This episode of "The Commissioner" is inadvertently of historical interest in its Pollyannaish approach to a serious topic: dealing with the vast number of displaced persons seeking a new home after World War II. Donlevy is assigned by the commissioner to travel to Casablanca where 700 displaced persons are living in makeshift quarters within a large warehouse. They've been promised a voyage to a nearby small island in the Mediterranean to set up their own new "country" and Donlevy is being sent to find out who amongst them is a malcontent trying to sabotage the resettlement plan.
It turns out to be Henry Rowland, a construction engineer who is easy to spot as the bad guy in hindsight -especially by me who had long enjoyed his work as a regular playing Nazis and other villains in Russ Meyer soft porn movies in the '60s. Climax has the folks on a ship headed for their promised Valhalla, with Donlevy defusing a time bomb Rowland has set in just seconds before it's set to explode (planned to destroy the ship and everyone aboard) in the worst such sequence I've ever seen on screen. (The best being David Hemmings in "Juggernaut".)
Along the way there's a particularly saccharine scene of Donlevy befriending a cute little refugee girl Nina (Sandy Descher, billed on-screen as Jeanine Caruso, later immortalized as the frightened kid in the monster movie "Them!"). He makes up, out of whole cloth, a picture of a happy, carefree future on the island for them, including "chirping squirrels", that is textbook sugarcoating of a serious issue, just to cheer up the kid.
That hokey scene, and the fake derring-do of our hero leading to a very phony happy ending is typical of how history routinely is watered-down and distorted for a TV audience. In reality, tens of millions of people were displaced in Europe at the end of the war, living in crowded camps (parallelling today's crisis especially in the Middle East and South/Central America) ultimately relocated in places as far away as Australia. The United States eventually took in, very, very reluctantly, as many as half a million, but there was no magical island in the Mediterranean for them to start a new life on their own.
Watching this dreary episode over 70 years after it was broadcast, I thought of Otto Preminger's epic "Exodus", dealing with Jews leaving Cyprus on a ship for the Promised Land, which I saw in 1960 upon its roadshow release. Otto's budget was well over a thousand times that of the cost of this 1/2-hour tv episode, but even taking that into account, Donlevy and company came up with zero quality in all respects.
It turns out to be Henry Rowland, a construction engineer who is easy to spot as the bad guy in hindsight -especially by me who had long enjoyed his work as a regular playing Nazis and other villains in Russ Meyer soft porn movies in the '60s. Climax has the folks on a ship headed for their promised Valhalla, with Donlevy defusing a time bomb Rowland has set in just seconds before it's set to explode (planned to destroy the ship and everyone aboard) in the worst such sequence I've ever seen on screen. (The best being David Hemmings in "Juggernaut".)
Along the way there's a particularly saccharine scene of Donlevy befriending a cute little refugee girl Nina (Sandy Descher, billed on-screen as Jeanine Caruso, later immortalized as the frightened kid in the monster movie "Them!"). He makes up, out of whole cloth, a picture of a happy, carefree future on the island for them, including "chirping squirrels", that is textbook sugarcoating of a serious issue, just to cheer up the kid.
That hokey scene, and the fake derring-do of our hero leading to a very phony happy ending is typical of how history routinely is watered-down and distorted for a TV audience. In reality, tens of millions of people were displaced in Europe at the end of the war, living in crowded camps (parallelling today's crisis especially in the Middle East and South/Central America) ultimately relocated in places as far away as Australia. The United States eventually took in, very, very reluctantly, as many as half a million, but there was no magical island in the Mediterranean for them to start a new life on their own.
Watching this dreary episode over 70 years after it was broadcast, I thought of Otto Preminger's epic "Exodus", dealing with Jews leaving Cyprus on a ship for the Promised Land, which I saw in 1960 upon its roadshow release. Otto's budget was well over a thousand times that of the cost of this 1/2-hour tv episode, but even taking that into account, Donlevy and company came up with zero quality in all respects.
