This episode of Aaron Spelling's "Charlie's Angels", only the tenth show of the program's first season, already knew how to exploit Farrah Fawcett-Majors' appeal to budding male (and female) teenagers: put her on a skateboard and have her roll for her life! The Angels are assigned to the case of a missing man, an antiques dealer and sometime-mama's boy, who was also the unwitting victim of a prostitution/robbery racket. All three of our girls get a chance to shine here: Jaclyn Smith gently shakes down a bartender for vital info (just after ordering tequila with lime salt!); Kate Jackson climbs over a barbed-wire fence and into an industrial yard, only to be taken hostage by the two goons who pull off the robbery schemes; and Farrah, well, she aids in the nabbing of a prized racehorse and then outruns the nutcracker-wielding villain on her trusty skateboard. Sure, it's '70s kitsch, and not without flaws (the biggest lapse comes when Jill and Sabrina pick up the racehorse, with the horse's maniacal owner apparently nowhere in sight; they return to the office and call him, and he's right there on the property!). Still, the dialogue is sometimes fun (Farrah to prostie Laurette Spang: "Your name isn't Tracy. It rhymes with Stacy and Macy and all those other JIVE names hookers pick up!"). The repartee between the Angels ultimately holds this episode (and dozens of others) together, and when Bosley gets involved it's usually a hoot.
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The Angels always deliver an entertaining hour, and this episode is another strong entry in the canon. The plot initially involves a missing antiques dealer, but upon investigation the plot mushrooms to include a prostitution and robbery racket, a prize race horse, smuggling and syndicate-style cold-blooded murder.
Two especially enjoyable characters introduced early on were Cooley and Mumford as the burglars. They had an enjoyable repartee and I hoped to see more of them throughout the episode, but when they did reappear it was only to be viciously murdered gangland style by Mafia hit-man Ernesto. He even states the only reason he didn't murder Sabtrina was because he wasn't paid to kill her.
Sabrina is usually considered the "smart one," but in this episode she is "dumb and sloppy," the very words she used to describe Cooley and Mumford. Outside the warehouse, she radios Bosley, Jill and Kelly to give her location. She states the road she's on, but the transmission cracks up before she can give the cross street, and instead of waiting for a "roger" or some response from the others, she puts her radio away and rushes into the burglars' warehouse, where she is soon captured, bound and blindfolded. What was especially frustrating about her blunder was that it cost Cooley and Mumford their lives and prevented the capture of Ernesto and resolution of the case. Even more chilling, Sabrina shows absolutely no remorse or regret over the deaths that happened right behind her.
An iconic event from this episode is the infamous pursuit of Jill on a skateboard by a killer in an ice cream truck. For absolute ridiculousness, it ranks right up there with Lynda Carter's similar skateboard ride on WONDER WOMAN a couple years later. Actually, the same stuntman seems to have done the heavy lifting in both scenes, as is much more obvious on DVD than it was when first broadcast.
There wasn't even a compelling reason for the chase--Ernesto played fair and gave Jill the diamonds, and she supposedly gave him the whereabouts of the kidnapped racehorse Khaki. He wasn't making any hostile moves, so why did she kick over the trash can and run?
Upon the safe return of Clifton, Bosley asks him what his mother would think, but Clifton's mother Maggie is an old eccentric I doubt anyone would want for a mother. First, she shows very little real concern for her son's safety when the Angels interview her, preferring to tell tall tales of her time with Harry S. Truman. Then she takes a very cavalier attitude when Sabrina's breaks it to her that Clifton is a client of prostitutes (maybe whatever two consenting adults do is okay by Maggie, but the law states otherwise when one is soliciting hookers, high-priced or otherwise). And when at the end it looks like Clifton will be going to the clink for diamond smuggling, she is nonplussed, drinking her champagne and flippantly saying he'll learn a lesson. Ma Barker had more compassion for her boys than Maggie does for Clifton.
One especially despicable character who never got her comeuppance is Tracy the prostitute who stole the heart of the hapless and lonely antiques dealer (he keeps her picture on his nightstand and lavishes expensive gifts upon her). She heartlessly kept Clifton occupied while Cooley and Mumford robbed his shop, taking the ceramic frog on a nostalgic whim for Andy Devine's 1950s television show. Had they left that frog, none of this would have even happened. I liked that touch, how one small, seemingly insignificant thing sparks an avalanche of events.
Tracy was played by Laurette Spang, just a couple years before landing her best-known role as Cassiopeia on BATTLESTAR GALACTICA. She's beautiful, but lacking the heart of gold an amoral Hollywood likes to give its bad girls (though Bosley does note she's a UCLA Art History student with a 3.4 GPA). I liked the scene where she and Jill dish on the prostitution business in the powder room, Jill showing her own savvy with the street smarts so often attributed to Kelly. Less believable was Tracy's going along with Jill's scheme so quickly after discovering Jill in her apartment rifling through what seemed to be her LP collection (in search of what clues, besides her musical tastes?).
A fun episode all around, especially closing as it does with the recurring gag of Charlie having been nearby and the Angels eager to know what he looks like, here interrogating a poor cocktail waitress. Only 10 episodes in and it is clear why the series was a huge hit--well-written stories that are well told and enacted by a talented cast and welcome guest stars. The feeling that everyone was enjoying themselves making the series is contagious, as is the camaraderie among the four principal players. -
adamcshelby10 May 2021This was a good one. Laurette Spang (Battlestar Galactica) shows up as a college call girl running a scam on wealthy clients of a fake dating service called 'Consenting Adults'. She sets up an antiques dealer by the name of Cunningham to be robbed by two men who work as thieves of which the dating service is their front. Only problem is that Cunningham himself is involved with a retired mob boss who's smuggling diamonds out of South Africa, and one of the items stolen from Cunningham's antique shop contained diamonds. The mob boss believes Cunningham has stolen the diamonds from him so he kidnaps him back to his horse ranch.
Cunningham's mother hires the Angels to find her son. It's not long before they track down Laurette Spang's character, who gives them enough information to set a trap for the dating service. Jill of course is asked to assume the role of call girl, and she takes a job with Consenting Adults. Bosley then plays the role of a wealthy client who's dying to date Jill.
This leads to a scene where a house is robbed (allegedly Bosley's) by the men representing the dating service. Sabrina tails them to a warehouse out in the sticks. Foolishly, she enters the property without backup and without her sidearm. This leads to her being tied up and blindfolded by the two crooks, who are themselves murdered in cold blood by the mob boss's enforcer (who was given the location of the warehouse by Spang's character under duress).
Eventually Sabrina is rescued by the other Angels, but they still don't know where Cunningham is, but believe the mob boss is holding him prisoner. So the Angels decide to kidnap the mob guy's prize racehorse in exchange for the smuggled diamonds and the return of Cunningham. This scene takes place in Griffith Park in LA and features Jill doing some fancy stunts on on a skateboard while being chased by an ice cream truck.
Yes it's every bit as good and goofy as it sounds. Were there plot holes? Of course! They could have just searched the mob boss's horse farm, guns a blazing, looking for their client's son. But they chose a more interesting path and it, well, was fun. -
neilclack5 May 2023The most 1970s scene ever - Farah Fawcett on a skateboard, in flared jeans and a tight red jacket, chased by a hit man in a brown leather coat driving an ice-cream van, while funky jazzy music - that classic 1970s sound - plays in the background.
This episode must have been made just after the Romanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci famously won the Gold medal in the gymnastics at the 1976 Montreal Olympics, as she gets mentioned when Kelly (Jaclyn Smith), undercover as a sports magazine editor, tells the racketeer Bialy (Alan Manson) that the cover story is a choice between his racehorse or Nadia Comaneci.
I was 10 years old in 1976 and remember the skateboard craze, and those kind of clothes, and getting excited when the ice cream van came round.
It's actually quite a complicated plot, difficult for the viewer to work out exactly, until Sabrina (Kate Jackson), the smart one, cracks it with just ten minutes of the programme remaining. This is after she's been blindfolded and held at gunpoint while the two men who blindfolded her are shot dead by the hit man in the brown leather coat (played by George Sperdakos)... A while later when Sabrina and Jill are stealing the racehorse, pretending to be veterinarians, and remarking upon how different it is from the "good ole dull days" of the Police Academy, Sabrina says with a smile, "you know what, I miss the good ole dull days".
Prostitution features in a number of Charlie's Angels episodes, and this time it's Jill (Farah Fawcett) who has to go undercover as a sex worker; "I don't give anything away for free that I can sell", she says as she signs up to work at the 'Consenting Adults' agency, and there's a great moment as her first prospective client walks in... and it's Bosley! Meticulous planning from the Angels team there.
The way the episode finishes with the hit man in the brown leather coat stacking the ice cream van into a parked car, and knocking himself out, is pure entertainment. Ten episodes into the first Charlie's Angels series, no wonder it was so popular, topping the TV ratings around this point.