AlsExGal

Henry Wigram, a trusted employee of the Bonded Messenger Service, conspires with his wife and an accomplice, John Grolier, to steal a twenty thousand dollar payroll. What is actually going on is unclear at first - Wigram tosses the bag with the money to his wife who is waiting along the road. Then he meets up with the accomplice where a robbery is supposed to be staged. Instead, Grolier double-crosses Wigram and shoots him dead. Yes, it will look like a robbery, because it is! But Grolier just shot a man dead for a sack of worthless scrap paper, and in 1957 he'd be facing the death penalty. Complications ensue. Why do I say this episode is Hitchcockian? You'll have to watch and find out, as in watch to the end.

Wigram's wife seems convincing when Dan Matthews of the Highway Patrol comes to talk to her about the robbery - nobody knows about the murder yet because the body has not been found. She asks why would her husband risk a good job and the more than adequate living that his salary buys? Digging under the surface - as Matthews always does - finds that Wigham cosigned an 8000 dollar loan for a cousin who then defaulted. So half of that twenty thousand would have paid off that debt and then some. So like a film noir, we have an average guy , Wigram, thrust into extraordinary events and making the wrong choices to deal with them.

Note that at the beginning of the episode Wigram drives away from the bank in his company car labeled "Bonded Messenger Service". Maybe that is just for illustrations sake, or maybe that was something that was actually safe to do in 1957, but I imagine that today such a person would be in an unmarked car for the safety of all concerned.

... but if you have no idea what the show is about, or maybe you know what it is and have seen just an episode or two, I'm just not sure how much you are going to get out of it, as there are more than a few ironic tie ins to the original LITB show. Plus, if you are younger, you may have trouble with the concept of superimposing the 50s on the 80s if you are unfamiliar with both decades.

Beaver Cleaver's wife has just thrown him out of the house. His rich father in law therefore fires him, and he doesn't even have a car since he is driving a company car. He takes a cab back to Mayfield, to his mother's house, and tries to pick up the pieces of his life in a place that seems familiar and safe. He also tries to have a better relationship with his sons, who resent the divorce and the dislocation it has caused in their lives.

Beaver's older brother Wally is a successful attorney, and in his 30s has only recently married his high school sweetheart, Mary Ellen Rogers. But being mid to late thirties, they have a problem - possible fertility problems as they try to conceive a child.

A large number of the original cast members show up - Ken Osmond as Eddie Haskell, Frank Bank as Lumpy Rutherford, Richard Deacon as Fred Rutherford, Richard Correll as Richard Rickover, Rusty Stevens as Larry Mondello, Diane Brewster as Miss Canfield, and Tiger Fafara as Tooey.

One thing that I really enjoyed as a long time viewer were the many intercuts from the present Cleaver home to some relevant scene from the TV show. Hugh Beaumont, who played Ward Cleaver, died the year before this was made, in 1982, and many of those intercut scenes involve him. I thought these scenes were a tastefully done tribute to the actor and the role he played.

Written and hosted by Matthew Sweet and ranging from the quota quickies of the 30s to the exploitation flicks of the 70s. In between we visit wartime comedies, the 50s youth market, and Hammer in the 60s. There are oddball one-offs like 1952's Private Information, in which none other than Jill Esmond (Mrs. Olivier #1) plays a woman who crusades against the leaky sewer pipes in her council house.

It runs 89 minutes and is loaded with clips, many from films I've never heard of. Sweet welcomes several veterans from the B movie era, and these are my favorite bits. He chats with Patricia Laffan as they watch her film Devil Girl from Mars (1954). Nicky Henson giggles as he watches himself in Psychomania (1973) riding a motorcycle through a wall and confronting some kind of giant demon frog.

It's lots of fun if you like these old films, and I do.

An older woman who owns a motel is robbed at gunpoint by a man wearing a trench coat, hat, and bandana covering his face. The woman won't tell him where she keeps her money, so he slugs her with the gun, searches a few boxes, but then leaves empty handed.

When the Highway Patrol arrive she says she recognizes the man as somebody who checked into the hotel the night before, Roger Taylor, from the clothing he was wearing. Taylor professes his innocence though he has no alibi, and he admits to having a trench coat and hat, but none are found in his room. He's a man on his way to Baltimore who owns a grocery store and has no money problems.

Dan Matthews asks him if he'd be willing to take a lie detector test. Taylor agrees because he has nothing to hide. He passes the test which is given over four hours asking a combination of mundane questions and questions applicable to the crime. Then the test is given to the hotel owner to see if she is either lying or has doubts about who she is accusing. She passes too. So Matthews is at an impasse. He has two people with test results that are at odds with one another. The owner believes she is accusing the right man. The accused at least believes he didn't do it. Or one or both of them are sociopaths! Complications ensue.

"Lie detectors", or polygraphs which are their true names, were never administered like this - With the subject holding their fingers in the air and only that one sensor being employed. That would be a unigraph, and not at all accurate.

Putting it center stage in the script was interesting though, and maybe put a chill through any bad guys watching that might really think that the police managed to put God in a box.

Two thieves plan to steal and ransom a one hundred thousand dollar electronic brain - which is what computers were called back in the day. It is supposed to be transferred from where it was built to where it will be used, the thieves know this, and imitate truck drivers who are supposed to haul the thing. It is so heavy an 18 wheeler is required to move it. Remember the first silicon transistor was built by Bell Labs in 1954, and the first integrated circuit was built in 1958, so at the time such computers were a bunch of vacuum tubes and quite fragile. Today we all have computers much more powerful than what was stolen that cost several hundred dollars and fit in our back pockets.

The thieves reason that if successful they will wind up with the same amount of money that you get for ransoming a person without the complications or possibility of the long prison sentence that comes with kidnapping a person.

The thieves seem surprised that the Highway Patrol was using helicopters - one thief said it was something that he was not counting on. So I looked it up - Helicopters were not used by the California Highway Patrol until about 1960. This show doesn't specifically SAY they are in California, but from the landmarks and cities mentioned, that state is probably where the show is set.

So this episode turned out to be fascinating for the technical signposts. And it had a good script and acting as usual.

Eddie is late - as in it being past 10PM - for a night out at a swanky restaurant with his wife and Wally and his wife. It turns out he is shooting pool with Lumpy, and worse yet he didn't forget, he just blew it off figuring that he could get his wife Gert to forgive him. He'd be wrong. He ends up staying at June's house and driving everybody there crazy when he starts taking advantage.

Gert won't take Eddie back unless he changes completely, but if you took the selfishness and manipulation out of Eddie you'd probably have about a quarter cup of water. Can this marriage be saved? Watch this episode and find out.

Eddie has some sincere moments here, which are always a treat, since he so seldom lets one peek beneath the surface and see his vulnerable side. Also note that in the original LITB that Eddie went around calling everybody "Gertrude" and he has ended up marrying a woman named Gertrude.

Also, it was fun to see Barbara Billingsley work in a homage to her come-back role in Airplane!.

... because it is classic Eddie Haskell.

Eddie's sons cause problems for the new generation of Cleavers as in getting one Cleaver suspended and another two Cleavers accused of shoplifting on the same day that Eddie's flirting with a wealthy widow in Wally's law office causes Wally to lose her as a client. This causes June to ban all Haskells from her house, and her argument to son Wally convinces him to do the same at his house. Eddie's attempts to make up with Wally are rebuffed.

This leads to an unintentional heart to heart between Eddie and his oldest son about how much they miss and need the Cleavers. At Wally's house, he and his son have the same conversation about how they don't know what that certain something is about the Haskells that makes them want them around in spite of all of the problems that they bring. How will this all work out? Watch and find out.

Two of the writers for this episode were regular writers of the original Leave It To Beaver show, and they certainly have the characters down. And Ken Osmond certainly remembers how it's done in spite of twenty years, a career as a LA policeman, and the rumors of him being Alice Cooper having occurred in the years since he last played the role of Eddie Haskell. Osmond's actual sons play his sons in the sitcom.

... and I've found most folks either love or hate the Carry Ons as a rule, and for many it's a generational thing (i.e., the films either evoke fond memories of their youth in a Britain that's vastly different from the UK of today, or they draw out unalloyed scorn for the lewd side of British comedy). And, truth be told, there's lots NOT to like about the Carry Ons, starting with the hit-or-miss quality and cheap production values of the series' entries as well as the broad style of humor found therein (a style that irritated more innovative British comics such as Tony Hancock). And, yes, for me the series proves scientifically the thesis that one film can have too many breast jokes. But, at the same time, when the core group (Sid, Hattie, Kenneth, Joan, Charles, etc.) is present and the humor is firing on all cylinders, you can see why these movies made a ton of coin: because at their best, they're hilarious.

Carry On, Matron has one of the dandiest premises in the series: a gang of crooks plans to steal birth control pills from a maternity hospital and sell them on the black market...just the kind of crime one would expect from a gang led by the ribald Sid James! Indeed, there are no prizes for good taste here, including a patient who's nine months pregnant (Joan Sims) who shows up at the hospital with false labor and then settles in to eat like a horse, and Sid's crooked son (Kenneth Cope) who dresses as a nurse in order to obtain a floor plan but ends up being harassed by the lecherous Dr. Prodd as well as distracted by his terminally curvaceous roommate (Barbara Windsor). Factor in Hattie Jacques' deft turn as Matron and Kenneth Williams, in spectacularly twitchy form, as a hypochondriac Chief of Staff, and you have yourself a movie that will keep you laughing in spite of yourself.

This first episode of the 50s series has the Highway Patrol trying to capture a man who broke out of prison. He's ruthless and clever, stealing and then abandoning vehicles as he goes. He steals a car, then a police car badly injuring the cop who drove it, and then uses the police car to hijack a school bus which he figures will be less suspect.

The interesting thing about this episode is that although the escapee does pretty bad violence in a couple of scenes, the actual violence being done to the people is not shown. Nor is the injured person shown post violence. I wonder if this was due to some type of morals code at this particular point in television such that explicit violence, even though it is just acting, could not be shown.

Broderick Crawford plays the hands-on head of the Highway Patrol, directing the investigation and manhunt. Although I doubt the head of such an outfit would be out in the field chasing down suspects, no audience is going to stick around for a show where Crawford, star of stage and screen, spends the entire show filling out reports.

For this first show, Broderick Crawford comes out at the end to invite the audience to tune in next week.

A criminal type, Blackie (Jack Palance) and his two lackeys (Zero Mostel as Fitch and Tommy Cook as Poldi) chase an illegal alien through the streets of New Orleans and shoot him over him leaving a poker game after he won all of the money. They dump the body and it's found the next day. But the guy doing the exam at the morgue thinks there is something wrong with the body other than the bullet holes. Clinton Reed (Richard Widmark) of the U. S. Health Service is called in and says the guy died of plague.

The guy turns out to be an unknown. The authorities figure out the illegal alien part pretty quickly, and now they have to figure out where he's been (how he got it) and who the people are he's been in contact with (who is likely to get it). A full blown epidemic could be in progress in four days. The public needs to be kept in the dark because if they knew then they'll start leaving town and spread the plague nationwide or even worldwide, the press knows something is up and is trying to sniff out a story, and Dr. Reed is partnered with a homicide detective (Paul Douglas) who is not particularly fond of doctors in the first place.

A complicating factor is that Mostel's Fitch actually does get caught up in the initial dragnet the police put out, but they don't know his association with the case and let him go when he appears to know nothing. But his boss Blackie gets the wrong idea. He figures that the police are making such a fuss because their victim brought drugs into the country, and that since Poldi was the guy's cousin, that he must have the drugs and that he is holding out on him.

Especially striking were some scenes with politicians having trouble taking health experts predictions about possible infections seriously and arguments with reporters about what kind of information the public needs to know. A comment Widmark made about the pointlessness of focusing only on the location of the initial appearance of a pandemic in the modern (for 1950!) era of transportation where anyone can quickly travel half way around the world in a short time was particularly prescient. In addition to the intelligent script, the direction is excellent, combining extremely realistic, on-location documentary-style filming on the streets of New Orleans, and dark, expressionistic film noir stylistics.

There's also quite a bit about Dr. Reed's domestic life, and it seems that being a federal employee was not nearly as lucrative in 1950 as it is today. I wonder when that changed?

Beaver has a crush on his teacher, Miss Canfield. He stays after school and helps her, and it's pretty obvious to the casual observer how he feels. It is so obvious that some of the kids tease him about it and dare him to put some "exploding snakes" in her desk to frighten her as proof he doesn't really "like" her. Beaver, always the one to give into peer pressure, does just that. Then he immediately regrets the choice, but after the kids leave the room Miss Canfield returns and he doesn't have a chance to retrieve the snakes. It seems the anticipation of Miss Canfield being scared by the snakes and his own conscience are bothering him more than being made fun of by the other kids could ever have done. Complications ensue.

There is an odd section in the middle where Beaver and Wally go to the school in the middle of the night to try and get the snakes, but the janitor's dog prevents them from succeeding. While they are gone, June goes to check on the boys and finds books in their beds instead of them. When Ward goes in a few minutes later to confirm what June said that she found, the boys are "sleeping" in their beds and Ward acts like June is seeing things. Why didn't either of them pull back the covers to see that their street clothes are probably still on? One of those inconsistencies that don't happen later as the characters find their bearings.

Boys in the neighborhood are forming a baseball team and they need money for uniforms. Ward and the neighborhood dads decide it will teach the kids about enterprise to do chores and earn money for those uniforms. Beaver wants a uniform too, so he can at least sit with the older kids, but nobody wants to hire him to do a task. He comes across a group of workmen who says there is a leak in a water main and they will have to shut off the water for a couple of hours in order to do repairs. Note that it is a very hot day.

So Beaver loads up every bottle and bucket he can find with water and, when the water is cut off, charges his friends, neighbors, even his own mother! For water. Ward has a talk with Beaver about this practice, but Beaver doesn't see the difference between this and the grocer charging for food versus giving it away. How does this all work out? Watch and find out.

There is a great bit of business where one of the neighbors calls Ward and tells him that she thinks it terrible that Beaver is taking advantage of the situation and thinks that this kind of thing leads to Communism! I guess you had to be there to get that take.

The film marks Deborah Kerr's final feature film appearance. She plays an English woman who spent her young adulthood with her now-dead husband in India where they ran a tea plantation. Back in England, she has always felt out of place. The husband spent his UK years building an exotic garden in homage to his years in India. Kerr slaves to maintain the garden, but it's more than just the garden she's trying to preserve.

She meets an Indian woman (Madhur Jaffrey) who lives in the village and who longs to return to India. The immigrant starts to help Kerr in the garden and the two women form an odd bond because of their Indian "roots," though each woman's India is a very different place and likely does not even exist anymore. Kerr's memories of the waning days of colonial India and Jaffrey's memories of quaint village life are just that: memories of long-lost worlds. In the end, one of the women succumbs to the lure of memory and leaves the garden.

Excellent performance by both actresses.

I remember this episode from when I was a kid, mainly because June was so unlikeable here. She is completely out of character versus the shows that went before and all of those that went afterwards, She reads a poem about brotherly love and then, when Wally and the Beaver are fighting, she makes them sign a friendship pact to do everything together.

What a bunch of hooey. Beaver is in second grade and Wally is in either the seventh or eighth - There is a world of difference in their ages, so it is only natural they are going to be interested in very different things, and they are just going to resent each other if they are forced to be together all of the time.

The weekend does pose a problem as Wally has an offer from a friend to go to a football game and Beaver has an invitation to go fishing with Gus the fireman. Each of them thinks they can outsmart and escape the other, and each is afraid that if they are the first to break the pact that the other will rat them out to mom. Complications ensue.

The character June Cleaver of the series always had a level head on her shoulders. The only woman in a house of men, she always kept high standards but knew exactly who she was dealing with in the persons of her sons and husband. In this one episode she is impractical and naive. It's worth watching for the LITB fan just to see how good the rest of the episodes were versus how off center this one was.

... because in 2024 it's hard to understand the actions of the victims and would be victims in this case.

A 50ish man escapes from a mental hospital. He is under the delusion that he is the world's greatest violinist, and his (very strong) hands make some kind of involuntary shaking motion. He is unkempt and dressed in white pants and white shirt, both of which are dirty from him traveling through the rural wilderness trying to get to the main road. He does not look like someone to whom you would want to give a ride, because he very much looks like an escapee from somewhere! But a local man picks him up and then bends his ear how he is on the way to pick up a widow woman with whom he has been corresponding to go on a long term trip. The escapee strangles the driver, takes his suit, and goes to pick up the widow woman. Will she be his next victim? Watch and find out.

Dan Matthews and his officers have been trying to find this guy since he broke out, but the willingness of ordinary people to trust a total stranger is at cross purposes with Highway Patrol's best efforts. This was not the point the episode tried to make, it was just something I noticed.

But Quincy does not, and there have been a few such episodes scattered throughout the series, but usually the audience is in the dark at least in regards to the how of the case if not the who.

A couple of men have killed a third man with a drug overdose. They cover the crime by pushing the man and his car off a cliff. But the body falls out of the car before the car reaches the bottom. The two men plan to go down and investigate - Is the guy really dead, perhaps reposition the body - when they see a car coming and have to drive away in a hurry so they aren't spotted near the scene.

The Mr. Big who hired them to do the killing is not happy because at this point nobody is sure the victim is even dead. So he uses the drug habit of a young man to strongarm his father - a medical examiner - to fake the autopsy so that what really happened to the victim does not come out. Assuming the guy is even dead! The audience sees all of this. All Quincy knows is that a body from a car crash has been brought into the coroner's office for autopsy.

Meanwhile there is a new doctor working for the office of the medical examiner. The new doctor is a young lady - very young - and Quincy is hitting on her!!!! Over 40 years later this is very hard to watch - Mainly because she is being harassed and disrespected, but also because she appears to be young enough to be Quincy's daughter. The ick factor is strong.

The new doctor looks at the autopsy findings on the murdered guy and finds results different from the older respected - and blackmailed - coroner who doesn't find that there are any signs of foul play. Will she be believed? Watch and find out.

Carolyn Grant (Marie Windsor) is just making enemies left and right - She won't divorce her estranged husband because the money is too good even though he (John Archer as Harlow Grant) wants to remarry to a less showy, more homey (but not homely) woman (Nancy Gates as Louise Nelson). Carolyn is trying to break up her employee's engagement just because. The guy (Richard Crane as Dick Sawyer) has no interest in her. So one night an intruder - the audience doesn't see who it is - shoots her dead on the stairs. Everybody she ever said hello to is rightfully a suspect.

So this film is neatly divided into two parts. The first part is playing out like a Douglas Sirk melodrama of the time. The second part, after the murder, is your basic whodunnit. It rather plays out like an overly long version of Perry Mason, as you are pretty sure you know who is going to end up murdered, there is a parade of people who have good motive for performing the murder, except this is not a courtroom drama and there is no hard charging defense attorney involved. Also, Marie Windsor hangs around with a pulse longer than any of the victims in Perry Mason, but then who wants to let Marie Windsor's bad girl talents go to waste?

It does seem like it is trying to compete for the kind of audiences who watched TV in the 50s. The sets aren't cheap but they aren't deluxe either. The acting is competent, and the script is not much of a surprise, but it does fit the bill if you are a fan of these 50s noir/crime dramas.

... And her family needs to look up the word "mistake" in the dictionary.

Cheryl's aunt has died, and so Cheryl's entire family is hanging around Larry's house. Larry tries to make the best of an uncomfortable situation. He offers to write the obituary and have it published in the newspaper so the grieving family doesn't have to bother with it. At the funeral the boyfriend of Cheryl's sister asks Larry how to handle a breakup with her since he was just about to break up with her when the death occurred. Larry gives advice but asks not to be quoted on it. Finally, the only time he is able to break away from all of this forced togetherness is to do another good deed - Bring Jeff's mother a birthday present.

So this is an episode where Larry is not being a jerk and is doing good and unselfish things, and yet everything falls apart for him in a hilarious way, starting with a misprint in the obituary that Larry wrote having Cheryl's entire family mad at Larry, and Cheryl kicking him out of the house because of it! Things go wrong at Jeff's house too, and as a result Larry is looking at homelessness that night.

This is the kind of episode that I find funny enough when I watch it, but thinking about it later it becomes hilarious in retrospect.

The rather helpless Johnsons next door had a check bounce, and so George Baxter goes over their finances. It turns out that their investments are sound - for 1915. They have shares in corset companies, buggy whip companies, and kerosene lantern companies. And Herbert Johnson proudly proclaims that he has cornered the market in whalebone.

George says that the Johnsons still have a nest egg, but they'll need to cut back severely, as in letting their maid go. Herbert Johnson would like to get a job, but his only talent is that he earned a degree in dead languages in his youth. Hazel works to get the Johnsons back on her feet given their new circumstances, good soul that she is.

There's some wry social commentary going on when it comes to the Johnsons concerning the idle rich. They apparently came from great wealth - Herbert's dad was a kind of wizard of Wall Street, but he must have been too busy giving Herbert the kind of carefree life that he never had without bothering to teach him anything practical about life. There's an old saying that says "Leave your kids enough money that they can do anything, but not so much that they can do nothing." I think of that saying when I see the Johnsons.

Dierdre, evil sister of George Baxter, has already dodged one bullet with the Nancy/Eddie relationship, and now she's holding over her daughter Nancy's head that she will ship her back to the finishing school that she hates unless she dates men other than Eddie. Nancy talks to a really nice young man who works at a gas station and when he asks for her number she gives it to him. Dierdre hears about it and hits the roof, refusing to let her see the guy. What she doesn't know is that the gas station attendant is a college student himself AND the son of George's college roommate. He's the most eligible bachelor in town!

Of course Dierdre erupts into tears when she finds out she's rejected this catch on the basis of her hideous snobbishness. I was surprised that tears didn't melt her since water is what melted the Wicked Witch in Wizard of Oz, but I digress. No wonder her husband travels on business so much. What a horrid human being she is. I guess she is a repeating character because she is a balance to the likeable Baxters.

Dierdre might take note of the fact that Nancy called Hazel when she wanted to leave the finishing school and come back home, not her mother.

Dierdre is at it again, and her complaints about her daughter Nancy dating Hazel's nephew Eddie are drawing them closer together not further apart. They are old enough to marry without consent, so if Dierdre is not going to let Nancy see Eddie they decide they will marry now, even though Eddie is still in college.

Rather than using Dierdre's sledgehammer approach, Hazel decides to be a friend to the couple so that they see just what they are facing if they marry right now. From food choices, to needing to sell Eddie's treasured car, to Nancy needing to work and not being very qualified to do anything that pays well, to the only shelter that they can afford making the Bates motel look inviting, will the couple get the message? Watch and find out.

There's a funny bit of business involving George trying to handle two phone calls and a client simultaneously on one of those old style office intercoms.

Lumpy Rutherford puts smoke bombs in Wally and Eddie's cars. It's embarrassing but causes no damage. But Eddie wants payback and comes up with a scheme that he thinks will adequately pay Lumpy back. He and Wally tie Lumpy's car to a tree, then Eddie calls Lumpy from a neighbor's house and imitates Julie Foster, saying that she needs help with her geometry homework and that only Lumpy can help. Lumpy charges out of the house, glad to have the admiration of a female, but the joke doesn't go as planned. They had hoped for the car just spinning its wheels, unable to accelerate. Instead, the bottom of Lumpy's car is ripped out when tree meets drive train.

Wally and Eddie run for it, but Wally turns out to not be a very adept prankster. The chain he used to tie car to tree has his dad's name on it as in "return to". How will this all work out? Watch and find out.

There were quite a few of these Eddie/Wally/Lumpy centric episodes in the last two seasons as actor Tony Dow turned into quite the teenage hunk and became very popular with girls. Once Jerry Mathers reached that awkward tween/teen state, he could no longer play the cute little kid like he could in the first few seasons. The exploits of Wally and his friends likely extended the life of the show by a couple of seasons.

The writers on this show almost seemed to know the culture was about to change and that Leave It To Beaver was emblematic of an innocent and more carefree time that was about to end as a presidential assassination, the British invasion, the Vietnam war, the civil rights movement, and a more open attitude about sex due to the advent of the birth control pill changed everything. Just ten years later America's family would be Archie Bunker and company.

So in a rare instance for those days of a TV show having a series finale, the Cleavers look through a scrapbook that has the viewer relive moments in the series. As some reviewers have said, many scenes shown are of some very embarrassing moments and for sure nobody would have a camera handy, but the point is nostalgia not realism.

Larry and Richard are talking, and Richard is telling Larry he is hurt that Larry isn't calling him to do things together anymore. Larry has to admit that Richard's obnoxious girlfriend has him avoiding both of them. They are in the process of finding a way to patch up their friendship when Richard's African American dermatologist friend walks up and says hello. Larry blurts out something about affirmative action, trying to be funny. He isn't.. I've rewound it a couple of times and still can't figure out what he said other than the words "affirmative action". The doctor is understandably offended by Larry and storms off. It was like something Jack Nicholson would have blurted out in "As Good As It Gets".

At the same time, Cheryl has dermatitis and has a prescription that is supposed to treat it. Trying to get that prescription filled, Larry offending Richard's friend, and Larry trying to avoid someone at a restaurant who is a dull conversationalist and hangs around like a bad cold all intersect in hilarious ways. I will add that, after everything Cheryl goes through in this episode, if there was any time she was going to divorce Larry I would have thought that this was the time.

I've never said anything as bad as what Larry said to the doctor, but I think we've all blurted out things we immediately regret and have wondered if it won't come back to bite us later, in spite of any apology we immediately make.

Cheryl is going to have a dinner party and Larry the misanthrope is dreading the thing. At the same time, Jeff buys his dream car - a 57 Chevy - and has Larry take it out for a spin. At an intersection the radio plays an AAMCO commercial which includes a beep in the middle - Double A beep-beep MCO . Larry isn't familiar with this commercial, thinks it's the guy behind him honking his horn, they begin yelling at one another, and the guy behind him rams the Chevy and speeds away. Jeff's transmission is broken.

It just so happens one of Cheryl's guests works for AAMCO, and is the only guy in southern California who knows how to repair the transmission on a 57 Chevy. Great you'd think - not so fast. The guy is somebody with reasonings and ways far from the ways of Larry. At dinner he sits in Larry's chair at the head of the table and pretty much pressures everyone into saying grace. Larry is Jewish.

This guy isn't obnoxious like the attorney in the previous episode, but like that guy Larry needs him, and Larry can't read him at all. Complications ensue.