Customer Reviews

Dangerous Assignment, Collection One

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"Dangerous Assignment" was one of the first secret agent series to appear on television in its earliest days and had some "star power" in actor Brian Donlevy who portrayed Steve Mitchell. This show (and others from the era) is chock full of character actors like Hugh Beaumont ("Ward Cleaver" in "Leave It To Beaver") who were transitioning from B-movies to the burgeoning field of television and you're bound to recognize a few over the course of the series. There have been several releases of episodes of "Dangerous Assignment" that have fallen into the public domain, but this collection of licensed episodes (and collection 2) from Critics Choice Video is the preferred version to get for two reasons. First, the picture clarity puts most of the public domain releases to shame. These are so good that you can actually see the string that a knife rides along in front of Donlevy's face in each episode's opening title sequence. Also, both collections represent the series' entire run of 39 episodes, which are not available elsewhere.

I can't say that the series is a great one . . . stories are fairly simplistic, casts are small, and the show is very stage bound . . . but it's an entertaining enough diversion that's greatly helped by this crisp DVD presentation. There are no extras on either of the collections, but I wasn't expecting any given the age of this series (it was produced in 1952). Instead, what you get are very clean looking, uncut episodes that are probably better looking now than when they were originally broadcast on TV in the Fifties. I can easily recommend this and collection 2 to vintage/classic TV fans.