One for the Road

You know very well that when a group of men, down on their luck, decide to take out an insurance policy on an old sot, that things just aren't going to work out. Everyone is suffering during the depression. In the bar are the usual alcoholics plus a priest played by James Cromwell, one of our finest actors. The way the old guy drinks, his days are probably numbered. The key word is probably. When he doesn't die of natural causes or from his excessive drinking of Scotch (which they supply at great expense), they decide to help things along, including the ingesting of anti-freeze, turpentine, and rat poison. The episode has a nice ending which it must have because everything else is so outrageous.

A group of bar flies are talking about a widow who struck it rich. It seems that she heard that there was a contract out on her husband and instead of warning him, she took out a huge insurance policy on him and struck it rich when he was knocked off! One of them has an idea--find a worthless person and heavily insure him and then arrange his death so they can collect on an insurance policy. They pick Mike Malloy (Douglas Seale--who played Santa a few episodes earlier) and then they'll become rich, right? All they need to do is keep giving him whiskey and wait for him to croak! Well, maybe not.

In addition to Seale, the episode stars a bunch of familiar character actors--James Cromwell, Joe Pantiliano, Geoffery Lewis and Royal Dano. It's nice to see these guys and it's a fun episode--in many ways reminiscent of the dark comedy "The Lavender Hill Mob". Well done.