User Reviews

The Kookster strikes again! Only he has the connections at the Green Kite--a, to be brutally honest, pretty lame coffeehouse. But everyone has beards at least. Their leader/idol/god to whom they genuflect is Mort Sahl! Yes, the Great One. We still haven't gotten hip enough to catch up to Mort. Roger sings a totally lame-o "folk song," a sort of wimpy Harry Belafonte. And our hero . . . well, I won't give anything away, but although we all know he's the Coolest, he can also be pretty incendiary.

This episode of 77 Sunset Strip has none other than Kookie bringing in a client to Bailey&Spencer. Susanne Edwards is not happy with the coroner's suicide verdict and she wants the real story. Her brother was an up and coming pop singer who took a dive off his apartment roof and she thinks murder.

Instead of Roger Smith going undercover as an undiscovered singer and getting involved in the dirty world of record producer Ted DeCorsia it would have made far more sense to have real teen idol of the time Edd Byrnes do the job. When he did sing a rather insipid folk song the question the viewer asked is why would anyone sign him up. A little old for teen trade Smith was.

Ted DeCorsia is his usual tough villain who keeps his people in line with a little blackmail. He also has his fingers in all aspects of the music industry from controlling and I mean controlling his acts to leg breakers intimidating jukebox owners to making sure his client's records are played. The McClellan committee was investigating the payola racket at the time so the viewers then had a relevance for this episode we don't have now.

Would have been far better with Kookie part of the sting.

Directed with efficiency by the first Hollywood female film maker Ida Lupino, this episode talks about the musical world. In the first scene, we see a man thrown from his balcony by two guys. We soon learn that he was a famous singer and his sister reports our private eyes that his bro did not take his own life. So that's the reason why she doesn't ask directly to the police, I guess. So, the investigation begins, and we assist to a try for Jeff to get into the music - making records - world. A shark world. He impersonates an ambitious singer and guitar player so that he can do a sort of undercover job to exactly discover by whom the young singer was assassinated. And the music record company boss is no else but Ted de Corsia...That sounds like a phony or I should say a very strange music record company, doesn' it? Because Ted de Corsia's characters have never be something else than gangsters or, more rarely, cops.

Good episode.