User Reviews

There are several weak spots to this episode but it is also rather lively and entertaining. The large cast is mostly unfamiliar and it has a noticeable lack of any of the regular series characters,which is unusual. The story is kept clicking along at a quick pace to make up for the fact that the story itself is rather murky and weak for a Rockford Files episode. But it is indeed different,interesting and entertaining,and it does have it's moments. Rockford has several quite funny quips and wry comments to share throughout the busy episode.

By all means,watch and see for yourself!

That first line by Rockford, as he discovers mail has been erroneously been sent to his trailer under a different name, sorta defines the quality episode that follows. It's a big shrug of an episode that sorta limps along, simply existing and bidding its time.

And soon enough Federal agents whisk Jim down to South America, along with a phony passport for him, to make contact with a heiress, who is being sequestered by her poor, domineering husband. The setup is contrived - especially as the second consecutive episode with this story entry point - and Rockford never straight up says, "I'm not who you think I am," before the situation escalates outside his trailer and he is on the private jet.

A riff on spies mixed with cases of mistaken identity, ala North By Northwest, should be a slam dunk at this point in the run when it was a dependable story engine for much of the episodes. So why does this feel so dire? Garner delivers and has great chemistry with Dorrie Kavanaugh. But, it never rises to the scale as it should for such a story.

Mexico is represented as an abandoned building off a airstrip, the Mexican street set on the Universal Backlot and a derelict bus that inexplicably picks up Jim and Christine and a few watering holes. The great Juanita Bartlett does what she can here, but it is clearly a rush job, defined by end of season budget restrictions, and the resources ready and available (and possibly by the upcoming feature-length season finale).

I'm imagining this episode taking place at the beginning of a season when it could have been finely tuned and it's all the more revealing and disappointing.

"South By Southeast" is definitely a below-average Rockford, bearing all the hallmarks of an episode churned out in an exhausted frenzy as the production season neared its end.

For the second episode in a row, Jim is mistaken for someone else, thereby launching him into a dangerous situation. Unfortunately, the reason behind the mistaken identity is particularly contrived this time around. Even worse, everything that happens to get Jim over the border (in order to get the story running) is clearly the work of a desperate scriptwriter hoping that by keeping things moving, the gargantuan plot holes don't become too obvious. Surprisingly, this is a Juanita Bartlett episode, which makes it particularly shocking -- she's usually pretty solid at plot mechanics.

Of course, Juanita's also good at character and dialogue, and there are some absorbing moments in the episode when Jim deals with a spoiled-but-sympathetic heiress. However, the rest of the cast barely registers, and everyone in this story behaves pretty stupidly pretty much all of the time. In particular, the villain of the piece has an especially dumb and transparent criminal plan he's trying to execute.

Is the end result of all this terrible? No. But "South By Southeast" only gets as far as it does on the appeal of James Garner, and a fairly good performance from Dorrie Kavanaugh. For a lesser P.I. series -- Simon & Simon, say -- this would merely be a mediocre episode. But for The Rockford Files? It's quite frankly a disappointment.

This segment started out well, especially the scenes when Rockford is mistaken for a federal agent and is driven place to place to meet a supervisor who's never the right one, and then he ends up on a plane to another country to find an heiress, although I can't quite recall the reasoning behind it. It appears that she's unhappy and held against her will, and that she knew the agent that Rockford supposedly is mistaken for. Right off the bat, I felt a lack of chemistry between Jim and Dorrie Kavanaugh's character Christine, and I felt the longer they hung together, the more clichéd their relationship became; boy meets girl, girl despises boy, girl feels sorry for boy, boy charms girl, girl likes boy, and so on. I usually dislike episodes when Jim falls for the girl, even though this woman is married; why does he need to hold her hand at the restaurant, and what did he expect to happen? There's another moment that I'm left scratching my head; Jim discovers the husband has been giving her arsenic, not pain killers, for her headache. My problem is that the husband leaves the poison out in the open for anyone to see, and voila, Jim discovers it. Is she too dumb to see what he's giving her, or is the husband too dumb not to hide the arsenic? There's no Rocky, Angel, or Dennis to add to the disappointment. The final moments have Christine wanting to meet Rocky and Jim's cat(did you know he had one?)and go back home with him, but Jim the cowboy turns her down, but proceeds to give her a big kiss to end the show. I'll make sure to watch something else the next time this show rounds the corner again, and I recommend you do the same also.