Director: Howard Avedis
Writers: Ralph B. Potts, Howard Avedis, and Marlene Schmidt, based on the book by Ralph B. Potts
From: Cult Cinema
A spiteful lawyer hires a woman to seduce his legal opponent leading to unintended consequences for both sides.
The movie stars Adam West and opens with a titular theme song sung by Lou Rawls. So you know we've peaked in the first five minutes and can just jump to the end.
Pike Smith is the former lawyer for the local water company. He’s outraged at being replaced by the new hotshot Jerry Bounds (Adam West). Smith’s family has long held control over the town and is responsible for a lot of its current state. The water company firing him is a move to wrest control from the family and start letting the town develop on its own. Smith, of course, objects, and takes the water company to court to try to have it dissolved.
Which is the first curious point about this movie. The IMDB synopsis says the court battle is over the use of a local lake when it’s about dominance. On the other hand, IMDB says this is a “thriller” so it’s clear I’m the first person to have ever actually watched this movie.
Smith wants to guarantee his victory so he hires Alec Sharkey to spy on West. Sharkey says it’ll be difficult because West is pretty on-the-level. However, Sharkey does know a woman, the titular Specialist, who excels at seducing men. If Smith can get her on the jury, she can seduce West, opening him up to charges of jury tampering and getting him disbarred. Smith agrees and Londa Wyeth is brought to town.
She gets on the jury, aggressively pursues West, and is photographed “frolicking” with him on the lakeshore. West is off the case, but he and his wife pursue information about Londa and eventually track her down. They file disbarment charges against Smith for setting this whole thing up. Londa and Sharkey are both subpoenaed and Sharkey goes to Smith to work out a price for Sharkey and Londa to disappear. He pulls a gun on Smith, but Smith manages to choke him to death.
Londa testifies at the disbarment hearing that West didn’t initiate contact and refused to discuss issues related to the case. Since she never met Smith, she doesn’t say anything about him. West gets disbarred, it seems like Smith has won, but on the steps to the building West yells at Smith, “I’m not a lawyer anymore,” and shoots him. THE END
I wanted to write about how middling and goofy this movie is. I mean, it’s not sure if it’s a sex comedy without any sex or an erotic thriller without any eroticism so it ends up being nothing. Plus it has the additional problem of having an unsympathetic villain who’s right. When Smith hires the Specialist, he says that if West is the kind of person who’d have an affair with a juror then it’s best for everyone if he get exposed. Granted, Smith is doing it for purely selfish and petty reasons, but he’s not wrong. In the end, West is disbarred because he did exactly what he’s accused of.
So I was going to write about all of that, but then I read deeper into the IMDB pages of the people involved with this movie and oh my golly! This is six degrees of “possibly Nazi? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯”
Okay, okay, okay, so the director Howard Avedis has two other movies on these box sets that I still haven’t seen yet. He cast himself as the PI/fixer Alec Sharkey so you get to see him on-screen, but so what?
Avedis is married to his co-writer, Marlene Schmidt, who appears in all of Avedis’ movies. Here she plays West’s loyal and dedicated wife. She’s also where things get, narratively, interesting. According to her IMDB bio, she was raised in Soviet East Germany and fled in 1960 to the West. She became an electronics engineer, then Miss Germany and Miss Universe.
Sidenote, how isn’t that a movie?
After becoming Miss Universe, Schmidt married Ty Hardin, a beefcake player in Western movies and tv shows. They divorced after a few years and she ended up with Avedis. I’m not sure if this is pettiness or coincidence (I want to believe it’s pettiness), but in this movie, Smith’s idiot son who ends up causing everything to come crashing down on Smith is named “Hardin.” They named the hippie-dippie, half-smart, poseur artist after her ex. In retrospect, a pretty bold move since, according to IMDB, Hardin
became a self-proclaimed "freedom fighter" in the 1970s, and led a radical right-wing group called The Arizona Patriots, an anti-Semitic/anti-immigrant/anti-black group with a penchant for stockpiling weapons and baiting public officials.
It goes on from there! Seriously, skip this movie, it’s a merely passable mediocrity that “ehs” its way through its uninspired plot. However, I highly recommend reading the entire IMDB bio page for Ty Hardin and check out The Nizkor Project page for the Arizona Patriots. That stuff is terrifying and wild.
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