This TV movie was the third pilot for a series in which the feds would recruit an amateur each week to help them carry out a complex law enforcement mission. This aired partway through the seventh and final season of the original Mission: Impossible series, and plays very much like a padded episode from that show's declining years.
It's got Mission star Peter Graves as the lead, a U. S. Justice Department official tasked with rescuing an informant from the clutches of the mob and their impenetrable fortified beachfront enclave ("with the latest in electronic security," little of which we see). To penetrate it, all Graves needs is a guy with three valuable skill sets: archer, beekeeper, and stock car driver!
Thanks to an oversized 1973 computer, the government finds three men in Southern California with archery-beekeeping-stock car driving experience. The best qualified, played by Clu Gulager, has a sore arm and hasn't won a race in a long time. Is he really the right man for the job? We get a few scenes of a lovely government agent (Diana Muldaur) recruiting this poor schnook and rehearsing the mission, which includes surreptitiously shooting an arrow through a window.
Meanwhile, Peter Graves goes undercover romancing Tina Louise. (In an amusing goof, she invites him up to her room, 5-D, but we cut directly to a stock footage shot of an apartment building, which pans and zooms up to a much higher floor.) He also deals with assorted gangsters to set up the complex plot, gets involved in a car-and-foot chase through a parking garage (which must have seemed a lot fresher in '73), and does a death-defying dive into a swimming pool.
Eventually, it all leads to the utterly improbable, but entertaining, arrow shootin'-beekeepin'-stock car drivin' climax!
Writer-producer Laurence Heath was Mission: Impossible's most prolific writer, and although his scripts usually lacked the sparkle of, say, William Read Woodfield and Allan Balter, or Paul Playdon, he could generally be counted on to come up with something competent and watchable with at least one quirky facet, which is exactly what he does here. So if you enjoy late Mission's poker-faced recounting of ludicrous crime stories, this is for you.
If only it had gone to series, Peter Graves might have spent years teaming up with stockbroker-ski instructor-hog callers, barber-locksmith-stamp collectors, and acrobat-mathematician-horseshoe champions in the fight against evil.
It's got Mission star Peter Graves as the lead, a U. S. Justice Department official tasked with rescuing an informant from the clutches of the mob and their impenetrable fortified beachfront enclave ("with the latest in electronic security," little of which we see). To penetrate it, all Graves needs is a guy with three valuable skill sets: archer, beekeeper, and stock car driver!
Thanks to an oversized 1973 computer, the government finds three men in Southern California with archery-beekeeping-stock car driving experience. The best qualified, played by Clu Gulager, has a sore arm and hasn't won a race in a long time. Is he really the right man for the job? We get a few scenes of a lovely government agent (Diana Muldaur) recruiting this poor schnook and rehearsing the mission, which includes surreptitiously shooting an arrow through a window.
Meanwhile, Peter Graves goes undercover romancing Tina Louise. (In an amusing goof, she invites him up to her room, 5-D, but we cut directly to a stock footage shot of an apartment building, which pans and zooms up to a much higher floor.) He also deals with assorted gangsters to set up the complex plot, gets involved in a car-and-foot chase through a parking garage (which must have seemed a lot fresher in '73), and does a death-defying dive into a swimming pool.
Eventually, it all leads to the utterly improbable, but entertaining, arrow shootin'-beekeepin'-stock car drivin' climax!
Writer-producer Laurence Heath was Mission: Impossible's most prolific writer, and although his scripts usually lacked the sparkle of, say, William Read Woodfield and Allan Balter, or Paul Playdon, he could generally be counted on to come up with something competent and watchable with at least one quirky facet, which is exactly what he does here. So if you enjoy late Mission's poker-faced recounting of ludicrous crime stories, this is for you.
If only it had gone to series, Peter Graves might have spent years teaming up with stockbroker-ski instructor-hog callers, barber-locksmith-stamp collectors, and acrobat-mathematician-horseshoe champions in the fight against evil.
