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The Andy Griffith Show: Andy Saves Barney's Morale (1961)
Barnie runs amok
If you had any doubt up to this point that Barney should never be left with absolute authority over anything, this early episode closes the case.
Andy is reticent to leave Barney as acting sheriff while he leaves for the day to testify in a criminal case being tried out of town. But he'll be home before sundown, so what could actually go wrong? When Andy returns he's happy to see the streets of Mayberry so quiet. But then he goes inside the courthouse and sees why. Virtually the entire town is in jail!
It turns out that Barney was enforcing the law by the book. As a result the mayor is in jail for vagrancy, Aunt Bea in jail for inciting a riot, and "old Judd" (the marvelous Burt Mustin) is incarcerated for disorderly conduct. After Andy adjudicates all of these cases the jail is empty. And Barney was right on this one point - Andy made him sheriff for the day, not justice of the peace, so he couldn't try any of the cases himself.
Now Barney is the town laughingstock, and as a result his fragile self esteem is shattered and he may quit. Andy comes up with a clever solution that trades on the fact that the townspeople do actually like Barney, they just don't realize the harm all of their ribbing is doing.
Kyûketsu dokuro-sen (1968)
a moody and atmospheric black-and-white ghost story of revenge
This film blends traditional Japanese horror elements with psychological implications and offbeat twists on western horror iconography, including Christian religion and a touch of the mad scientist trying to preserve life after death. It begins with a massacre on a ship by hijackers stealing a gold shipment. Three years later the troubled twin sister of one of the victims is living in a church, getting strange sensations her sister is still alive. While scuba diving with her boyfriend they discover a series of chained skeletons, and soon after she is drawn to the now-derelict ghost ship where the opening tragedy took place, learning what she needs to go through with her own revenge plans.
What sets The Living Skeleton apart is its use of stark, black-and-white cinematography, which amplifies its gothic horror roots. The ominous ocean setting and the ghostly imagery of the skeletons on the ship create a chilling, claustrophobic atmosphere. The film is filled with striking, symbolic visuals, such as a skeleton chained to the ship's mast, contributing to a surreal and nightmarish tone. The sea, often seen as a mysterious and untamed force, becomes a crucial character in itself-an embodiment of both death and revenge.
Gold Diggers in Paris (1938)
Rudy Vallee was no Dick Powell...
... but by 1938 Dick Powell had vacated his relationship with Warner Brothers in search of better vehicles, so it's not like Warner Brothers really had a choice here.
The bumbling Maurice Giraud (Hugh Herbert) is sent to New York from Paris to recruit the Academy Ballet of America for a prestigious international dance competition in Paris, offering significant cash prizes. But Giraud ends up at the Club Ballé by mistake. The owners are down on their luck, and Rudy Vallee is facing jail for nonpayment of alimony. I've always wondered about the sanity of jailing people for being broke. How are they going to pay you if they are in jail? But I digress. Vallee accepts Giraud's invitation on behalf of the club and its employees even though he is aware of the mix-up, because they get paid just for attending, which is better than what they are making as a failing nightspot.
The problem is that the leader of the real Academy Ballet of America reads about what has happened in the newspaper, and he and his gangster patron, played by Ed Brophy, are in hot pursuit of the group for the impersonation and the cash grab. Romantic complications occur when Valee starts falling for a girl he has employed to teach his chorus girls ballet while they cross the Atlantic.
So there's nothing really wrong with the story. Precode WB could have made this work. But the precode era is over, and in the place of hard-bitten humor we have the Schnickelfritz Band. To those who might wish to say something charitable about the film, I would say that absolutely nothing could atone for the imbecilic musical outrage of the Schnickelfritz Band, which--I can't believe I'm saying this--makes Spike Jones seem tolerable. And though it's discouraging enough to see a cast which includes the names of Hugh Herbert and Allen Jenkins near the bottom of the list, finding their names 3rd and 4th billed is a portent that some kind of low-brow extravaganza is probably going to follow--which, with a vengeance, it did.
There was a reason this was the last of the Gold Diggers films, and it was not just changing musical tastes.
Naniwa erejî (1936)
An interesting look into 1930s urban mores...
...with a plot out of Precode Hollywood and frequent jazz music to match. A pretty young switchboard operator reluctantly decides to become the mistress of her boss so she can help her financially-strapped father who had embezzled company funds for an investment that went bad, and her college-student brother who needs his tuition paid. Of course she is ostracized from the family for her immorality without giving her the chance to explain how they got their money. Various other relationships and subplots also come into play. This one has nicely-plotted character dynamics, good performances, and beautiful cinematography.
Ikimono no kiroku (1955)
One of Kurosawa's lesser known films
Akira Kurosawa's I LIVE IN FEAR (1955) is one of his lesser-known and sadly underrated films, with a revelatory performance by Toshiro Mifune as a character nearly double his real age at the time. Mifune plays the old owner of an iron foundry who has become so paranoid about the possibility of another atomic attack that he first tried to build a bomb shelter and now is planning to move his entire family to a farm in Brazil.
Naturally his adult children and even his wife have no desire to move from their comfortable Tokyo home and try to get him declared mentally incompetent. Takashi Shimura is a dentist serving as conflicted judge on the court mediation panel. This excellent look into the personal psychology of 1950s nuclear paranoia is a huge step above the numerous propaganda films of the era and an ideal complement to the numerous allegorical sci-fi horror films from the same period (especially GODZILLA, from the year before and also starring Takashi Shimura), as well as some of the more interesting Cold War post-apocalyptic films like WORLD WITHOUT END (1956) and PANIC IN YEAR ZERO (1962).
Satellite in the Sky (1956)
Interesting study of 1950s nuclear war paranoia
This is a moderately entertaining but rather dry and slow-moving British Cold War sci-fi adventure/parable in color and CinemaScope, released in the U. S. by Warner Bros. It's about an experimental new space project whose participants find out at the last minute was financed by military funds so a new super-bomb could be tested in space.
A woman reporter (a young Lois Maxwell) who doesn't think any space exploration is worth the money stows away on board. When the bomb is ready to be released there is a malfunction and it sticks to the rocket ship, so the ground crew and rocket crew have to decide what to do next. It's okay as a sci-fi drama but more interesting as a symptom of 1950s nuclear war paranoia.
Panic in Year Zero! (1962)
well structured meditation on human behavior during a cataclysmic event
Shot in nice moody black-and-white CinemaScope, starring Ray Milland, Jean Hagen (a far cry from Lina Lamont here!), and Frankie Avalon getting the chance to do a serious role. Interestingly it was also directed by Ray Milland, and is a fairly accomplished little cinematic parable, again dealing with the threat, and here the after-effects, of atomic warfare.
Milland and his family set off on a weekend camping/fishing trip and a flash in the distance they think at first is lightning turns out to be an atomic mushroom cloud over Los Angeles. The rest of the film they attempt to survive and maintain some resemblance of civilized behavior while rationalizing their lapses into violence against the panic-stricken populace, looters, and opportunists who suddenly appear. It might easily have been handled as the exploitation film promised by the trailer (it's an American International production, after all), but is actually a very thoughtful and well-structured meditation on how people might react in the event of the massive nuclear attack everyone was fearing at the time.
Monk: Mr. Monk and the Magician (2009)
Mr. Monk faces the ambivalence of grief
Kevin Dorfman, Monk's annoying neighbor, is the accountant for world renowned magician, Karl Torini. Torini asks Kevin, a really horrible amateur magician, to substitute for him when he goes to Reno with his girlfriend. After the show, Monk finds Kevin strangled in his dressing room. At the funeral, Monk notices something that makes him zero in on Torini as the suspect. But how could he have done it since five minutes before the performance Torini called the crew of the show from Reno telling them that he and his girlfriend/assistant had become engaged? Complications ensue.
It was shocking to see a recurring although not regular character killed off on Monk. The show probably did this since, at this point, they knew the following season would be the last. Monk feels lots of conflicting feelings at Kevin's death, admitting to Natalie that the guy, though good hearted and a true friend, drove him crazy to the point that Monk would pretend to not be at home if he knew it was Kevin at the door.
Kevin had a way of talking in which he would start to say something, then realize that he was not being precise, and then branch off into some minutia, and then keep going until he is essentially the verbalized version of a flowchart. When Monk and Natalie attend Kevin's funeral they realize this must be a genetic trait as all of Kevin's relatives speak the same way.
The Purple Plain (1954)
A commentary on the transitory nature of life
This well-produced and often-moving J. Arthur Rank production stars Gregory Peck as a Canadian flyer serving with the British in Burma, suicidally reckless after his wife's death in the Blitz, who finds new reason for living after meeting a beautiful Burmese girl. Then, however, his plane crashes in the wilderness behind Japanese lines and he has to find a way to get back home with his injured crewman and complaining passenger. It's beautifully shot, well-acted, and a powerful story of hope vs. Despair. Apparently, a popular hit in Britain, it doesn't seem to have made much of a mark in the U. S. but deserves to be much better known.
X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009)
The film missed the point of the character
This film reminds me of Phantom Menace. You probably like it more when you're younger, but as you get older, the flaws are more apparent. The movie is weak and although it's not awful, it's so mediocre and on that fine line, that you might as well say it's bad. It's the weakest of all the Xmen movies and then X3 after that.
The previous movies alluded to the idea that Wolverine was barely holding back his more intense rages. That struggle is what makes him so compelling - that with just one slip up he'd be more animal than man. So what I wanted from Origins was that crazy Wolverine that the current day guy was afraid of. Instead they presented a pretty levelheaded guy who just liked to fight, but not that much.
Also, they totally botched the purpose of the Weapon X stuff. Namelythe purpose of the program is to subjugate mutants by treating them like objects, not people. So even if they wanted to go with the whole "level headed Canadian" for the first part of the movie, he should have been turned into that crazy, out-of-control animal after Weapon X. This way I could see his humanity stripped away, revealing the animal inside, and thus showing me why he's afraid that it'll get out again.
Alas, his response to volunteering for the program is more of a casual confusion at his new, sharper claws. Basically, they missed the point of the character.
Monk: Mr. Monk's Other Brother (2009)
Mr. Monk meets another branch of the family tree
Monk is making square pancakes when he hears his house being broken into. But the bearded long-haired sewage covered intruder is not just any burglar, it's his younger half-brother Jack. Jack broke jail earlier that day after allegedly killing an employee there while he was escaping. Jack claims he had nothing to do with the killing, that she was dead when he found her, and he's a dead man if he is returned to prison because the woman who was killed was a particularly beloved employee there. So Monk decides to help Jack clear himself of the murder before he returns him to prison. Complications ensue.
I could easily see Jack being the son of Dan Hedaya, the actor who played Monk's dad in the one episode he made an appearance. They have an undisputable mutual smarminess about them. Others have said they indeed found Jack to be a likeable rogue, but I just found him to be a rogue. He proves that he is more at home with lies than the truth and that he'll steal anything not nailed down.
I did wonder why Jack escaped from prison looking like he had been locked in the basement of the Bastille for three years. Prisons usually keep the inmates clean shaven to prevent them from doing exactly what Jack did when he escaped - disguising his identity by merely getting a haircut.
Overall it was a pretty good but not great episode of Monk.
Andy Hardy's Blonde Trouble (1944)
a sluggish claustrophobic entry to the series
This Andy Hardy film has the titular character on the train to Wainwright to start his freshman year at his father's alma mater. The problem is that he's on that train for a full 45 minutes of the movie's running time. This sets the pace of the entire film as being sluggish and claustrophobic.
While on the train, Andy meets up with a girl who is also on the way to Wainwright, Kay Wilson (Bonita Granville). It's the first year Wainwright has gone coed. It looks like something might be developing between the two, but Kay also seems to have eyes for a doctor Standish (Herbert Marshall). He's older and sophisticated, and Kay is taken with him. Also on the train there are twin blondes trying to stay together in spite of their father's plan to separate them based on the belief that their psyche's will best be adjusted if they spend their young adulthood apart. One of the twins is enrolled at Wainwright, but she has to come up with the money for both of them to live until the non-student can get a job.
The solution? These horrible sociopathic young women con Andy out of a grand total of 38 dollars by having him believe lies about how freshmen at Wainwright are mistreated if they dare have any money on them. They use tears, fears, sweet-talk to keep that money in their hot little hands. By the time I knew the full story of their dilemma it's impossible for me to like them or feel for them given how they've been behaving. The only other girl Andy's age is the mute Katy Anderson, back in Carvel, who is a compulsive car thief. If this is what Andy has to put up with, I'm surprised he didn't change his mind and join the Army. The Germans and the Japanese couldn't be any worse than these awful twins and the car thief!
Another thing that keeps this film from working is that there is very little of the actual Hardy family in the film. The judge gets tonsilitis, but that just seems to be a vehicle for introducing "special guest" Keye Luke as the temporary town doctor, playing the exact same role he plays over in the Dr. Gillespie series of movies. I will admit he does liven up the short Carvel section of a pretty dead film.
I was pretty bored during most of this, and just stuck with it so I could write this review. Perhaps you can find something better to do with your time, like watch the earlier episodes in the series. It really did seem that the Hardy family did not translate well to the war years and beyond.
Her (2013)
It's an amusing tragicomic romantic satire...
...commenting on the direction we are heading given our reliance upon being constantly connected to technology, set in the sleek and sterile urban near future.
Scarlett Johansson, noted for her superb physical and facial nuances with almost no dialogue in movies like GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING, here steals the show with a voice-only performance as "Samantha," the protagonist's new ultra-friendly interactive computer operating system. Joaquin Phoenix, Amy Adams, and Rooney Mara are also quite good, but it's Johansson who makes the movie work as well as it does and we never even get to see her!
What I liked about Her is how tender it is, even as it asks uncomfortable questions, like whether we as a race are becoming obsolete.
The Andy Griffith Show: Opie's Charity (1960)
Pride can cause lots of problems and misunderstandings
This episode doesn't have that much action. It's mainly just a lot of back and forth conversations between Andy and various townfolk, including his own son.
Annabelle Silby is head of a committee collecting for the underprivileged children of the area. Andy inquires how much his son Opie gave at school and is told he gave only three cents. Andy is in the process of trying to talk to his son about the importance of generosity when Annabelle's husband, Tom (Stuart Erwin), stops by the courthouse to say hello to Andy. Ordinarily, this would be no big thing in a small town. But the problem is Tom was supposedly run over and killed by a taxi cab in Charlottesville two years before - complete with big funeral and fancy headstone in Mayberry's cemetery. Complications ensue.
The main draw of this episode are the conversations, and specifically those between Andy and Opie about the subject of generosity. Ron Howard is only six at this point, and he completely gets the rhythm of the banter between his character and Andy Griffith. It's rare when you see a youngster who is able to pull off subtle humor so convincingly.
Rock-a-Bye Baby (1958)
This was better than I remembered it...
...but still had more than a few drawbacks. This is a very loose re-imagining of Preston Sturges' MIRACLE AT MORGAN CREEK, but has only a few scenes that relate back to that classic screwball comedy, preferring to showcase star Jerry Lewis doing whatever he felt like doing. It's heavily sentimental (not necessarily a bad thing) and likely because Jerry Lewis was the producer as well as the star, many of the slapstick and physical comedy bits are dragged out long past their amusement factor.
It's also much more of a musical than I'd remembered (including several okay songs sung by Lewis himself plus one by newcomer Connie Stevens), and the "White Virgin of the Nile" movie-musical production number (for Marilyn Maxwell's movie-within-the-movie) is one of the high points of the entire film, along with director Frank Tashlin's hysterical in-jokes about the pernicious influence of television commercials.
Despite some faults, it's still a very entertaining film and very much a time-capsule of the late 1950s.
Victoria (2015)
Sebastian Schipper's rather audacious slice-of-life heist thriller...
...Is most impressive for its concept, the logistics needed to carry it out, and its sustained performances without a single cut. It hopes to involve the viewer as a participant in the story by following one girl's experiences over the course of two-and-a-quarter hours. It begins shortly before dawn, playing out in real time in one long, uninterrupted take from beginning to end.
The first hour or so sets up the characters as Victoria (Laia Costa), a recent immigrant to Berlin from her native Spain, meets four rather grungy local men while dancing and drinking in a flashy nightclub. They convince her to come with them as they wander aimlessly around the city, and then must go off to an appointment with a local gangster who wants them to pull off a robbery he's planned.
Unfortunately, the film really plods its way through much of the first hour, but of course the single-take concept eliminates the possibility for editing the dull parts. Ideally the script should have been pruned to establish the basics and then get into the main plot much sooner. Luckily the last hour and a half picks up both pace and tension dramatically once Victoria commits to accompanying these rather shiftless hoods to their meeting as their driver. It soon becomes quite gripping and much more involving with the plot's quick turns of events and limited point-of-view.
Lady on a Train (1945)
An all-grown-up Deanna Durbin in a fun murder mystery...
...that turns briefly into a noir thriller near the end, and takes place almost entirely on Christmas Eve. Of course the plot is manipulated to make time for a couple of songs, including Cole Porter's "Night and Day," when she has to pretend she's a night club singer during her investigation.
The film begins while her train is pulling into New York, and during a brief pause before continuing to Grand Central Station it pauses long enough for her to see a murder being committed in a warehouse window across the tracks. Naturally since she's been reading a murder mystery, so nobody believes she saw a real murder, so she tries to enlist the author of her book to help her solve the crime. Somehow she stumbles into the reading of the will for the dead man and is mistaken for his nightclub mistress, who is the sole heir. It's too bad Durbin did not continue her career, as she does a great job playing an adult role with a winning blend of comedy, drama, romance and still a bit of music.
Woman They Almost Lynched (1953)
A fun feminist western
This may be a Republic B-western, but it is an action-packed and highly entertaining melodrama under the skillful hand of veteran director Alan Dwan. Not only that, but a year before the cult classic JOHNNY GUITAR, we have another feminist western with both a barroom brawl and a shootout between two women, in this case Joan Leslie and Audrey Totter, as well as a tough female mayor who owns the local lead mine. We also get appearances by Frank and Jesse James and the Younger brothers, riding with Quantrill's raiders at the end of the Civil War.
Nevertheless, putative stars Brian Donlevy (as Quantrill) and John Lund (as the mine foreman) take a back seat to the women as far as the action and main plot go. Even longtime Republic star Reed Hadley barely makes an appearance (as Leslie's brother) before being shot down in the first reel, giving the plot its "inciting action," since his younger sister must now take over the saloon he owns and the debts he owes. The film's only faults are some tedious expositions presented through a couple of pretty heavy-handed dialogue scenes towards the beginning and again towards the end. Otherwise, there are lots of unpredictable variations on the genre, especially for a Republic western. There are even a couple of songs, sung by Audrey Totter as a saloon singer.
Monk: Mr. Monk Is Underwater (2008)
Mr. Monk and the worst CGI in the history of the world
On a submarine, during maneuvers, the first officer is nowhere to be found. The captain and some other officers go to his cabin to see what goes on. Before they enter they hear a gunshot. When they open the door to the officer's cabin he is dead with a gunshot wound to the head, his gun still in his hand.
Once the sub is docked in San Francisco, medical officer Steven Albright goes to see Natalie. Albright was a good friend of Natalie's late husband, Mitch. Albright says he does not agree that the officer committed suicide, but admits he is at a loss as how he could have been murdered when he was found alone inside of a locked room. He therefore wants Monk to come onboard and have a look around. But Monk is terrified of boats and even more terrified of boats that sink themselves on purpose - submarines. While onboard, the sub suddenly submerges and leaves port with both Monk and Natalie onboard. Complications ensue.
I didn't particularly like this episode as it was all quite clumsily done and put together, and the mystery isn't at all compelling. This episode sets up Albright as being an ongoing love interest for Natalie, but I just was not buying the chemistry between the two. That could be because I can't look at actor Casper Van Dien and not think of him in Starship Troopers, hunting giant bugs and spouting totalitarian slogans. But perhaps that is a tribute to his power as an actor rather than a criticism.
Also, the CGI was just awful. The Hunt for Red October, filmed almost 20 years prior to this, had better CGI and green (might have been blue at the time) screen effects. The only part of the episode that was quite entertaining was Monk, as a coping mechanism, imagining Dr Bell being there onboard the submarine with him. Tony and Hector worked very well together in this episode.
The Andy Griffith Show: Alcohol and Old Lace (1961)
The original "snoop" sisters
Two sweet little old ladies, the Morrison sisters, help Andy and Barnie find and destroy two stills that they haven't been able to locate. They claim they have seen them on their long daily walks. They are right - there are stills exactly where they say that there are. Andy and Barnie think that they've now "cleaned up" the county, but then in walks the town drunk, Otis Campbell, dutifully locking himself in his jail cell until his intoxication passes. Since Otis does not drive - which is the topic of a different episode later on - and Mayberry is in a dry county, there must be yet another still out there somewhere. So the search continues.
The existence of "stills" in the area surrounding Mayberry and the search for them was just about the only consistent long running law enforcement issue in the show. This was actually a realistic issue in the rural - and even not so rural - south as some counties would have a patchwork quilt of laws as to where liquor could and could not be sold.
Monk: Mr. Monk and the Bully (2009)
Life is not fair to Mr. Monk
Monk is having a dry spell as far as cases are concerned, and then Natalie gets a call from somebody who wants Monk's help. But Monk freezes up when he hears the guy's name - Roderick Brody. It turns out that this is the name of his childhood bully from 40 years before. When they go to the guy's house he's fabulously wealthy and though Brody remembers what happened between them he feels no remorse and even remembers what happened as "good times". He even "whatevers" Monk when he reads a letter he composed about how what Brody did to him has impacted him into adulthood.
The reason Brody called him was that he wants Monk to follow his wife since he believes she is cheating on him. Normally Monk does not take matrimonial cases, but if the wife is indeed cheating he thinks this might be an opportunity to humiliate his old schoolmate and get at least a modicum of payback. Complications and a murder ensue.
As far as the bully's reaction, it's probably pretty realistic. Most childhood bullies probably don't give any thought to their victims as the years pass, and karma does not necessarily reward their bad actions with bad luck in adulthood. Nothing was really said about it, but I had to wonder exactly how Brody was making a living as an adult and how much he had really changed since childhood. When we first meet him he is bullying some subordinate on the phone and he did have a gun in his glove compartment.
The Andy Griffith Show: Andy the Matchmaker (1960)
Andy sure turned out to criminally corrupt Ellie!
Barney (Don Knotts) wants to quit because he feels the town is laughing at him because he never solves a crime. That may be true, but it's also true that there is virtually no crime in Mayberry.
At the same time, Barney is sweet on a shy local lady, Rosemary. But Andy feels Barney is going to need something to boost his confidence if he is going to ask Rosemary out on a proper date. Andy's solution - Have Ellie report a fake robbery so that Barney has a crime to solve. Barney does have a new sense of purpose. He has so much, however, that he rounds up an actual suspect who is threatening to sue the town for false arrest. Complications ensue.
Andy sure was a corruptor of Ellie - First prescription fraud and now filing a false police report! I guess these were simpler times in a simpler place, but still! Also, Andy trusts Opie with quite a bit of information, like the false robbery. Opie asks some pretty pertinent questions of Andy like - Just how long will Barnie keep looking for this nonexistent robber before he gets suspicious. My words, the kid's wisdom.
Ron Howard was such a good child actor he could augment any scene and was given entire episodes where he was the central character. You could have never done that with Larry Mathews over on the Dick Van Dyke Show. Whenever he said anything it looked like it was all he could do to remember his lines and not laugh in the middle of them, but I digress.
It's a good episode featuring the versatility of Don Knotts - Down on himself one minute, swelled head and thinking he's a lady's man the next.
The Andy Griffith Show: Ellie Comes to Town (1960)
Mayberry would have been absolutely puzzled by CVS
Town pharmacist and owner of the town drugstore, Fred Walker, has been ailing for awhile, so he gets his niece, Ellie (Eleanor Donahue), a recently graduated pharmacist, to come help him out for awhile.
Her entry is rough from the start when she finds Andy and Aunt Bea in what she was expecting to be a locked and closed drugstore and thinks them to be burglars. She's just not expecting the town sheriff to find a poorly hidden key to the place, let himself in, help himself to what he wants, and then leave the amount due in the cash register.
Things get even rougher when Mrs. Brand comes in and demands her pills that she's been getting for years, without a prescription, and for ten cents. Pharmacists have a license from the state and are sworn to follow the law, but Andy just sees her as a big meanie who won't let an ailing old woman have the pills that relieve her suffering. Complications ensue.
Rather than try to ratchet up the tension on both sides of this argument, somebody MIGHT have suggested talking to Ellie's uncle and find out just why exactly he's been breaking the law for years with this one patient. But for some reason the ordinarily wise citizens of Mayberry don't think to do this.
Meanwhile, southern hospitality is on full display with Mrs. Brand laying on her couch, thinking that she is dying, surrounded by pork roast, fried chicken, casseroles, cakes, and various soups, all brought by the concerned neighbors. Cheerio Meridith is a delight as Mrs. Brand. She absolutely steals every scene unless Don Knotts is around.
The Andy Griffith Show: Those Gossipin' Men (1961)
Andy gets his comeuppance...
... from Aunt Bea of all people!
Aunt Bea and two of her female friends are gossiping at the drugstore when Andy comes in and asks for some medicine to put on a cut Barnie got on his finger while he was cleaning his gun. In just a few hours, the three women turn that small cut into Barnie having accidentally shot himself in the chest and passed away in the process. Barnie hears about this himself when somebody calls asking about it, and then the town mortician shows up, complete with hearse to take away the body!
Andy teases Aunt Bea about this when she comes to the courthouse, having heard the product of her own exaggeration and gossip. But she assures him that men are equally capable of gossip and exaggeration. This is an assertion that has Andy laughing.
But Aunt Bea gets the last laugh when she plants a doubt in Andy's mind about a traveling shoe salesman that has come to town. She asks - What would a traveling shoe salesman from New York City be doing in the tiny town of Mayberry 900 miles away? The imagination of the town's men take it from there.
Later in the series, the show goes more in depth about the healing power of Mayberry and the influence it has on visitors. But this time, we only get the sentiment of the fellow as he pulls away from the curb on his way out of town.
Also note the appearance of Floyd's son and Floyd's mention of his wife. They disappear from mention afterwards, leading to the belief that Floyd had never been married.
The Andy Griffith Show: Irresistible Andy (1960)
Little pitchers have big ears
Andy finds out Ellie is not going to the Mayberry picnic/dance. It is called both throughout the episode, so it is probably a picnic where a dance occurs, but I digress. When Andy realizes she has not been asked, then he asks her to the picnic himself. As he recounts the story to Aunt Bea, he begins to think he's been had, and that Ellie actually trapped him into asking him, with matrimony in mind. Unfortunately, he does this in front of his son, Opie. So the next time Opie sees Ellie at the drugstore, he is sure to bring a dime for his ice cream cone and innocently tells her how his father thinks she is a scheming woman trying to get her mitts on a fine fellow as a husband. Complications and recrimination ensue.
No doubt Andy Griffith landed the lead in such a show in part from his guest appearance on the Danny Thomas Show as a small town sheriff, but also in part because of his role as the naive country bumpkin Will Stockdale in "No Time For Sergeants". Here Griffith is channeling the country bumpkin interpretation of the role. It would have been grating if he had continued to play the role like this, so he transitioned his persona into the wise sheriff with homespun charm that was more easily embraced.
Also note Robert Easton as one of the three men vying for Ellie's attentions at the drugstore soda fountain. He started out as a character actor, often playing slow witted types, but became the Henry Higgins of Hollywood, an acclaimed dialect coach.