User Reviews

Once again, I felt very satisfied watching this episode of "Police Story" because the plot was so very different from those in other cop shows. And, it was awfully entertaining as well.

John Saxon stars as Detective Cavelli--a cop who works undercover. His latest case involves some scum-bags who work for a department store chain. Their scam involves finding shoplifters with records trying to rip off the store and then having them come to work for them--using fake credit cards to scam their stores! But this isn't all of it--these guys are seriously dangerous and have even killed several of these shoplifters! This is obviously a super-dangerous case, as Cavelli is posing as a career shoplifter and has infiltrated their organization. While this is pretty intense, it's even tougher for Cavelli because he's trying to balance all this with his screwed up home life. He's divorced and his daughter is coming for a visit--but he's so under cover that he can't break cover to spend time with her.

All in all, extremely well written and very tense--especially with the scary ending. Well worth seeing and one of Saxon's better roles.

By the way, Tina Louise plays one of the gang members and the leader is played by Rory Calhoun. Howard Duff plays Cavelli's boss.

This episode tells the story of Rick Cavelli (John Saxon), a detective who is trying to find the balance between his undercover work and his fractured home life when his young daughter visits. After an informant with ties to credit scams ends up dead, Cavelli pretends to be a small time con and is quickly taken in by two guys who run a department store and are running credit scams. This is a very good episode and features some really brutal violence (rape, torture), especially for early 70s TV. Saxon, as always, is good. His hair? Not so much. The rapport between him and the team leader is quite good as well. Also, there is a nice tension when Saxon tries to visit his sick daughter without letting the crooks know who he is.

I remind watching this episode back in 1978. Because of John Saxon. I won't add much to the other comment, except that this story doesn't look like the other, the typical Jo Wambaugh scheme about the routine street cops in uniform or not, the procedure stuff, so typical for TV series. Here, in this episode, you have an undercover cop scheme, which would have been rather for a long length movie picture instead a simple episode. But that doesn't prevent this story to be excellent, tense, sharp, very well done and acted with so many oldies such as Tina Louise, Rory Calhoun, David Brian, Howard Duff...Calhoun is impressive as the gang leader, especially with his check jacket...Some violent scenes too. Yes, I repeat, that's a very unusual episode for the show, but also one of the best so far.