I Love a Mystery (1973)

I have a weakness for seventies TV movies, particularly those made as pilots for series that never materialise.  I also retain a fascination with movies derived from old time radio series, so I approached I Love a Mystery (1973) with moderately high hopes.  Derived from an old US radio series that ran in the forties and fifties and which was subsequently used as the basis for a trio of Columbia B-movies in the late forties, my expectations for this failed pilot was very much based upon my experiences of these.  The radio series concerned a trio of private detectives, (later reduced to two, following the suicide of one of the original stars) who specialise in investigating the kind of mysteries you might find in a 'weird detective' type pulp magazine.  Macabre and off-beat, but with seemingly supernatural phenomena always given a rational explanation.  The Columbia B-movies (which only featured two of the detectives), pretty much followed that formula, with a look that closely approximated the pulpish horror B-movies that Universal had been producing.  (There was also a fourth Columbia B-movie derived from an 'I Love a Mystery' radio script but, despite having the same leading actor as the series proper, changed all of the character names and other details, while retaining the plot).  So, I was naturally expecting the TV movie to present itself in similar style.  Upon watching it, though, I was in for something of a shock.

From the off, the movie comes over as very cartoonish, with a voice over introduction trying to emulate an old-time radio announcer and failing badly, before leaping into the conclusion of the trio's latest case, which involves one of them leaping out of a large packing case at an airport customs and mowing down some gangsters with a machine gun.  It all has something to do with a diamond smuggling racket involving real diamonds hidden inside paste diamonds - the leader of the detectives, Jack, explains it, radio-style, but it still doesn't seem to make much sense.  Why none of the actual law enforcement present seem worried about the machine-gunning in a public space is more than mildly baffling.  The three then run across the runway to board the private jet from which they operate, where they get their next assignment, via a video link, from Terry-Thomas, who gives the impression that he really is drunk, rather than just acting drunk.  This involves them finding a missing millionaire, which leads them to an uncharted island where his wife, son and daughters live, along with various creepy retainers and some lions.  The script then veers off completely into comic book territory, with the wife subjecting the trio to various physical tests as part of some scheme to find the perfect man, or something.  Bits and pieces of plot from the radio series turn up, but seem very arbitrarily inserted into the action, none of which seems to make much sense.  Right at the end, Don Knotts turns up as the missing millionaire.  As noted, the whole thing comes over as a live action cartoon parody of the original source material.

Which left me wondering just why the makers took such an approach to an established property.   The clue lies in the date of production.  Despite finally getting a TV airing in 1973, I Love a Mystery was actually made in 1967, but was left sitting on the shelf when it was rejected as a series pilot.  It seems fairly obvious that its style was influenced by the contemporaneous Batman TV series, which had found success in taking a property of similar vintage and turning it into a campy, cartoonish, parody.  There were various attempts to repeat the formula, from the short-lived Green Hornet series spun off from Batman, to rejected pilots for camped up versions of Wonder Woman and Dick Tracy.  I Love a Mystery follows the pattern, complete with exaggerated performances from the leads that completely parody the original characters to the guest star flamboyant villain (Ida Lupino) who has a fabulous lair.  Cast in the leads were Les Crane and David Hartman (who would both subsequently become better known as talk show hosts) and the wonderfully obscure Hagan Beggs, (best known at the time for playing Lt Hansen in three episodes of Star Trek, but who later became a regular in long-running Canadian adventure series Danger Bay).  While Crane and Hartman had voices that would have been fine if this had still been a radio series, Beggs is saddled with a ridiculous ' Hollywood English' accent, (Beggs was actually from Belfast, but later went to live in Canada - either of these accents would have been preferable).  Inferior even to the Columbia B-movies - which had better scripts,direction, production values and acting - the I Love a Mystery TV movie was, for me, a major disappointment.