User Reviews

For what was nominally supposed to be a suspenseful mystery, I almost cracked up when thug Nick Fisher (Robert Carricart) came out with that 'hamburger' line in my summary above. The bad guys were roughing up Burt Lewis (Jack Carson) and his wife Midge (Nan Leslie), and that just kind of broke up the mood of the moment for me.

So when all was said and done, this was like an episode of 'Seinfeld' - nothing actually happened. Lewis, by virtue of a two year blackout due to his binge drinking, couldn't get a grip on who he was after finding a note in the possession of a hit-man sent to rub him out. Talk about being dealt a bad hand, it was revealed in the story that his first wife and child died in a car crash, and now it looks like another nightmare scenario is about to be played out.

But let me get this straight. The Bill Logan (get the initials - BL?) everyone was on the lookout for was the husband of the Pelican Bar owner and died three years earlier. Why did these guys wait so long for anyway? Seven hundred grand would have been a lot of cash back in the Sixties for anyone to be taking their sweet old time about it. I don't know, maybe I'm missing something here, but this turned out to be one Thriller that wasn't.

****SPOILERS**** Whoever this guy Bill Logan is he did something that the mob is out to knock him off and knock him off in the most painful way possible. It's ex-con and now recovering alcoholic Burt Lewis', Jack Carson, great misfortune to be mistaken for Logan that put his as well as his wife's Midge, Nan Leslie, and infant daughter's lives in jeopardy. This all started when this stranger from out of town George Adams, who's part was so difficult that it took two actor Steve Darrell & Sol Gross to play him him, passed out at the Paradise Motel and sent to a nearby clinic for medical treatment. It's there where Burt, in his chartered boat, brought Adams and found a note on him saying that he, Burt Lewis, is really Bill Logan!

Burt still suffering black outs because of his alcoholism has no idea who this Bill Logan is or if in fact he's really him. That has Burt end up getting worked over by the mobsters who in fact knew who Logan and looked like in them trying to find out if Burt knows where Logan is at this very moment. During that time Adams and fellow alcoholic Charlie Pringle, Chubby Johnson, end up getting killed or murdered by someone who's out to keep Logan's whereabouts secret as well as frame Burt for their deaths!

****SPOILERS**** Burt who by now has been together with his wife and child put through the ringer by the mobsters sent to find Bill Logan finally finds out who this Logan guy is from a photo provided to him by Paul Hawkins, Paul Newland. Hawkins who like almost everyone else in town has it in from Logan in him being responsible for his's son's, Roy, murder! It's then that the local police, with Burt's help, get the drop on the mobsters looking for Logan and end up whacking them instead of them whacking Logan. As we soon find out all that Burt really wanted to know, besides if he is or is not Bill Logan, is if had anything to do with Logan or his, the big secret in this "Thriller" episode, secret drug trafficking operation. And the answer he got, from Logan's old lady, was happily no he didn't! He was either too honest or too stupid, or both, to be part of it.

This starts off very promising with alcoholics anonymous sponsor Jack Carson finding himself drawn back to his past of black-outs and forgotten past as he begins to wonder about all of this events he's forgotten, making him wonder if he was somehow involved in organized crime. Wife Nan Leslie and assistant Jeanne Cooper try to aide him in finding the truth out about himself, especially after one of the people he's trying to help go sober is killed while in rehab.

The road to recovery wasn't even as twisted as this messed up script that gives good material for the individual performers to sink their teeth into but unfortunately rings a complete false note as an entire episode. It's trying too hard once again to be intelligent, and unfortunately that just makes this episode very pretentious and messy.

It's always good to see the young Jeanne Cooper before she became one of daytime's most popular matriarchs, and Charles McGraw is excellent as a raspy-voiced detective. But as evidenced by the episodes surrounding this, "Thriller" as it reached the first half of its first season wasn't really doing very well with quality complex episodes, even though it had some top-notch actors, writers and directors. The problem here is that a tries to put too much into a 50-minute episode and it's too much convoluted detail to really be convincingly set up and wrapped up.