The Girl in the Empty Grave (1977) & Deadly Game (1977)

The notion of playing a resort town’s top lawman must have lodged in Andy Griffith’s imagination after starring in the respectable made-for-TV thriller Winter Kill (1974), which was designed as a pilot but failed to produce a series. Griffith headlined no fewer than three reworkings of the basic concept, beginning with Adams of Eagle Lake (1975), an hourlong show that lasted only two episodes. Then came The Girl in the Empty Grave and Deadly Game, wannabe-pilot telefilms about Sheriff Abel Marsh that aired in late 1977. Both were written by Lane Slate, who also created Adams of Eagle Lake. (The full backstory is even more convoluted. Slate introduced Marsh, as portrayed by James Garner, in the 1972 theatrical feature They Only Kill Their Masters, which begat the 1973 made-for-TV sequel Isn't It Shocking?, with Alan Alda as new version of the character named Daniel Barnes. The Griffith projects followed.)

It’s remarkable how consistently the strengths and weaknesses of Slate’s approach simultaneously enrich and flatten The Girl in the Empty Grave and Deadly Game. Slate has fun surrounding Griffith’s intrepid peacekeeper with idiosyncratic townies, some of whom appear in both movies, such as the earnest deputy played by James Cromwell. Slate’s pithy dialogue is at worst vacuously entertaining and at best genuinely delightful, so the details garnishing these films are tasty—especially because the discursive nature of Slate’s scripting suits Griffith’s avuncular performance style. Alas, the movie’s central mysteries are trifling, and Slate has a turgid way of resolving narratives.

In both pieces, Griffith plays Abel Marsh, the unflappable sheriff of Jasper Lake, a stand-in for the real Southern California city of Big Bear Lake, where these movies were filmed. The Girl in the Empty Grave, as the title suggests, kicks off when Abel spots a young woman driving through town and recognizes her as the victim of a fatal car crash that occurred some time back. Deadly Game begins with a U.S. Army truck crashing outside Jasper Lake and thereby exposing the whole town to the dangerous chemical agent the truck was transporting. In both movies, determined and intuitive Abel won’t rest until he finds out what’s really happening—and then, inevitably, whodunnit. Even though both stories drag and meander, there’s almost always something of passing interest happening, whether it’s Griffith solving some logical puzzle or an offbeat supporting character lending comic relief.

While they’re largely interchangeable as far as quality goes, Deadly Game is incrementally more satisfying to watch than The Girl in the Empty Grave because one gets the sense that Slate, Griffith, and their collaborators were starting to figure out what worked and what didn’t for this would-be franchise. Deadly Game also benefits from the presence of the regal Dan O’Herlihy in the main guest-starring role, whereas The Girl in the Empty Grave features a host of rank-and-file character players. Naturally, both movies thrive on the novelty of Griffith channeling Andy Taylor while investigating cold-blooded felonies instead of no-harm-done misdemeanors. And perhaps that’s why these resort-town projects never captured the public’s imagination. Both telefilms are sufficiently gentle to seem like cousins to The Andy Griffith Show, but they integrate mature-audience elements that don’t square with The Andy Griffith Show’s vision of unthreatening Anytown U.S.A.

The Girl in the Empty Grave: FUNKY

Deadly Game: FUNKY

Savages (1974)

          Months after playing a howling-mad psycho in the telefilm Pray for the Wildcats, Andy Griffith took more subdued approach to playing a killer in another telefilm, Savages. Slight but unnerving, Savages was based upon a novel by Robb White, and it tells the threadbare story of a hunter who accidentally kills an innocent man, then tries to frame his guide for the crime. Since the story lacks the element of mystery—viewers never doubt whether Griffith’s character was responsible—the vibe is more pressure cooker than whodunit, so the material might have worked better as, say, a one-hour episode of Night Gallery. Even though Savages runs just 74 minutes, it feels padded, especially during the long, long sequences of the guide struggling to survive in the desert while the hunter plays cat-and-mouse games. Extending the story to full telefilm length also exposes some iffy narrative mechanics to scrutiny. The trick for telling stories about villains toying with victims involves providing a persuasive explanation for why the villain doesn’t simply kill his or her adversary, and Savages never does that. As a result, Savages is merely disposable escapism.

          Griffith plays Horton Madec, a big-city lawyer with a bum leg. After using is influence to get a license for killing a big-horn sheep, he travels to the California desert only to find that the guide he originally hired is unavailable. Lucky for Horton, Ben Campbell (Sam Bottoms) has time on his hands. A young animal enthusiast who strikes locals as eccentric because of his fixation on vultures and other desert critters, he knows the land but doesn’t groove on killing protected animals, no matter the circumstances. Yet Horton twists his arm with cash, so off they go. The minute Horton spots a ram on a hilltop, he gets carried away and fires blindly, hitting and killing an old hermit. When Ben refuses to help cover up the death, Horton forces Ben to flee at gunpoint, the idea being that Ben will die of exposure before reaching civilization, allowing Horton to spin a yarn about Ben committing the murder and going crazy afterward. As directed by the experienced Lee H. Katzin, Savages is workmanlike at best, with some sequences suffering for lack of narrative excitement and visual creativity. However, the picture starts well and ends well, its third act effectively complicating the storyline. Better still, Bottoms complements Griffith’s restrained villainy with sweet vulnerability, so watching Savages conjures images of Sheriff Andy Taylor torturing Opie. Sometimes, casting against type works wonders.

Savages: FUNKY

Pray for the Wildcats (1974)

          Although the bleak made-for-TV drama Pray for the Wildcats echoes many downbeat theatrical features of the same era, the movie’s principal appeal stems from a cast comprising small-screen luminaries. William Shatner, of Star Trek fame, stars as a tormented ad executive; Robert Reed, from The Brandy Bunch, plays one of his colleagues; and Andy Griffith, beloved for the sitcom that bears his name, portrays a psychotic millionaire. Standing on the sidelines of the story is Police Woman beauty Angie Dickinson. Excepting perhaps Griffith, who attacks his monstrous role with glee, none of the participants does anything extraordinary here. Nonetheless, the combination of familiar faces and menacing narrative elements is noteworthy.

          Sam Farragut (Griffith) is an obnoxious mogul who enjoys using people. Sam’s latest plaything is Warren Summerfield (Shatner). Warren was recently fired, but his agency has kept Warren on the payroll while he transitions his clients to new reps. Adding to Warren’s problems are the dissipation of his marriage to Lila (Lorraine Gary) and the lingering effects of an extramarital affair. The main characters are introduced during a dirt-bike excursion, because Sam makes subordinates keep him company whenever he prowls the wilderness on two wheels. Thus, when Sam proposes—orders, really—that Warren and his fellow ad executives accompany Sam on a punishing dirt-bike journey from California to Mexico and back, Warren sees little choice but to participate. Coworkers Paul (Reed) and Terry (Marjoe Gortner) agree without hesitation to ride along, since they’re eager to get on Sam’s good side. Once the journey begins, two things become apparent: Sam is a sadist capable of rape and murder, and Warren is so depressed that he’s looking for an opportunity to kill himself in order to leave money behind for his wife and children.

          Thematically, this is ambitious stuff for a TV movie, even if the execution is a bit on the clumsy side and the dirt-bike gimmick is given far too much prominence. (The title stems from a moniker Sam places on the leather jackets he provides to his traveling companions, “Wildcats.”) Jack Turley’s script relies heavily on repetitive voiceover to hammer narrative information, and Robert Michael Lewis’ direction wobbles between blandness and intensity. Shatner, as always, skirts self-parody whenever he tries to portray powerful emotions, though it should be noted that his performance is comparatively restrained. Dickinson, Reed, and costar Janet Margolin deliver serviceable work, while Gortner believably incarnates an avaricious prick. Griffith easily dominates. The image of the Artist Previously Known As Sheriff Andy Taylor ogling a hippie chick in a Mexican bar and howling “Now we’re gettin’ in on, baby!” is hard to shake. So even if some of the dirt-bike scenes feel endless, the savagery at the heart of this offbeat little piece resonates.

Pray for the Wildcats: FUNKY

Salvage-1 (1979)

          Featuring one of the loopier premises in the history of primetime drama, this feature-length pilot movie launched a short-lived series, which has since become a minor cult favorite among sci-fi fans. Beloved TV icon Andy Griffith stars in the movie as a junkyard owner who builds his own private spaceship for a trip to the moon, where he plans to salvage abandoned NASA equipment and sell it to the highest bidder. Once the concept went to series, Griffth reprised his role, with his character piloting the spaceship for missions to remote locations around the globe; in the first regular episode, the goal was to retrieve monkeys for a zoo and to explore the possibility of bringing back an iceberg for a California community suffering from drought. Not hard to see why the series got canceled. Still, two things make the Salvage-1 pilot movie charming—Griffith’s affable persona and the lightness of the storytelling. Written by Mike Lloyd Ross, whose character development and dialogue are as clunky as his narrative concepts are wild, Salvage-1 introduces Harry Broderick (Griffith) as an expert in repurposing junk—he buys a World War I biplane for a song, then guts the vehicle and sells parts to various buyers, making a $14,000 profit in the course of a morning’s work.

          Harry’s gotten hip to the multimillion-dollar value of tech that NASA left on the moon, and he’s identified an aeronautics expert with a theory that might facilitate inexpensive space travel. Harry hires the expert, ex-astronaut Skip Carmichael (Joel Higgins), who in turn enlists the aid of fuel specialist Melanie Slozar (Trish Stewart). Together with Harry’s regular employees—including a pair of former NASA ground-control techs—Harry cobbles together a spaceship called the Vulture. Meanwhile, uptight FBI agent Jack Klinger (Richard Jaeckel) sniffs around Harry’s junkyard because he senses something strange is happening. Salvage-1 is predicated on an inordinate number of convenient plot twists, and Ross’ script is so upbeat that there’s never any real tension, but Salvage-1 is fun to watch simply because it’s such a lark. Even the laughably bad special effects featured during the Vulture’s moon shot aren’t enough to diffuse the good vibes. This is pure gee-whiz escapism, and the saving grace of the piece is that it never pretends to have meaning or substance. So, yes, the acting is hokey and the story is borderline stupid, but who cares? Fun is fun.

Salvage-1: GROOVY

Winter Kill (1974)

          After actor/producer Andy Griffith left the series that bore his name, the 1960-1968 family favorite The Andy Griffith Show, he spent nearly two decades casting about for another project that curried equal favor with the public. Some of the failed pilots and short-lived series he made during these wilderness years, which extended until the 1986 launch of his geriatric-lawyer show Matlock, are interesting because they’re edgier than the kind of material one normally associates with Griffith. For instance, the 1974 telefilm Winter Kill, the first of three TV movies designed to launch a new series featuring Griffith as a small-town sheriff facing grislier problems than The Andy Griffith Show’s unflappable Andy Taylor ever encountered, is a suspense story about a serial killer. It’s startling to see good-ol’-boy Griffith tracking down a psycho who slips on a ski mask and prowls around a snow-covered resort town by night, blowing away victims with a shotgun and spray-painting the number of each murder near the crime scene. Mayberry, this ain’t.

          Even aside from the novelty of seeing Griffith in a new context, Winter Kill is fairly effective, and with good reason: Screenwriter John Michael Hayes, whose career was winding down at this point, counted three Alfred Hitchcock classics, including the seminal Rear Window (1954), among his past credits, so he clearly learned a few things about generating tension from the Master of Suspense. Winter Kill unfurls in a straightforward fashion, with Sheriff Sam McNeill (Griffith) uncovering his neighbors’ tawdry secrets while he looks for connections between murder victims. This prompts flashbacks showcasing the sordid sex lives of various townies, and we also discover the pressures McNeil faces when he starts treating his constituents as suspects.

          Although the specifics of the story are a bit on the generic side and the supporting cast is largely populated with workaday actors (exception: a young Nick Nolte shows up as a cocky ski instructor), Winter Kill manages to sustain interest from start to finish because Hayes and director Jud Taylor stay focused on the race to catch the killer. Furthermore, the murder scenes are memorable for their docudrama simplicity: Watching the masked killer methodically load his weapon and then trudge through snow toward his next victim preys upon the universal fear of something awful creeping out of the night. And who better to protect us than our beloved Sheriff Andy? If nothing else, Winter Kill is a reminder of Griffith’s versatility, something worth remembering on the sad event of his passing today at the age of 86. (Available at WarnerArchive.com)

Winter Kill: GROOVY

Hearts of the West (1975)

One of several nostalgic ’70s movies set during the early days of Hollywood filmmaking, Hearts of the West is a flawed but charming romantic adventure boasting clever characterizations and a terrific cast. Jeff Bridges stars as Lewis Tater, a naïve Iowan obsessed with becoming a Western pulp writer in the mode of Zane Gray. Through convoluted circumstances, he ends up making his way to Los Angeles circa 1930-ish, where he falls in with a group of crusty cowboy types who make their living doing stunts for a low-rent production company. The rangy story involves an avuncular veteran stuntman with a mysterious past, an eccentric book publisher, gun-toting con men, a hot-tempered studio boss, a wisecracking secretary, and other colorful types. Even with such an overstuffed plot, writer Rob Thompson and director Howard Zieff try to give every character unique flavor, like the unlucky stuntman who always takes the first bullet in onscreen gunfights. As was the case in many of his early pictures, Bridges is powered by enthusiasm and raw talent rather than refined skill, and it’s unfortunate that the dorky vocal style he adopts makes his work feel contrived in comparison with the naturalistic acting of the other players. Blythe Danner, at her liveliest and loveliest, is endearing as the secretary, and Alan Arkin connives and shouts his way through a funny performance as the mood-swinging studio boss. Donald Pleasence contributes memorable weirdness in his brief turn as the publisher, and the rest of the cast is filled out by impeccable character players including Matt Clark, Herb Edelman, Burton Gilliam, Anthony James, Alex Rocco, and Richard B. Shull. Topping all of this off is the venerable Andy Griffith, giving a loose and authoritative performance as the veteran stuntman; in a series of plot developments reflecting this picture’s surprising depth, Griffith’s character takes Tater under his wing but then grows to occupy an unexpected role in the young man’s life. Hearts of the West has big problems (the cartoonish music score is awful, the pacing is inconsistent, and the story relies on overly convenient plot twists), but it’s thoroughly appealing nonetheless. (Available at WarnerArchive.com)

Hearts of the West: GROOVY