Montgomery Pittman Movies

Written by Charles Beaumont with the uncredited assistance of OCee Ritch), this compact little Twilight Zone offering gets under way as a pair of gangsters dump a corpse into a Bowery alley. Emerging from the shadows, shabby derelict Nate Bledsoe (Warren Stevens) steals the dead man's custom-made shoes -- and suddenly acquires the dead man's custom-made personality, arrogant swagger and all. "Dead Man's Shoes" made its CBS network premiere on January 19, 1962. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Seeking shelter from a particularly brutal Montana winter, Beau finds himself in a cave which is being used as a bank robbers' hideout. Overhearing the gang planning another heist, Beau realizes that his life isn't worth a plug nickel if he's found out. Thus, he poses as the notorious outlaw Red Dog, and agrees to accompany the outlaws on their next caper--all the while trying to work out a strategy to escape the crooks and save the cash. The ingenue on this occasion is played by Sherry Jackson, the daughter-in-law of scriptwriter Montgomery Pittman; also in the cast is Mike Road, who would later show up in the recurring Maverick role of con artist Pearly Gates, and even later supplied the voice of Race Bannon on the animated TV series Jonny Quest. This episode marks the final appearance of Roger Moore as Beau Maverick. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Season Three of Twilight Zone got off to a flying start with this episode, written and directed by Montgomery Pittman. Some five years after a devastating war that wiped out virtually all mankind, a pair of surviving soldiers from opposing armies confront each other in the deserted streets of a bombed-out city. Only the male soldier, played by Charles Bronson, has any dialogue; the female soldier, played by Elizabeth Montgomery, prefers to do her "talking" with a high-powered rifle. While the episode's ending is inevitable, the buildup to that ending takes a variety of unexpected twists and turns. Filmed on the old Hal Roach Studios backlot, "Two" originally aired September 15, 1961. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Maverick launches its third season with one of the series' best and most fondly remembered episodes, in which James Garner essays the dual role of frontier gambler Bret Maverick and his own, grey-haired "Pappy", Beau Maverick. Having long relied upon the sage advice of their beloved Pappy--which can be boiled down to "get rich quick, love 'em and leave 'em, and steer clear of trouble"--Bret and his brother Bart (Jack Kelly) are shocked to learn that the 60-something senior Maverick has ignored his own advice about women and gotten himself engaged to an 18-year-old New Orleans belle, Josephine St. Cloud (Kaye Elhardt). It turns out that Pappy is being forced into this union by Josephine's disreputable father Rene St. Cloud (Henry Daniell), who has arranged the marriage for purely financial reasons...and who intends to have Pappy bumped off in a duel just after the engagement is announced. To extricate his paternal unit from this dilemma, Bret cooks up a swindle requiring him to pose as a sharpster named Dandy Jim. A pre-stardom Troy Donahue is cast as Josephine's true love Dan Jamison, while "Batman" himself, Adam West, shows up in an unsympathetic role. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Riding into a small town, Bret (James Garner) and Bart (Jack Kelly) are amused when the locals mistake them for the notorious gunfighters Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday. But it's a bit less amusing when gorgeous Doll Hayes (Joi Lansing) begins cozying up to the local sheriff (Frank Ferguson) as a diversion so that her cohorts can rob the town bank. To prevent this, the Mavericks decide to exploit their resemblance to Earp and Holliday to the hilt, A cute closing gag tops this final episode of Maverick's first season. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In this curious blend of Western and detective melodrama, Jock Mahoney plays a frontier gumshoe named Hogan. When an old prospector is murdered, Hogan takes on the assignment of finding the four heirs to the prospector's fortune. Briefly sidetracked by a romance with Mary Kingman (played by Kim Hunter in a rare Western appearance), Hogan not only finds the heirs but also the killers -- and in at least one case, heir and killer are one and the same. Money, Women and Guns was produced by Howie Horwitz, who, like screenwriter Montgomery Pittman, would go on to even bigger things in the TV industry. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Tarzan and the Lost Safari is the first MGM-released Tarzan picture since 1942, and the first of the series to be lensed in color. Gordon Scott plays the Lord of the Jungle, herein guiding a group of high-society types through the jungle after their plane has crashed. Since there's no Jane in the film, old Tarz is permitted to extend every courtesy to heroines Gamage Dean (Yolande Donlan) and Diana Penrod (Betta St. John). The villain of the piece is white hunter Tusker Hawkins (Robert Beatty), who intends to turn over two of the safari members to tribal chief Ogonooro (Orlando Martins) in exchange for a fortune in ivory. Unlike earlier Tarzan epics, Tarzan and the Lost Safari was lensed in its entirety in Africa. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Loosely based on the true story of Lieutenant Colonel Peter Ortiz, this mystery centers on an American WW II veteran who heroically served as both an officer and a member of the French Foreign Legionnaire. During the war he had been instrumental in assisting in the French Resistance. With such a sterling war record--his exploits are revealed via flashback-- it is therefore a great shock when he is charged with the murder of a Resistance leader. It does not help that the accused lieutenant is thought dead following a key mission and is not around to clear his sullied name. During the trial, several dubious witnesses tell their version of the tale. A former communist spy presents the most conclusive "proof" that the lieutenant killed the Resistance leader. Fortunately, the lieutenant is not dead and bursts in at the crucial moment to clear his name and point out which of the witnesses is the real killer. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

Humphrey Bogart plays Martin Ferguson, a prosecutor about to put Albert Mendoza (Everett Sloane), the head of a murder-for-hire ring, on trial. But the night before the trial, his key witness, Joe Rico (Ted de Corsia), dies in a fall out of the window of the room in which he's been guarded, part of an abortive escape attempt to keep from testifying. His case in shambles, Ferguson and detective Captain Nelson (Roy Roberts) try to piece the entire four-year investigation back together from square one, trying to find something that might give them another way to prosecute Mendoza. The main body of the movie is told in flashback, starting when a small-time hood named Duke Malloy (Michael Tolan, then billed as Lawrence Tolan) walks into a police station to turn himself in for killing his girlfriend -- and says that someone made him kill her. He babbles to the bewildered detectives about "hits" and "contracts" and men nicknamed Philadelphia, Big Babe, and Smiley. The body isn't found, but they arrest Malloy, who hangs himself in his cell. That dead end leads, almost by accident, to Philadelphia Tom Zaca (Jack Lambert), an asylum inmate who has to be put under sedation at the mention of Malloy's name. They find another suspect's body burning in his building's incinerator, and then Big Babe Lazick (Zero Mostel), a two-bit hood, hiding in a church in mortal fear of his life. He begins weaving a tale of a murder-by-contract ring and its head operator, Joe Rico, of a murder contract that Duke Malloy never filled on a girl who had to change her name, of mistaken identity and the murder of the girl's cab-driver father, and the connection between that and a murder that they both witnessed eight years earlier. In the midst of all of those interlocking stories (spread across ten years), there's something Ferguson missed -- when he had Rico to testify -- that he has to sort out from the reams of testimony and evidence, and he has to figure it out before Mendoza does, or lose the last witness he has. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide