Guest Who: Oh, Brother...!

It may startle you to realize that this installment concerning TV guest stars does NOT derive from Fantasy Island, as so many previous ones have! Ha! This time, I've drifted to another island for a 1974 episode of Hawaii 5-O. We love the location-filmed police procedural series, which starred Jack Lord, but this one was particularly eye-catching thanks to the two young men featured in the story line.

Perry King (a longtime Underworld favorite profiled here) plays a young filmmaker who is on the beach taking pictures when he comes upon a car. The beach is seemingly quite deserted, but clearly someone is nearby.

Within the car (with the window down) is a suit jacket with a wallet clearly visible! King ponders the situation before walking away and leaving the tempting morsel alone.

Then he hears another car pull up near the one he's just walked past. A burly, intimidating sort of man gets out and heads down near the water.

Regardless of the potential danger, King heads back out to the car with the wallet in it and snatches it as quickly as possible, retreating swiftly to his own ramshackle station wagon, which is parked in another area. Unfortunately, he is seen by the second man and is chased away, but not before dropping a canister of his film in the sand during his haste to get out of there.

The man who chased King was busy killing a shady zoning official who was on the verge of being indicted by the district attorney. Thus, the attorney and the whole 5-O gang come converge upon the corpse, desperate to find out who killed the man before they could make their case against him.

Meanwhile, King and his younger brother Nicholas Hammond, are screening their surfing docu- mentary for the backer. Although the footage is all very exciting and promising, they are ever short of funds.

The lights come up on them and we're greeted with a knee-eye view of King's distressed, army green shorts (which we would love to distress even further... perhaps even shredding them to pieces with our teeth?  LOL)

God love whoever staged this scene for placing the camera where they did (and for King, who jostles around, coming close to giving us a total "up the shorts" view!)

How many 1970s TV shows can you name that made a point of having the guest star's crotch serve as the primary focus of a scene?

Anyway (is it hot in here??), Hammond is stunned to see King pull out a wad of money to give to the backer in order to secure more film & processing. Knowing that his brother doesn't have this kind of money at hand, he's perplexed at where it came from.

When King explains that it is cash that he stole from someone's unattended wallet, this already crotch- heavy scene goes one step further. The camera rears back and now both young men's nether regions take center stage!

Hammond is distressed at his big brother's behavior and presses him for an explanation there in the office while the backer has stepped away. By now, he's wriggled and squirmed in his seat until his trunks have ridden up to a perilous position!

This episode first aired on January 1st of 1974 and while Dick Clark's New Year's Eve ball drop might have occurred the night before, viewers very nearly were treated to a second one on New Year's DAY! Had Hammond maneuvered around even a tiny bit more than this, the CBS censor might have had to demand some less demonstrative re-shoots.

Anyway, let's take a (heavy) breather while I explain that the two men behind the killing, land developers who'd been afraid of being fingered by the crooked zoning officer had he been apprehended and indicted, are running the film that was found by their hit man at the crime scene. Through it, they are able to ascertain what Hammond looks like as well as what vehicle the brothers are driving, a haggard station wagon with slogans painted on it.

Hammond continues to surf and wax his board, completely unaware that these two dangerous men are on the lookout for him.

Now here we go again with some hilarious camerawork and staging! Hammond comes in to the brothers' gritty little beach shack and slithers onto a padded bench. Meanwhile in the foreground, King is turning a little crank on a film splicer, angled right at Hammond's crotch. Check out the expression on Hammond's face as his brother yanks the crank...!

Now the big waves are coming in. King wants to capture them for his movie and Hammond can't wait to get out there and ride for his life, but again they run into trouble. King can only film these waves properly with the aid of a longer lens and he hasn't got the money to buy one.

He decides to use the credit card found in the stolen wallet and procure the exact lens that they need for the movie. Hammond is dead against it, but King will not be swayed.

King runs into problems at the camera store when the card, since reported stolen and being tracked by 5-O, is flagged. He winds up grabbing the lens and darting out of the store, adding full-on robbery to his list of sins. I don't know what to shake my head at more in this frame, the phallic lens case held at Hammond's chin level or the hysterically vaginal shell art on the wall behind King's back! Balance in all things, I guess.

Their dramatic expressions during some of their more heated exchanges yield interesting facial expressions at times. (And it must be said that they often seem to be placing their hands on one another. This ep, called "The Banzai Pipeline" could just as easily have been tagged "Brotherly Love.")

So finally, with the lens required and the big waves crashing, they head out to the shore. Thing is, they aren't going to be able to just get away with thieving. Will it be the bad guys or the stalwart forces of 5-O who make them atone?

These gents were at or near the peak of their handsomeness at this point. King had a couple of movies under his belt (like Slaughter- house-Five, 1972, and The Possession of Joel Delaney, 1972, with Shirley MacLaine), but was about to costar in a fun streak of movies of varying quality such as The Lords of Flatbush (1974) opposite Sylvester Stallone, The Wild Party (1975) with Raquel Welch, Mandingo (1975) Lipstick (1976) and A Different Story (1978), in which he was a gay man married to Meg Foster. Now sixty-eight and a handsome salt 'n pepper daddy, he still acts infrequently.

Hammond was a Broadway veteran (having played the young son of no less than Sir Michael Redgrave) when he was plucked from scores of hopefuls at age fourteen to embody Friedrich in The Sound of Music (1965.) That phenomenal worldwide bonanza didn't lead to immediate acting success, but by 1971 he was back on Broadway again and also working in movies (including one of our guilty pleasures Skyjacked, 1972.) By 1977, he'd regained enough career footing to star in his own series The Amazing Spider-Man (1977-1979), which was not a considerable hit and had a sporadic broadcast schedule. A 1986 trip to Australia for work in a miniseries ultimately led to his permanent relocation there where he has remained very busy and even become an Australian citizen. He is currently sixty-six.