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Reviews
Hawaii Five-O: Samurai (1968)
Hefty Body Count
The episode "Samurai" has been criticized because of the casting of Ricardo Montalban, who is Mexican, in the role of a Japanese-American businessman who is under indictment for racketeering, who is in fact a Japanese Kamikaze submarine pilot who deserted during World War II. Whether Japanese or Japanese-American, Montalban is indeed miscast, but a greater problem with "Samurai" is its hefty body count tallying 7.
Montalban is wanted by the law in Hawaii for racketeering and murder and wanted by the Bushido in Japan for deserting the Japanese navy during the war. Apparently, he could not go through with a suicide mission in which he would have had to have fired torpedoes into an American battleship at close range and been killed as well.
Montalban arrives at the courthouse to stand trial for racketeering. A Bushido runs up and shoots him down, his bodyguards in turn shoot the Bushido to death as he is running away. Montalban nonchalantly gets up and proceeds to the courtroom courtesy of a bulletproof vest-I did not buy it!
A secretary takes the stand to testify against Montalban, and she keels over dead of poisoning administered through lipstick. With Montalban's Bushido troubles dominating this episode you end up forgetting about this unrelated murder-that he is in fact guilty of-as the episode wears on.
Montalban's men drive up to a pool hall, pull out shotguns and blow away two enforcers who work for rival criminals and who Montalban therefore suspects tried to kill him in the courthouse. Another Bushido-armed with a grenade-waits for Montalban to arrive an office building in his car. When Montalban steps out the Bushido pulls the pin from the grenade, but one of Montalban's bodyguards charges him, and as they are wrestling the lever dislodges and they are both blown to bits. These two scenes amount to a total of 4 deaths (bringing the overall body count to 6) and were totally unnecessary! The first was to illustrate that Montalban initially suspected that a rival criminal tried to have him hit but he was mistaken since in fact it was the Bushido as McGarrett would later explain to him and show him that Bushido's hara kiri sword, although Montalban feigned ignorance of all things Japanese to hide his identity. This scene should have stood alone because then Montalban would have known who was out to get him and he would not have wasted time, energy, and ammunition, i.e., the pool hall scene would not have been necessary, and the episode would not have been as violent. The second was to illustrate to persistence of the Bushido, but all it does is add to the body count unnecessarily. Again, having McGarrett explain to Montalban that the Bushido were out to get him should have been enough, i.e., it should have taken place before four more bodies piled up, thus nullifying any need for those respective scenes.
Montalban desperately needs to go into hiding, so he stages a Bushido siege on his home with McGarrett there to witness it. A Montalban double, wearing his clothes and a ring (that does not fit), is killed by a shotgun blast to the mouth that disfigures his face. When the ring falls off the finger of the body, McGarrett knows that it is a double...just like we the audience do. Withal, the boy count is up to 7.
Eventually, Montalban comes out of hiding after McGarrett uses the latter's daughter as bait. Then all the authorities can charge him with is illegal entry to the United States, dating 26 years earlier when he deserted the Japanese navy by scuttling his sub off the coast of Molokai and swimming ashore into U.S. territory. Why could they not have charged him with the murder of his double? After all, was it not him who ordered that that man be killed by his men in the bogus assault on his home to fake his own death and go into hiding? That was clearly murder!
In the end McGarrett stages a sting in which the authorities are forcing Montalban to board a ship for Japan with apparent Bushido lying in wait (they are in fact the authorities as well). Montalban is petrified but McGarrett says the only thing that can keep him from their clutches is confessing to the murder of his secretary. Montalban kicks and screams as they drag him aboard the ship, but he gives in. At this point you recall: "Oh, yeah...now, I remember...he killed his secretary!" I mean...it was six dead bodies ago!
Also, this was not the first time Ricardo Montalban was miscast as a Japanese: 11 years before "Samurai" in the film Sayonara (1957), he was cast unconvincingly as a Kabuki actor.
Hawaii Five-O: Deathwatch (1968)
"Deathwatch" is right...
"Deathwatch" is right...the viewer of this episode will watch death happen 5 times and laced with utter improbabilities.
A boxman, i.e., safecracker, breaks into the courthouse and cracks the safe in the office of an assistant prosecuting attorney, who is prosecuting a local crime boss (James Shigeta) and steals the evidence against this defendant. The assistant prosecuting attorney happens to enter his office at this very moment and the boxman shoots him to death. Although it seems that this prosecutor unfortunately walked-in on this burglary, as the episode unfolds it seems as though there was a contract out on his life as well. First-of-all, if organized crime were to steal evidence from a prosecutor's office in a courthouse, it would be an inside job; they would never send a boxman for a risky job like that! Second-of-all, organized crime would never kill a prosecutor no matter how strong the case against them, because another prosecutor is just going to pick up where the dead one left of, ergo it would be a waste of time! Furthermore, the whole scene of the prosecutor's pregnant wife seeing his lifeless body and going into premature labor is totally needless!
The girlfriend of the right-hand man (Nehemiah Persoff) of the aforesaid crime boss gets into her boyfriend's car to drive home and get her bathing suit and is killed by a car bomb meant for her boyfriend. This bomb was planted by Shigeta who feared that Persoff was going to inform on him to the authorities about racketeering and murder. Persoff goes on the lamb, then confronts Shigeta and says he is going to testify against him, and then goes to Five-0 and tells McGarrett he is going to help them nail Shigeta. For the latter sequence to have had even a shadow of creditability the confrontation between Persoff and Shigeta should have been erased! A career criminal like Persoff would never have confronted the crime boss who just attempted to have him killed...that would have been committing suicide! Additionally, it is not creditable that Persoff would have lived long enough to go to Five-0 after confronting Shigeta, because even if Shigeta could not have him killed in the open when they met, he easily would have sent men to follow Persoff and kill him at any opportune moment before Persoff reached Five-0!
McGarrett takes Persoff to a hotel to hide out until Shigeta's trial. The moment McGarrett opens the door to Persoff's room a contract killer who was lying in wait starts shooting wildly at them. McGarrett shoots the contract killer dead and Chin goes out to the balcony and finds a rope hung from the roof that the contract killer presumably used to enter the room and would have used to exit the room after killing Persoff. This had to have been the dumbest scene in the entire episode! In the first place, a contract killer is not going to start shooting until his target is dead in his or her sights, and since he obviously could not see through that hotel room door, he had no idea whether Persoff would open the door or not in order to target him! No contract killer would ever be that brainless! In the second place, a contract killer always has a foolproof escape route planned after a hit and the only way for that contract killer to have escaped that room was to use that rope to scale the building either up to the roof or down to the sidewalk! But the with the time it would have taken to scale the building either up or down, in the meantime the cops would have had the roof and the sidewalk covered, hence whether scaling up or down he would have been caught! Also, even if he had by dumb luck killed Persoff and/or pinned the cops down with his gunfire and managed to reach the rope, in all the commotion he created he have might fallen to his death while scaling the building up or down! Persoff recognized the contract killer and referred to him as a "good gun" but it is plain to see that the evidence does not bear any of that out! On the contrary, he comes off as the stupidest contract killer on the face of the earth! Plus, that McGarrett still has Persoff stay in the hotel despite this botched hit is completely stupid! It is obvious that Shigeta knows where Five-0 has Persoff holed-up, so would they not move him pronto? And Steve McGarrett is not stupid!
The boxman who stole the evidence and murdered the prosecutor is cornered by Danny and Chin and tries to shoot his way out. Then Shigeta's men drive up and gun him down. It turns out that this boxman was a heroin addict! As mentioned before organized crime would never be moronic enough to try to crack a courthouse safe to steal evidence or kill a prosecutor, but even if they did execute such a job, they would never be so moronic as to employ a junkie to execute it! That would be nothing but self-destructive!
Persoff's character wants water for his scotch and an HPD officer goes to get some. He tests the water and falls dead from poison meant for Persoff! At this point you are crying out loud: "Not another dead body...for Pete's sake!" It appears that Shigeta has even poisoned the water supply of the hotel! Again, would not it have made sense to find someplace else to hide Persoff after the botched hit, not only for his safety (which at this point you can care less about) but for the safety of the authorities protecting his worthless life! Despite all the dangerous circumstances here, that police officer's death could have been prevented if not for the uncharacteristic stupidity of Five-0!
In all, "Deathwatch" is a totally improbable episode that is unequivocally not worth viewing.
By the way, 8 years earlier Jack Lord and James Shigeta played antagonists in the movie Walk Like a Dragon (1960), albeit that time Shigeta's character was actually a good guy.
Hawaii Five-O: Strangers in Our Own Land (1968)
Good idea. Pathetic Execution.
One of the criticisms of "Strangers in Our Own Land" is that the actor Simon Oakland did not look like a native Hawaiian. As indubitable as this is, a far greater problem here is that the moment you see Simon Oakland you automatically know that he is going to be playing the villain because in episodic television Simon Oakland almost invariably played villains-and by 1968 he was already that typecast! Indeed, even before he tells McGarrett to pin a medal on the murderer of the victim (who was his best friend) you know that he is in fact the murderer!
Another criticism of this episode is that when the victim-who was the state land commissioner-was killed by a bomb, a taxicab driver was killed as well but Five-0 never considered that he might have been the target despite that the land commissioner was more likely. Reasonably, the cab driver was collateral damage, but what is disappointing is that never in the episode is it even mentioned that he was killed along with the land commissioner! And this is totally out-of-character, for a righteous peace officer like Steve McGarrett would certainly have regarded the life of a cab driver as equally important with the life of a public official!
The scene with Milton Selzer as the sad sack bookkeeper who confesses to murdering the land commissioner just to get attention plays so obviously it ends up being an unnecessary distraction. Milton Selzer is another actor who was typecast-in his case playing sad sacks-but this is beside the point! He claims to be a contract killer, but since when do contract killers go to the authorities and confess to a murder they have committed? Contract killers do their business and leave without drawing any attention to themselves! Besides, who ever heard of a contract killer named Lester Willighby?
What was also unconvincing was when McGarrett confers with the Governor (Richard Denning), who tells him that the land commissioner was a warm soul who waived his salary and worked for $1.00/year! Especially since when McGarrett interviews the victim's wife at her home and you see how well she and her late husband lived! Perhaps, the land commissioner had a previous career in which he made enough money for he and his wife to live on, but I just did not buy it that he would have been so magnanimous he would have worked for next to nothing!
Then there was the end where Simon Oakland attempts to kill the contractor with a bulldozer. Where does a Honolulu nightclub owner learn how to operate a bulldozer? Perhaps he served in the Seabees or the Corps of Engineers during World War II and/or worked for the CCC as a young man, but it just does not play convincingly! And his fate is thoroughly gratuitous: Five-0 arrives in the nick of time and as he is driving toward the contractor, McGarrett shoots him in the arm and he ends up crashing the bulldozer into a demolition shed and is blown to bits! A gunshot wound and then an explosion...after all that excess, I just wished that they had plain taken him alive!
While the idea was certainly good the execution of "Strangers in Our Own Land" was pathetic- especially because of the latter! After all, for centuries it has been the whites (who were originally colonists) who have benefitted from the development of Hawaii, while the native Hawaiians have found themselves on the outside looking in, and they were utilized by the whites as virtual slave labor in this development even after they became citizens of the United States. But they did not hardly scratch the surface in exploring this issue.
Incidentally, the scene of the murder of the land commissioner (the exploded taxicab) was used in a photograph 10 years later in the action flick Good Guys Wear Black (1978), when Chuck Norris is investigating the death of one of his fellow Vietnam vets.