User Reviews

In this rather funny episode, the Germans have built a radio tower right outside of Stalag 13 that will help detect incoming Allied aircraft. And when General Burkhalter puts Klink in charge of security you know it will only be a matter of time before Hogan's gang will have to find a way to destroy the tower.

But because Burkhalter has puts Klink's job on the line if anything should happen to the tower, Hogan will have to think of a scheme to protect Klink and make the fall guy someone else. Hogan picks General Burkhalter.

With help for a lovely underground lady, there will be some scandalous pictures of Burkhalter taken at a party. These pictures could prove to an embarrassment to the General where he could lose his command. So Burkhalter will have to place the blame on someone else other than our friendly Klink.

The best part of the entire episode is at the party where Klink has invited Burkhalter to look at his new girlfriend. Yet Burkhalter is the one that the lady pays most attention -to the dislike of Klink, but to the delight of the General. The picture scenes are really enjoyable. Nice watch.

In the argument over what is the world's oldest profession, spying often tangles with prostitution, and for good reason: The honeytrap is a time-honored tool of tradecraft, an attractive woman who can seduce or compromise a man (if those aren't one and the same) in the name of God and country. In "The Tower," Colonel Hogan calls on an underground contact, Lili (Elisa Ingram), to perform such a service to enable the Heroes, the intelligence and sabotage unit operating covertly from German prisoner-of-war camp Stalag 13, to carry out the sabotage part this time out.

Smoothly scripted by Laurence Marks, "The Tower" indeed plays like another one of his taut capers driven by a plausible premise: The Germans have built a radio tower near Stalag 13 as part of an early-warning communications network to alert German fighters sooner to the approach of Allied bombers; scrambling them earlier increases the odds of shooting down more bombers and saving more targets from destruction. Knocking out the tower seems necessary, right?

Right. Only . . . As "Hogan's Heroes" neared the end of its second season, its formula approach, endemic to situation comedies, particularly those from the 1960s, made crafting variations on the theme a challenge. Here, we have the target that must be destroyed, only the Germans know that by placing it near a POW camp the Allies won't bomb it for fear of killing their own personnel, so it falls to the Heroes to do the figurative wetwork on it. General Burkhalter makes Stalag 13 commandant Colonel Klink responsible for the tower's security--under threat of a transfer to the Russian Front should he fail. Knowing this, Hogan must find a way to compromise Burkhalter so he won't punish Klink after the operation, otherwise he might get a new commandant who is, you know, competent and thus possibly shut down their mission.

Enter Lili, who had first led the Heroes to the tower and now takes umbrage at Hogan's idea of sending a secret-admirer mash note to Klink, whom Hogan gets to invite Lili to camp for dinner while also inviting Burkhalter, who Hogan knows will move in on Lili. Rank has its privileges, don't you know?

If you don't recognize some of these tropes, you will, because they will crop up again and again. C'est la guerre. That's not to say that the dinner party is not the highlight of "The Tower," with Ingram in the spotlight as the honeytrap sticking to Burkhalter--to Klink's chagrin--while Sergeant Kinchloe, lurking in the darkness outside the window, takes one compromising photo of the cozy couple after another to blackmail the married general as director Gene Reynolds frames and paces the scene to maximum seriocomic effect, abetted by supervising editor Jerry London.

And like a good soldier, Marks writes to spec. Only there's no spark, just professional competence in trotting out the tropes. For "The Tower," lazy Laurence calls it in.