Tub Time: Digging Up Some "Klondike!"

I have to bet that not too many readers are readily familiar with the TV series Klondike. At a time when the airwaves were saturated with westerns, some attempts were made at "northerns" instead (such as The Alaskans.) Klondike came on in 1960 and took place for the most part in a gold rush town. Thus, though it had many western elements, it also had its share of heavy coats to suit the colder climate. 

The star of the show was little-known actor Ralph Taeger, who'd appeared on shows such as Men Into Space, Bat Masterson, Tombstone Territory and Sea Hunt. It was something of a risk to star the young man in his own series when he'd only done a bit of stage work, one uncredited movie bit and scattered guest roles. But the 6'3" former baseball player and model had the right look, at least, and demonstrated charisma on screen.  

Appearing in more than half the episodes of the series was an antagonist played by James Coburn, who only started a bit earlier in the biz than Taeger but who'd amassed many more credits and had even done a few features. (Ever heard of The Magnificent Seven, 1960, ?!) Generally, though, the series centered on Taeger and his exploits. We're zeroing in on one particular episode in this post, for reasons which will be obvious. 

Episode 11 was titled "Bathhouse Justice." (Had this been the name of the series, it may have run longer than 17 episodes in all!) I have to apologize in advance for the picture quality. It's the best I could obtain.

Signage reveals that cold water baths are 5 cents, hot water 10 cents, which seems a no-brainer, especially in Yukon, Canada! Quite a jump up in cost was 50 cents for the use of a towel (!), which promised to be "better than your shirt!" This spout, with steaming water coming out leads to quite an interesting setup...

We see a gaggle of men all gathered around it, presumably with nothing on.

This hot water is being supplied by Taeger, who is helping out at the bathhouse and has a bird's eye view of the main room. In the upper-right corner he can be seen next to a large boiler.

Suddenly a female proprietress hollers that she's coming in with some towels, so all the men plop down into what are half a dozen individual tubs in a sort of wagon wheel formation! The place is full up, with a line out the door, hence every spot is taken.

Suddenly the well-heeled, impatient Britt Lomond arrives and requests a private room from the owner (Nora Marlowe.) She tells him that they're all in use... and that the LINE forms outside.

That's not good enough for him, though. Ignoring some of the other customers waiting, he picks one of the bathers and tells him that he's clean enough and needs to get out. Now.

Taeger overhears this and begins to head over to the jerk. He tries to steer Lomond away from his bad behavior, but ultimately has to take matters into his own hands.

He hoists the man head first into one of the tubs as all the bathers laugh raucously.

Lomond is then unceremoniously dumped, sopping wet, onto the floor.

Later (thank you, Jesus) we find Taeger enjoying a sudsy bath of his own.

He's in one of the private baths referred to earlier. But, you know, in the movies and on TV, few baths ever remain truly private!

Marlowe comes bustling in and he has to sink down and toss a towel over the tub.

She's got her husband with her now, who's been away looking for gold. The grateful man (Walter Burke) wants to gift Taeger 10% of the bathhouse for helping his wife while he was away with no payment given other than the occasional soak.

10% of a bustling enterprise like this one is nothing to sneeze at!

Unfortunately, diminutive Burke winds up playing cards with the disgruntled Lomond and in a rash move loses his own share of ownership of the place to the man!

Things take an even greater turn for the worst when Lomond is later found dead in one of the private bathtubs! Burke is blamed for the murder and sentenced to hang by the swift-moving "justice" of the town.

The bathhouse is a veritable gold mine in itself! Always busy with a half-dozen or more men taking a sudsy bath.

Taeger, investigating a hunch of his as he tries to clear Burke of the murder, starts rifling through some of the clothing at the bathhouse. 

This draws the ire of one of the customers (who, sadly, doesn't hop out and confront Taeger.)

Soon enough, Taeger starts to explain what he's doing and the bathers allow him to proceed.

Armed with the information he wanted, he next heads to a private bath to get the judge out of his tub. (These people are CLEAN!)

The judge (Milton Frome) isn't permitted to dress even...! He has to head into the other room to observe the new evidence.

Without ever leaving their pie-shaped tubs, the bathers watch everything unfold.

In fact, these gents are impressed into serving as a new jury as the judge verifies what really went down regarding Lomond's death! Hence, "Bathhouse Justice."

As we now seem to have a generation who prefer to shower at the gym without fully undressing, this sign would probably come as a real shocker! LOL By the way, this episode is available (albeit colorized) on YT if you want to see it all play out for yourself.

Taeger (whose voice sounded remarkably like Humphrey Bogart's!) wasn't able to get viewers to tune into Klondike in the required numbers. The show was canned after 17 installments.

In a rather startling turn of events, the success of shows like Surfside 6 and 77 Sunset Strip inspired producers to immediately star in a show of that nature.

Both he and sometime costar Coburn were cast as the leads in Acapulco. The first episode of Acapulco debuted in the very same time slot as its predecessor only two weeks after the final episode of Klondike aired! That had to be quite a jolt to anyone who really wasn't paying attention...!

Does this make ya want to tune in? Acapulco drew fewer viewers than the prior show and was canceled after only 8 episodes. Coburn went on to a successful career as a leading man in movies, which proves one can live through nearly anything and win if there is determination mixed with luck! He even won an Oscar for 1998's Affliction.

Taeger made movies, too. He costarred in X-15 (1961) and was featured in Stage to Thunder Rock, A House Is Not a Home and The Carpetbaggers (all 1964), but this didn't last. Soon it was back to TV for another try at series success.

The 1967 show Hondo (with Kathie Browne) was inspired by the hit 1953 John Wayne movie of the same name. It also failed to reach a significant audience, though, and was canceled after 17 episodes. (A fellow blogger has provided multiple screencaps from one episode that had him shirtless for an extended time, if you're interested.) Only one inexpensive movie and some infrequent guest roles followed. Taeger exited the biz in 1983. He created a firewood company and worked some in local theatre. He died in 2015 at age 78, having been ill for some time.

The End!

Take a "Looker"

Most people who know me to any extent know that I am a classic film lover. I have the utmost adoration and respect for those great examples of cinema that enthralled audiences long ago and still would now if people gave them a chance and weren’t offended by black & white film or old clothes or different manners of speaking, etc… So why, if I feel this way, do I have an almost equal, perhaps even greater, affinity for utter garbage? For every Vertigo or Singin’ in the Rain I have a Color of Night or a Can’t Stop the Music! I get such a perverse thrill out of movies that cost a decent amount of money and featured name brand stars but yet wound up as ludicrous, hilarious or embarrassing (or all three.) Such a film is today’s “gem,” the Michael Crichton-directed Looker.

Despite being splendiferously tacky, ineptly scripted, awkwardly edited and petrifyingly dated, this thriller about corporate manipulation of the masses through television advertising manages nevertheless to be fully entertaining and more than a little prescient. Old TV ads are always funny anyway, but when they are fake to begin and from the 80s it only adds to the cheese factor.

Albert Finney, of all people, plays a hotshot Beverly Hills plastic surgeon who has had a string of models make use of his services, each with extremely specific requests about the changes they want done (down to the millimeter.) Shortly afterwards, they begin dying off! He attaches himself to one of the most recent ones (Susan Dey) and begins to investigate what is happening, even though he is simultaneously being framed as a prime suspect in the murders.
James Coburn plays the head of a massive and shadowy conglomerate and is assisted by the rather icy Leigh Taylor-Young. This pair is the chief focus of Finney's legwork. One of the futuristic devices they are developing is a mechanism that is able to pinpoint exactly where the viewer’s eye is landing when watching an advertisement. Reportedly, such a device now exists in real life, though they needn’t bother with me. I can tell you where I usually look!

Standing in Finney’s way is hit man Tim Rossovich who wields a futuristic and baffling weapon (are you ready for this? It’s a gun called the L.O.O.K.E.R., standing for Light Ocular-Oriented Kinetic Emotive Responses), which causes time to stand still for the victim. Soon, Finney's own life is in grave danger as he tries to unravel the secret shenanigans of the folks who are making these models flawless and then offing them.

Finney does an okay job, though he's hardly the most desirable leading man for a film of this nature with his trousers yanked up to his sternum. Best known for touchstone films such as Tom Jones and Two for the Road, he was in the middle of an attempt to do more commercial and mainstream fare such as Wolfen and Annie. Soon he would revert to more artistically challenging and rewarding projects like The Dresser and Under the Volcano before coming back with a splash in Erin Brockovich.

Ex-The Partridge Family cast member Dey (who is horribly miscast) is adequate, but has a sketchy role with little to do except seem concerned. Fans of hers will be delighted at the amount of skin she shows (the film was made before a PG-13 rating existed and, as a result, the non-sexualized nudity was deemed okay for a PG movie.) Still, if we’re being honest, a film all about the perfection of an exactly symmetric face with flawless features did not necessarily need to focus on the cute, pert and appealing, but decidedly unusual-looking, Dey! The ex-Playboy models who make up the other victims seem a tad more plausible in this regard. Incidentally, Wheel of Fortune icon Vanna White is briefly visible within a passel of girls crossing a drive to enter a building. Coburn tries to inject some wit into his role, but, like so many other folks in this movie, is just a pawn in the bigger picture of “techno-thriller with a message.” Gaunt and rather craggy, with the feathered hair he (and most everyone) favored during this period, he isn’t exactly at his physical or creative peak.

Dorian Harewood has another one of the many cop roles that dominated his career at the time and winds up having little to do of interest. Taylor-Young, who is undeniably gorgeous, goes through the entire film with little expression and one eyebrow raised much higher than the other, which itself almost seems an unintentional comment on the dangers of cosmetic surgery. In her final scene, she looks like someone who is desperately sad she didn't get to play Mommie Dearest with her shoulder pads, severe hair, pearls and even the requisite “fuck me” shoes!

Ex-pro football linebacker Rossovich is a total kick as the hit man (billed in the credits as "Moustache Man"!!) His kinship with Tom Selleck in real life (they were college roommates) is more than obvious here and his hilarious look dates the movie more than anything else. (He is older brother of the yummy Rick Rossovich, an actor who appeared in The Terminator, Top Gun and, most notably, Roxanne, among other things.)

The film is often uproariously funny, but in this case a lot of the humor seems to be intentional. Little quirky bits of irony emerge along the way (for example, a product called "Spurt" is advertised as a character has blood gushing out of his chest!) The featured weapon, silly as it is sometimes presented, allows for some really interesting and eye-opening sequences.

Made at a time when excess and tastelessness were about to explode as never before, it wallows in idiocy and illogic, but is rarely dull. One death from a balcony is shown in slo-mo with the crotch of the victim front and center as the body flails to its eventual death. Someone even decided to mark the lovely event with a lobby card all its own!

The lame script (also by Crichton) has so many holes in it it's downright ridiculous, but somehow the movie still works as light entertainment and is able to get a few points across. This is one rare time when a film could have been better if it were allowed to be a little bit longer. Oddly enough, as he warns here about the dangers of computer-generated imaging, the most successful film adaptation of one of his works was the heavily CGI-ed Jurassic Park. As it stands, Looker is the first mainstream film ever to feature a “realistic” computer generated character, a model named Cindy.

The addictive title song is about as close to deliriously bad 80s heaven as one can get. This film has many similarities to director Crichton's Coma but without that film's darker edge (and without Jerry Goldsmith's nerve-jangling score. This one is done by Barry De Vorzon who had just come off the camp scream Xanadu.)

The preposterous climax of this film, which takes place inside a massive studio, is notably bizarre and hard to forget with the villains doing more harm to each other than to anyone else as they find themselves living inside virtual commercials! Cheesy spokespeople hawk various products while the antagonists skulk around the premises wielding guns.

Give this a look sometime, but be prepared to hum the title song for days afterward, despite any and all measures of prevention short of fast-forwarding through it altogether.