User reviews

Denny Miller would never win any awards and was mainly a bit part actor playing heavies, but I think this, despite reservation about the subject matter, by some , was by far the best performance I have seen him give, I thought he did really well.

Willie Turner (actor Denny Miller) is a strong young man of subnormal intelligence, whose childish impulses have hurt a child. The police are looking for him to place him in a mental hospital. Willie loves carnivals, and runs to one nearby where Kimble is working. The owner, impressed with Willie's strength, offers him a job, and puts him in Kimble's charge.

Kimble tries to leave him with his sister Mary (actress Collin Wilcox) but she cannot take care of him, and plans to marry next week. This causes Willie to go back to the carnival and Kimble. Willie is violently against any effort to hospitalize him, and the police involvement causes trouble for both Willie and Kimble.

This one is obviously inspired by "Of Mice and Men". Denny Miller plays the simple-minded giant, well- intentioned and friendly but who doesn't know his own strength and can hurt people in a fight. He tries to join some kids in playing football but pushes one of them down. The kid is mildly hurt but his mother wants Miller arrested. He runs and hides out at a carnival where Kimble is working.

Our hero finds him a job as a roustabout, not knowing the police are after him. He has a sister who has taken care of him but who wants to get married to a fiancé who doesn't know about Denny. She wants to institutionalize him to obtain her own freedom. The tragic ending is predictable, as is the episode. Dr. Kimble once again gets to show his gentle side.

"Approach With Care" is my vote for the most depressing episode of all the excellent episodes of "The Fugitive". It begins with a mentally challenged man playing football with some kids. One of them gets hurt and whines and cries so much his mother goes to the police about Willie (Denny Miller). It seems that Willie is a runaway from a hospital...one that is for disabled folks like him. Sadly, institutionalizing folks was the norm back then...and it's no surprise that Willie does NOT want to go back there! Soon Willie is befriended by Dr. Kimble...and soon the plot becomes very similar to Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men".

As I said, this IS depressing. The way they treated the disabled was appalling back then and the end of the episode is just terrible....and will leave you feeling a bit miserable. Not wholly original but well done and VERY engaging.

This was a really good episode of The Fugitive starring Richard Janssen and I thought Denny Miller gave a really realistic performance. The episode was quite engaging and went by very fast and I also enjoyed the episode more than a lot them. Also, there were a lot of familiar faces, and I did not even recognize Dabney Coleman with all that hair - I had to look him up to see who he was. David Janssen really created an iconic character with this great series. I watched this series on first run back in the sixties as a young teen and still enjoy it even more as a grown man. Getting close to the fianl episodes and cannot wait.

This is a great episode, Denny Miller(Willie) is awesome, in every way. But his portrayal of a young man with special needs is very well done and not over the top,in fact he should have been nominated for an Emmy. The rest of the cast are good,and the direction, although I feel Dabney Coleman was underused this time around..

I agree with Dawlish03 - Willie wasn't 'gunned down', it was an accident. Maybe fbm72751 wasn't looking when that happened. What did surprise me was that no-one thought to ring for an ambulance or try and help him in any way, Willie was hit in the top right side of his body, had an artery been hit which meant there was no chance he'd survive? They all just stood about, one cop went looking for Richard Kimble but otherwise nothing. None of them were medically trained apart from Richard Kimble and he'd already gone. I'm a Brit too.

One of Hollywood's most open non-secrets is that the judges who choose the Oscar winners adore movies about innocent, child-like, saintly, mentally-impaired characters. If the character is scary as well as saintly, so much the better. If the character's simplicity enables him to do something heroic, that's better still. It's a cliché, but they never seem to get tired of it. Charleton Heston pointed this out in an interview, saying: "If you want to win an Academy Award, arrange to play a retarded character." (This was long ago, when "retarded" was still the preferred technical term.) The obsession goes all the way back to Quasimodo.

Maybe Mr. Heston should have added: make sure you play the character WELL. Not the way this guy Denny Miller does. He plays the part so badly that I had to remind myself that BLAZING SADDLES was still 18 years in the future, otherwise, I would have thought that Miller was trying to do a parody of Mongo.

The rest of the performance is correspondingly awful. Bad acting by the entire cast (they look tired and bored), bad sets, bad costumes, bad camerawork, bad plot, bad writing. Dr. Kimble is even more unrealistically saintly and virtuous than the mentally-impaired guy. It has so much cloying, sugary goo, and so little substance that I had to check my blood-sugar when it was over. I thought I might need to go to an emergency room and get an injection of insulin. (And I'm not even diabetic.)

The only reason I give it any stars at all is that Malcolm Atterbury is in the cast. He's always fun to see. Other than that, this is a good hour for a nap.