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Crooked Lines is a good-natured comedy. Yes, some of the actors have no comedic talent (they look like neighborhood locals). Best performance came from Mario Cantone as a hyper-active gambler specializing in Hockey, of all things. And the scenes between Cantone and his Bull Terrier are hysterical. And the cameo of David Johansen wasn't bad either...quite funny actually. Ben Stiller was involved in the production and his mom Anne Meara had a supporting role. Jim Breuer wasn't bad, but the other leads lacked true comic timing.

Movie was filmed in south-eastern Brooklyn neighborhoods of Gerritsen Beach, Marine Park and Mill Basin. One or more of the production personnel hailed from one of those neighborhoods.

"The Clones" really stands out as having a truly science-fiction based storyline, that for it's time (1969), was just only being discussed in mainstream media because of real experiments that had been done on frogs (as mentioned in the episode).

I suspect writer Oliver Crawford deliberately focused on the character of Dan because actor Don Marshall turned in a superb performance in the the "Star Trek" episode "The Galileo Seven", which coincidentally Oliver Crawford had also written. The main cast (except for Heather Young) are excellent in their roles...particularly Deanna Lund and Stefan Arngrim who get to play 'bad guys' for a change as their evil duplicates.

Interesting how Dan's race becomes a major point in the story to determine who is and who isn't a clone. Nice dramatic points and certainly one of the earliest TV series to deal with the subject of cloning. SF shows prior to this used the term 'duplicates' as the scientific term of cloning had not yet been added to the American lexicon.

Guest star William Schallert turns in a fine performance as not necessarily and evil scientist but more as a determined man who doesn't see the flaws in his methods.

Guest props include the cryogenic tubes from "Lost in Space", and assorted IBM SAGE equipment left over from "The Time Tunnel" in the lab sequences.

Being an Irwin Allen aficionado, I went an purchased the DVD to this TV-movie. While the premise is a good one, the casting is a bit askew as Desi Arnaz, Jr. is grossly miscast as a bank robber (his acting is so forced it's pathetic). James MacArthur delivers his lines in a bored, detached, almost nonchalant manner. There was really no reason this movie couldn't have been done as a traditional 2-hour event. Instead we get loads of soap opera histrionics (in flashback) to fill-out the second-half, showing how the various characters -- now stuck on the collapsing bridge -- first crossed paths with one another. A similar script was done for the equally dull and excruciating, "Hanging by a Thread" (1978). The saving grace for this film was the physical and miniature effects. For TV in the late 70s, the effect of the full-scale bridge set coming apart was quite well done, as was the model-work showing larger spans breaking away and falling into the river below.

Irwin Allen was at his end with Warner Bros. at the time he made this (1979). It was his last TV project before moving over to Columbia Pictures the following year, and clearly, Warner Bros. had no real faith in the project, hence it's airing on NBC nearly four years after it was made(1983), and on a night when it was due to be clobbered in the ratings (aired against the final episode of M*A*S*H on CBS).