its 18 episodes are out-of-copyright and available in inexpensive public domain DVD editions; but none of these are of very high quality, as they're made from circulating 16mm prints of poor quality (the Douglas Fairbanks Jr. estate may well hold proper negatives). Another, though more minor problem, may have been the uneven tone of the series -- it offered plots involving violence and intrigue, yet was clearly aimed at younger viewers, which is a difficult line to tread (as the producers of the Superman series found out quickly, eliminating most of the violence and ominous elements from the production); and even in the relatively innocent days of 1953, any adults watching were likely put off, in an odd way, by the manner in which Baer, Tracy, and Reitzen finished each episode by stepping out of character, facing the camera, and inviting the viewer to tune in the following week to Terry And The Pirates. ~ Bruce Eder, Rovi

This colorful musical comedy was obviously inspired by the success of Broadway's South Pacific. Army Captain Bill Willoby (William Lundigan) is ordered to make sure that his men do not fraternize with the girls at a South Sea island base. His mission is forgotten when he himself falls in love with Diana Forrester (Jane Greer), the daughter of a local missionary. The fun begins when a native girl (Mitzi Gaynor) is offered to the captain as a goodwill gift by island chieftain Jilouili(!) Naturally, there's a major breakdown in protocol, quite similar to the one found in John Patrick's 1954 Broadway hit Teahouse of the August Moon. Featured in the cast as a woman-hungry lieutenant is Jack Paar, which is why this film got so much TV play in the 1960s. The incidental songs in Down Among the Sheltering Palms were written by Harold Arlen and Ralph Blane. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

About Face is a musicalized remake of the old stage and film comedy Brother Rat. The basic story remains the same, as military-school cadet Boff Roberts (Eddie Bracken) tries to keep his forbidden marriage to Alice Wheatley (Phyllis Kirk) a secret. Meanwhile, Boff's roommates Tony Williams (Gordon MacRae) and Dave Crouse (Dick Wesson) do their best to woo and win lovely Betty Long (Virginia Gibson) and Lorna Carter (Ailene Stanley Jr.). Cliff Ferre co-stars as the much-hated Lt. Jones, who turns out to be an accomplished tap-dancer in the film's closing sequence (but that's only after he's been "humanized" when his hair is dyed blue!) Future Cabaret star Joel Grey has a few funny moments as a put-upon "plebe." ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

A valuable supply of radium is stolen from the United States Medical Corps in Germany. The authorities think they've got the culprit dead to rights--but he has an airtight alibi. It is up to Superman (George Reeves) to figure out that the radium was swiped by a clever pair of twins (both played by Howland Chamberlain)--simply knowing this does not wrap up the case. In addition to a cameo appearance by future Mickey Mouse Club host Jimmy Dodd, this episode also boasts the spectacle of ubiquitious Superman bit player Stephen Carr) (the brother of director Thomas Carr) cavorting about in drag! ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi