1993 - THE RETURN OF IRONSIDE, closing the loop.

The previous post looked at the TV pilot for Raymond Burr's Ironside series.  The chief selling point of The Return of Ironside was as a reunion show which had Burr back with the original cast from his old TV series.  The movie was filmed on location in Denver, Colorado at Burr's insistence.  Burr had a great fondness for the city.

In the 1970's these television reunion shows were all the rage.  The baby boomer crowd got to relive the hours they spent in from of their television sets watching stuff like, The Return of the Mod Squad, Rescue From Gilligan's Island, The Munster's Revenge,  etc.  Believe me the list is endless. 

The plot of this film is almost incidental.  The original cast was Don Galloway as Ed Brown, Barbara Anderson as Eve Whitfield, Don Mitchell as Mark Sanger and Anderson's replacement Elizabeth Baur as Fran Belding who took over the sexy female cop role after Anderson left the series.  The story of this rather contrived movie involves Anderson's daughter played by Perrey Reeves being framed for a murder she didn't commit by some corrupt cops, yes that old narrative chestnut.

 

Burr was back in the wheelchair but this time he needed it in real life as he was now dying from cancer.  In fact The Return of Ironside was aired after Burr's death.  Burr at age 76, was still the old performing trooper and although visibly ill he's the main reason to watch this plodding crime thriller.  The movie spends way to much time on the Perrey Reeves character's boring love life at the expense of Burr's interaction with his old cast mates.

 

You can spend a few minutes on the Wikipedia entry for Raymond Burr, it's fascinating reading.  He was a closeted actor his entire life and had a long career working in film, theater, radio and finally TV.  The Return of Ironside is a real nostalgia wallow.

The film was written by Collier Young, Rob Hedden and William Woodfield, the running time is 89 minutes.     

1979 - THE BLACK HOLE, good looking science fiction film

Disney's attempt to grab some of the Star Wars money came up short.  The Black Hole has impressive special effects and production design like Star Wars.  It also had some of the worst aspects of that series, comical robots and lots of laser blasts. 

Disney also kind of blew it with their cast.  There was nothing particularly wrong with hiring Anthony Perkins, Ernest Borgnine, Yvette Mimieux, Robert Forrester, Timothy Bottoms and Maximilian Schell as a retread Captain Nemo character. However casting a bunch of middle aged actors wasn't going to seem very hip and cool to the targeted teenage audience.

The story was also very derivative as well.  The original Star Wars film may have borrowed from about every film that George Lucas could think of (Triumph of the Will, The Searchers etc) but at least he was able to steal and reuse ideas from those films in sort of clever ways.  The Black Hole's problem was that it was stealing ideas from Star Wars, so you had a situation where a film was stealing ideas from a film that had stolen ideas from other films.

Still the film looks good and has enough action and special effects to pass the time.  The robot battles are pretty lame with some very stiff robots shooting it out with our space heroes.  The comical robot V.I.N.C.E.N.T. gets all the good lines in the film and was voiced by Roddy McDowell who for some reason didn't receive any screen credit.  The voice of the robot B.O.B. was Slim Pickens in probably the only real clever joke in the film.

Written by  Gerry Day and Jeb Rosebrook the running time is 98 minutes.