The Five Best Episodes of "Banacek"

Banacek with his trademark cigar.

George Peppard starred as free-lance, Boston-based insurance investigator Thomas Banacek in a pilot movie and 16 episodes of Banacek. The series aired as part of the NBC Wednesday Mystery Movie in 1972-74. He was assisted in each episode by his friend, bookstore owner (and researcher) Felix (Murray Matheson) and chauffeur Jay (Ralph Manza). The episodes were typically 75 minutes (without commercials) and focused on elaborate thefts. Here are our picks for the five best episodes:

Stefanie Powers.

1. Let's Hear It for a Living Legend  - A professional football player disappears from the field during a nationally televised game. An ingenious, yet deceptively simple, crime highlights this episode that also features Stefanie Powers as a guest star. She and series star George Peppard have great chemistry; it's a shame she couldn't return for a second outing. An added bonus for NFL fans is the brief appearances from real-life former players John Brodie, Ben Davidson, and Deacon Jones.

2. No Stone Unturned - A massive three-ton piece of modern art is stolen from a museum. We're talking an object so large that the museum's glass front had to be removed so the artwork could be emplaced by a crane. So how was it nabbed during an opening night party without anyone knowing? I admit that my enjoyment of this episode was enhanced by the fact that I figured out how the basics of how the theft was accomplished!

Margot Kidder.

3. A Million the Hard Way - A Las Vegas casino has one million dollars stolen from a tamper-proof display case in the middle of a busy room with an armed guard on duty. This may be the most complex caper in the Banacek series. Plus, Margot Kidder is on hand as a part-time photographer, displaying the kind of spunk that would earn her the role of Lois Lane in Superman (1978).

4. Fly Me — If You Can Find Me - A jet has to make an emergency landing at a small desert airport. One pilot stays with the aircraft while the other crew members spend the night in a nearby motel. The next morning, the airplane and the pilot are gone! This is another crime which is clever despite its simplicity. If you think about it, there's really only one way the plane could have been stolen. But, in this case, another question is why was the plane stolen? The above-average guest star cast features Sterling Hayden and a pre-Dallas Victoria Principal.

5. Now You See Me, Now You Don't - An amateur magician, wanted for embezzling, disappears from a theatre surrounded by the police. This caper employs a trick featured prominently in one of Agatha Christie's mystery novels. It works effectively here, though there's a secondary impact that's pretty hard to swallow (no plot spoilers!).

31 Days of Halloween: 'Tis the Season to be Frightened in Bob Clark's Black Christmas

‘Twas the night before the holiday break, and all through the house, not a creature was stirring, except for the weirdo scaling the wall, crawling into the attic, murdering a sorority sister, and taking the body back up into the attic to rock in a rocking chair. Yeah, aside from that, everything is fine.

Bob Clark’s classic 1974 slasher, Black Christmas, follows a sorority house preparing for the upcoming holiday season. Jess (Olivia Hussey) has recently learned that she is pregnant with her boyfriend’s child. Her boyfriend, Peter (Keir Dullea), is clearly upset over her decision to have an abortion. But her shady and possibly unstable boyfriend is only the beginning of her problems. One of the sorority sisters has gone missing, and the girls are continually receiving strange phone calls from someone with an eerie voice. And guess from where the calls are originating?

Canadian filmmaker Clark, who also helmed the popular teen comedy, Porky’s (1982), and the yuletide favorite, A Christmas Story (1983), directs a film with style and wickedly dark humor. He keeps the murderous stranger hidden throughout most of the film, and it’s even difficult to decipher the character’s gender, especially when the voice on the phone is so vague (on at least one occasion sounding almost like two people). As the phone calls continue, the caller becomes increasingly more agitated and threatening. Clark heightens the terror by simply having the phone ring. The director's bits of comic relief -- including a goofy cop working the front desk at the police station -- are welcome within an otherwise intense movie.

One way in which Clark retains suspense is presenting the killer’s point-of-view (POV). In French filmmaker Françoise Truffaut's book on Alfred Hitchcock, the British auteur essentially defined "suspense" by contrasting it with "surprise." His example was a bomb suddenly exploding (surprise) vs. the audience fully aware of a ticking bomb during an entire scene before the explosion (suspense). In Black Christmas, Clark uses Hitch's approach to suspense, by showing the audience the killer entering the sorority house almost as soon as the film begins. Throughout the movie, the viewers are repeatedly provided with the killer's POV. Not only does the audience now see the irony in the sisters locking the doors for safety, but it has an exceptionally good reason to be frightened.

Clark even takes the killer's POV one step further. He doesn't just visualize the killer's perspective, but literally has the camera become the eyes of the killer. The audience can even see the killer's hands while ascending toward the attic and pushing open the window. The majority of the stranger's transgressions are presented in this manner. This almost forces the audience to identify with the killer, but also makes viewers feel helpless, having no control over the actions. Four years after Black Christmas, John Carpenter incorporated a similar technique in Halloween, making it immensely popular in horror films.

Hussey is sensational in the lead role with a strong, mature performance, and Dullea is appropriately disturbing as Peter. Margot Kidder (pre-Lois Lane) is surprisingly charming as the rather obnoxious, bad-mouthed Barb, and Andrea Martin (who would become a member of the Canadian sketch comedy show, SCTV, two years later) is equally good as one of the sorority sisters, Phyl. John Saxon rounds out the cast as a local detective. Edmond O’Brien, who starred in a number of films, including D.O.A. (1950) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), was originally cast in the role that Saxon eventually played but had to drop out due to deteriorating health. He died the same year.

Black Christmas also played in theatres under the title, Silent Night, Evil Night, and was broadcast on television as Stranger in the House.

Glen Morgan and James Wong of The X-Files fame directed a remake in 2006. Interestingly, their version provided a back story for the killer in the attic. Clark’s characterization of the mysterious slasher (and ultimately his film) proved much creepier and more memorable, but Morgan and Wong still managed to churn out some frights with an enjoyable flick. Original cast member Martin appeared in the remake as the housemother.

31 Days of Halloween: Sibling Rivalry and a Big Knife in Brian De Palma's Sisters

Brian De Palma is a director often accused of stealing from Hitchcock. Whether or not you're a fan of De Palma's work, it's understandable that some viewers would make such accusations. But De Palma's nods to the Master of Suspense are typically superficial, as he merely lifts the plots and presents them in a unique style. For example, Dressed to Kill (1980) begins with a shower scene. As Angie Dickinson showers, the audience is presented with her point of view (POV), and you can see a figure through the shower door. One might expect said figure to approach menacingly (an obvious Psycho reference), but it's eventually clear that he's simply using the bathroom mirror for a morning shave. Dickinson is then suddenly attacked by someone inside the shower with her. De Palma would frequently include familiar plots to play with viewers' expectations: does Jake know what he's truly seeing in Body Double (1984) [Rear Window] and is Carter suffering from murderous multiple personalities in Raising Cain (1992) [Psycho again].

Brian De Palma's first foray into the Hitchcockian thriller was his splendid 1973 movie, Sisters. Phil is a young man who is duped by a Candid Camera-esque TV show called Peeping Toms. A supposedly blind woman undresses while in a locker room with Phil, and a studio audience votes on what they believe the man will do. Following the show, Phil dines with the woman (who is, in fact, not blind), Danielle, a French-Canadian model. They spend the night together, but by the morning, Danielle is upset over an argument with her twin sister, Dominique. She asks Phil to pick up a prescription for her, and having just learned that it's the sisters' birthday, the man also stops by a bakery to have a cake made. When Phil returns, he unknowingly meets Dominique, who, in lieu of cutting the birthday cake, stabs Phil with a knife. In a nearby apartment, reporter Grace Collier witnesses the bloody encounter and telephones the police, but by the time they arrive, Danielle and her former lover, Emil, have cleaned the area and hidden the body. With the cops believing she's overzealous, Grace is determined to prove that a murder occurred in that apartment.

The Hitchcockian elements are there: a Bernard Herrmann score, shades of Psycho (check out the knife Dominique uses), etc. But the presentation of the story and the establishment of characters is vintage De Palma. One example of the director's style is the use of split screen, which he employs wonderfully after the murder: one screen shows Grace standing on the sidewalk, impatiently waiting for the cops, the other has Danielle and Emil desperately cleaning her place. It's an excellent technique to heighten suspense. He utilized the split screen to similar effect in films such as Phantom of the Paradise (1974), Carrie (1976) and Snake Eyes (1998).

Another example of De Palma's style in his frequent shifting of perspective. Keep in mind that, while Hitchcock did this in Psycho, he typically presented his protagonists' POV and stayed there for the duration of the narrative. De Palma bounces the audience around varying perspectives. Phil seems to be the protagonist, but then the viewers are suddenly with Danielle, and quickly to Grace. This is another way in which the director generates suspense, as the audience is often unaware as to people's true motives. In other words, just when the viewer believes that he/she knows a particular character, De Palma switches to an alternate perspective and said character now looks completely different. Danielle is quite innocent when she is with Phil. But she not only lies to the police when they arrive at her apartment with Grace, she's also considerably good at lying. Without giving away the ending, by the film's conclusion, a once reliable POV becomes shockingly unreliable. De Palma also toyed with perspectives in Blow Out (1981), Body Double, Snake Eyes, and even his commercial venture, Mission: Impossible (1996).

Sisters is strengthened by some exceptional acting. Margot Kidder, playing the dual role of Dominique and Danielle, is very good as both, a seemingly naive young model and a frighteningly unstable lunatic. William Finley is great at playing characters who are odd and undeniably creepy, which he proved in further De Palma productions, such as Phantom of the Paradise and a bit part in The Black Dahlia (2006). Jennifer Salt portrays Grace, and she makes a sympathetic reporter. Salt also starred in the 1972 TV film Gargoyles (another selection from this month's 31 Days of Halloween), and eventually retired from acting to pursue writing, having helmed a number of episodes of the popular FX series, Nip/Tuck. In 2006, Douglas Buck directed a lackluster remake of Sisters, starring Stephen Rea as a doctor and Chloë Sevigny as Grace.

So the next time you hear someone say, "Oh, that Brian De Palma just wants to be Hitchcock!" or if that very thought should cross your own mind, please take a step back and have another look. The director is just having fun with Hitch's theatrical plotlines. His keen visual eye and clever techiques are a grand talent not to be missed, and Sisters is one of his very best.