User Reviews

After a last week's pure fun episode Route 66 comes back to it's roots of being a travelogue with drama. Robert Walker Jr. proves the apple doesn't fall far from the tree as he is introduced in the shadow of his great actor father as Michael. Buz and Tod arrive in Oregon City, Oregon and check into a rooming house. Right away, with the simultaneous arrival of Maggie, Michael's estranged aunt there is much tension. The house is a home splintered and Michael is five months away from being 21 at which time he is proclaiming he is evicting his guardian aunt, uncle, and their young daughter.

As the story progresses we learn Michael's parents are long deceased and he has an inner turmoil in which he has separated himself from all attachments save a young girl whose three brothers will stop at nothing to keep him away from their sister. The boarding house is a cauldron of animosity and fear. The episode progresses whereby the estranged aunt, reduced to admission of her failings, becomes a healing bridge. As a regular viewer of Route 66 it is this kind of "location" drama that rings true and involves the viewer. Milner and Maharris are, for the most part, sidelined as the excellent supporting cast propels the story. Dark, enjoyable,and in the end uplifting this episode delivers fairly well. It ends with Michael gaining a moral compass, opening up to his family, and facing his fears.

Zoom! We're back in Oregon for an episode that is considerably less than the sum of its parts. The boys get a job in a saw mill, (we briefly see them operating the equipment). But the story isn't there. It's at the boarding house where they are staying with a menagerie of characters that seem to be from a Tennessee Williams play, or maybe "You Can't Take it With You".

Those characters are the "parts" that don't add up. Betty Field is back as the woman who runs the place. She has a sideline conducting séances. Her husband, (James Dunn), makes impractical inventions. Also on board is her recently arrived spinster sister, (Nina Foch- last seen as a mental patient in "A Bridge Across Five Days"- and she could be the same person here, trying to find solace in her bible and a place to live, physically and mentally), and the troubled son of her deceased brother, (Robert Walker Jr.), who happens to own the place and wants everyone out when he hits age 21 in five months. He's also conducting a romance with neighborhood girl- to the displeasure of her brother and his gang, that chase him all over the town when he's not holed up in the house he will soon own. He also seems to be a prisoner of his nasty attitude.

It all ends with Foch delivering the longest, most dramatic speech of the series, fighting through her tears to describe what it's been like to not connect with people and wind up as lonely as she's been. It's not clear what this really has to do with Walker's problems but he smiles as if to say that he'll be a nice guy now and steps outside, High Noon style, to face his tormentors, at which points the credits roll. It all seems very powerful but I really didn't get how these different personal stories really fit together.