The Wild Wild West: The Night of Sudden Death (1965) – Review

Many will remember the box office dud starring Will Smith and Kevin Kline as most modern viewers had no idea it was based on a popular Western, espionage, and science fiction television series of the 1960s. Today we will be looking at the episode “The Night of Sudden Death” which included this show’s take on “The Most Dangerous Game.”

The episode opens with a group of black-clad men clambering over each other as they scale a wall up to a high window, entering the United States Mint at Carson City, meanwhile, an inside man (Harlan Warde) releases knock-out gas to dispatch the other guards. The infiltrators then knock their inside man unconscious and plant a bomb, leaving him to die with the rest of the guards, the strangely, they leave without taking any of the money. What could their dastardly plan be and why betray one of their own? Secret Service agents Jim West (Robert Conrad) and Artemis Gordon (Ross Martin) are called in to solve this mystery, but it’s not much of a mystery as it is soon revealed that the printing plates have been switched out for fakes – the perpetrators clearly hoping the explosion would cover the swap – and now someone out there has the ability to make perfect counterfeits bills.

Note: In 1865 the “Secret Service Division” was created by the Department of the Treasury with the mission of suppressing counterfeiting, making this one of the rare episodes of The Wild Wild West where Jim and Artemis are actually performing duties that a Secret Service agent would actually be doing at the time.

This episode’s villain doesn’t waste much time in trying to stop our heroes, sending one of his black-clade minions to literally squeeze Jim West to death, but our hero aren’t so easily dispatched and soon Jim is being advised by the daughter of the inside man, Corrine Foxx (Julie Payne), that he needs to speak to her father, who had survived the explosion and can lead our heroes to the mastermind behind this crime. Unfortunately, Jim arrives at the hospital a little too late and finds the man near death, having been crushed by some unknown force – we can assume it was the same assailant who tried to put the squeeze on Jim – but before he dies, he is able to utter one final warning “If you find Corrine, you will find death.” Which is both cryptic and not really true. Meanwhile, Corrine isn’t doing to well under the “interrogation” of her employer.

 

This looks like an issue for HR to handle.

Turns out that Corrine works for world-renowned big game hunter Warren Trevor (Robert Loggia) as a bareback rider in his circus – don’t ask me why a Big Game Hunter has a circus, I’m guessing it’s an animal thing – and when Jim and Artemis spot a poster revealing Corrine’s position in the local circus our heroes leap into action. And by that, I mean Jim waltzes into the circus and announces he is looking for counterfeit money while Artemis goes undercover as a clown. We soon learn that Warren has a dream of buying a large portion of land in Africa, but as this is rather costly he plans to use those stolen plates to manufacture enough counterfeit money needed to pay off an African chieftain.

 

“I had a farm in Africa at the foot of the Ngong Hills.”

But what does a big game hunter/Circus owner want with a piece of Africa? At a dinner party, Warren explains to Jim West and Chief Vonoma (Joel Fluellen) that every man has a dream “Mine is to own and protect nature and its creations from man. Man is the most predatory beast on the face of the globe. He kills wantonly, animals kill merely to survive. There is already sound testimony of man’s senseless carnage of other living creatures. Man is the only animal capable of changing its environment, the only species to render other species extinct.” For a villain, that is a rather noble goal, and if it wasn’t for the counterfeiting and all those murders, I’d be a hundred percent on his side.

 

He’s kind of an altruistic version of Kraven the Hunter.

Stray Observations:

• That Jim West doesn’t notice a black-clad “ninja” clinging to the ceiling of his well-lit hotel room has me doubting his ability as a government agent to get this job done.
• Jim West wrestles an alligator with nothing but his bare hands and a knife – like a Wild West version of Tarzan Lord of the Apes – I now take back my doubts about his ability to get the job done.
• Much of this episode was filmed on the lagoon set of Gilligan’s Island, which is fitting as two years later that show would air their own take on “The Most Dangerous” game called “The Hunter.”
• This circus is shown to have a trampoline despite the fact that trampolines weren’t invented until 1945.
• Clown make-up is unique to each and every circus clown so Artemis’s capability to sneak around disguised as one of Warren’s clowns is a little suspect as he’d be spotted as “not one of theirs” rather quickly.
• The plan to us gas to knock out the guards of a U.S. Mint is quite similar to plot elements that appeared in Goldfinger, which came out a year earlier.
• The Carson City Mint never printed paper money as only silver and gold coins were minted there. Starting in 1869, all paper money was printed by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing so there would be no reason for printing presses and printing plates to be at the Carson City Mint.
• Jim, Artemis and Corine are wrapped in animal skins that will dry in the sun and shrink, which will cause our heroes to be squeezed to death. This kind of death trap would be a standard element of the Adam West Batman series that would premiere the very next year.

 

“Holy Cat Woman, Jim!”

Directed by William Witney, “The Night of the Sudden Death” is a solid first-season entry, with Robert Conrad facing off against a more nuanced villain than what would be found most action-adventure shows of the time. The script by Oliver Crawford and Michael Garrison gives our hero some nice character moments and a very nice femme fatale in the form of Janet Coburn (Antoinette Bower), Trevor’s beautiful animal trainer. That Jim West would win her over through his sheer animal magnetism was a given, even if a bit forced due to the constraints of a sixty-minute episode, and the screenplay would pit our hero against numerous henchmen and death traps. That the episode eventually culminated in the classic premise of “The Most Dangerous Game” – with Trevor grabbing his bow and hunting West through his reproduction of the African veldt – was a nice touch and worked quite well.

 

“I hope I don’t get eaten by my one of own alligators.”

Overall, “The Night of the Sudden Death” is a fun espionage thriller, one that was populated by beautiful women and a memorable villain – seeing a young Robert Loggia was a bit of a treat – and while the “Most Dangerous Game” element is more of an add-on rather than the focus of plot it still provided a nice conclusion to this particular adventure story. The only real negative aspect is that Ross Martin wasn’t given much to do – his undercover role fails almost instantly – but that is just a minor complaint for what was an excellent episode of Wild Wild West.