Customer Reviews

Incident on a Dark Street

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I bought this DVD for one reason and one reason only. The picture on the cover features William Shatner with big hair and a fantastic 1970s porn mustache. I was expecting nothing more than silly, campy fun. Some crime-fighting, perhaps. Maybe some overdone and unbelievable fight sequences.

I didn't really get that. In fact, I didn't get anything like that at all. This was far more serious and competent than I was expecting. So, as it turns out, I did enjoy this DVD -- just not in the way I had anticipated.

The story is typical legal/mafia/thriller stuff. The mob is making a nuisance of itself again (killing off informers, blowing up potential informers, etc), so it's down to one fresh-out-of-law-school prosecutor to untangle the ubiquitous puzzle and pin charges onto the local, big, stereotypically Italian-American mafia boss. The local, big, stereotypically Italian-American mafia boss is not content to simply kill off important characters. He has also bribed two corrupt city government officials (William Shatner and some other, weedier guy) to provide fat contracts to companies he controls. Shatner plays a character by the name of "Deaver Wallace", a designation I have tried and failed to turn into a dirty pun.

The plot is not replete with originality; however, it does spring one or two good surprises. The dialog borders on silliness on a few occasions. And the attempts to give the characters some depth are occasionally successful, but more often than not they just fail to deliver.

On the other hand, I was impressed by the acting of the cast as a whole. The two leads (Robert Pine and David Canary) are certainly believable in their roles. And I have to give special props to Richard S. Castellano, and not just for his convincing performance. He plays a small-time crook without the brains to play with the big boys. But his brother has been murdered, so he's torn between wanting to turn the killers over to the police and his "honor among thieves" desire to not be a snitch (I think his mouth hangs open in abject confusion during every moment the camera is on him). But where he won me over was the sequence where the mob tries to get rid of him by flattening him with what appears to be a very fast moving steamroller. Credit to Castellano -- who was not a small man -- for being game enough to apparently do his own stunts. It certainly (to my untrained eye) looked like they really make this fat man leap from the path of a heavy construction equipment multiple times.

Additionally, mention must be made of William Shatner's performance, since I'm guessing his presence in this movie is what will motivate the majority of sales (including, as I mentioned, mine). Shatner always knows when to hold himself back, and when to start getting his saliva on the scenery. Had this been a cheesier script, I'm sure he would have let himself go. But given the semi-gritty flavor that the producers seemed to be going for, he has a suitably restrained performance. If you're looking for a repeat of him screaming, "KHAAAAAN!" or the 70s legal thriller equivalent of him standing waist deep in tribbles (Lord knows what that would be), you'll be disappointed. But his acting here is perfectly in keeping with the film's style (and I absolutely adored his response to a simple "I love you").

Oh, and I should mention Shatner's mistress since I found her first scene (which is also her pen-ultimate scene) utterly and completely bizarre. The girlfriend and her expensive tastes are one of the reasons Shatner is so desperately in need of constant money. In the scene -- which is now indelibly carved into my fragile mind -- this blonde bounds into the room wearing a distressingly paedophilic baby-doll nightie, starts playing with a stuffed giant panda, and enunciates every syllable like a slow preschooler watching Sesame Street's Two Headed Monster teach her how to say the word 'cat'. (Kuh! At! Kuh! At! Kuh-at! Cat!) I have no idea what the filmmakers were attempting with this scene, and if anyone out there does know, please don't hesitate to keep it to yourself.

I couldn't find any confirmation of this in my exhaustive research (about three seconds worth of tooling around Google and the Internet Movie Database), but my theory is that this movie was actually a TV series pilot that went nowhere. It certainly has all the touchstones of a first episode. There's the scene where the main character joins the law firm. The scene where he's introduced to all his co-workers, including a token woman and a token black man (they're on the picture on the back of the DVD box, in case you missed them on account of blinking during their scene). There's the sequence where he learns that his boss isn't totally heartless at all. The title music has a definite 1970s TV show theme feel to it. The boss (James Olsen) even gets a catch phrase to repeat ("Don't call me 'sir'.").

I'm reviewing the Digiview Productions release of this DVD. The sound quality is a little soft. The picture is slightly fuzzy. The colors are very washed out. So washed out, in fact, that the screen actually reverts to a black and white picture for a few seconds at least once.

Despite not getting out of this film the camp enjoyment I thought was my due, I appreciated what was there. It's not the best legal thriller out there, but it's entertaining enough.

My copy of the DVD had mediocre sound quality. The colors were washed out.

The story is decent. I suppose the only reason it is out in DVD is Shatner's presence. He plays one of the bad guys, one of the corrupt government officials. Although not the star of the movie, he plays a significant part.

The film centers around a new man in the DA's office, a man with a heart. He ends up hunting organized crime and corrupt officials, among others.

I can't say that any of the characters are particularly interesting, or that the plot is either. Giving it 2 stars seems a bit low. Two and a half, maybe.

For a dollar or two, it's not a bad flick. Shatner isn't as big a ham here as he was on Star Trek.

The whole film has a colorlessness to it. Even when one of the more important characters gets killed by a bomb, it doesn't really have any emotional impact. It is delivered in a dry way. While fairly interesting, this film isn't a great work of art, and doesn't reach you on a gut level. It's ok, for the price.

This film had the effect of inducing an almost overpowering feeling of drowsiness.

As a viewing experience, "Incident on a Dark Street" is akin to the sensation of waking up from having been under a very powerful anaesthetic for several hours. The general feeling of numbness and disorientation is only disrupted by a stifling feeling of indifference and occasionally a pang of remorse and uneasy sense of time imperceptibly slipping away.

I can only remember two scenes from the film. The first features an actor who also appeared in The Godfather. In this film he plays a congenital idiot. In the scene in question, he opens a drain that has been booby-trapped with dynamite and gets blown to pieces. The scene only lasted a matter of seconds.

In the other scene, the William Shatner character is lifted off the ground by a strong-man and given the slapping he so richly deserves. Happily, this slapping scene is prolonged for several minutes. Shatner is literally held in the air and slapped repeatedly across the face. As each blow falls he emits a sort of surprised yelp that is thoroughly satisfying.

Other than that, "Incident on a Dark Street" is an entirely forgettable experience. Within a week of having seen it, I had forgotten even the title, remembering it only as "Incident in the Windy Street".

It ... can't ... be. Shatner ... playing ... a ... bad guy. It's ... illogical. Apparently, Shatner's 1973 bushy mustache (which, by the way, is mysteriously brushed out on some of the DVD cover images of this film) made him do it. He didn't kill anybody or anything; he was just a corrupt bureaucrat who gave a greasy mobster the in on some government contracts in order to pay off a load of money he lost in the stock market. That's not to say no one died in this movie, of course; you can't have a mob-related film without a few guys donning the old cement loafers (the first guy actually gets it with an icepick).

I've seen this 1973 NBC production referred to as a failed pilot. I don't know if that's true or not, but it certainly plays like a pilot, running a secondary storyline alongside the first, this one involving a brand new attorney (Robert Pine) faced with a moral dilemma in his very first case. The main story, though, revolves around a slimy bad guy the U.S. attorneys have been trying to nail for years. It doesn't say much for the good guys, as Dominic Leopold (Gilbert Roland) all but leaves bread crumbs for the feds to follow as he goes about buying off city planning commissioner Deaver Wallace (William Shatner) and his rather hapless colleague Ed Shilling (Murray Hamilton). David Canary stars as Peter Gallagher, the attorney who begins to put the case together after being contacted out of the blue by a greasy, two-bit mob wannabe (Richard S. Castellano) delivering a pretty uninformative message from his soon-to-be-found-dead brother. James Olson is the big kahuna; he's tough, but he's fair - and more than ready to give, at the drop of a hat, an impassioned defense of the role of U.S. attorneys in putting away scumbags like Leopold. Just as long as you don't call him "sir," you'll get along fine. Joining the fun, alongside all of these other familiar faces of TV yester-year is David Doyle, who went on to work with a much better-looking cast on Charlie's Angels; his shining moment comes in one of the most obvious good cop-bad cop routines ever scripted.

This is the kind of film I would expect to see around 2 am if I time-traveled back to 1978 or so. The story's interesting enough - barely - but the script really is rather weak. Without Shatner's presence, I imagine this film would have been forgotten many years ago. 1973 was, of course, one of the lean years for Shatner, coming midway between the end of the Star Trek TV series and the release of the first Star Trek feature film. I'm a big Shatner fan, so it was quite interesting to see him play such a different kind of role here. Speaking of seeing, the whole film is in pretty bad shape, suffering from a bad case of faded wash-out. Apparently, there is also a restored version available, but why anyone would bother to restore this forgettable little TV movie is a mystery to me. This really is bargain bin material here (and that's exactly where I found my copy of it).