Plot
This action series focused on a motley group of commandos recruited from stateside prisons to use their special skills against the Germans in World War II. They had been promised a parole at the end of the war if they worked out. And if they lived. The alternative was an immediate return to prison. If they ran, they could expect execution for desertion. The four were: Actor (Cesare' Danova) a handsome, resonant-voiced con man; Casino (Rudy Solari), a tough, wiry safe-cracker and mechanic; Goniff (Christopher Cary) a slender, likable Cockney cat burglar; and Chief (Brendon Boone) a rugged, somber American Indian who handled a switchblade like he was born to it. Led by West Pointer First Lt. Craig Garrison (Ron Harper) and headquartered in a secluded mansion in England, this slippery group ranged all over Europe in exploits that often took them behind enemy lines. In the pilot, Lt. Hanley from "Combat" gives them the name "Gorillas". Other recruits were sometimes brought in where special skills were required. In the episode "Banker's Hours", Jack Klugman is recruited to help loot a vault. In "The Magnificant Forger" comedian Larry Storch turns in one of a solid dramatic performance as a con brought in to help 'doctor' a Gestapo list of American agents. And in the two-parter "War And Crime/Plot to Kill" a con played by Richard Kiley is recruited because he was a dead ringer for a German field marshal who was part of a plot to assassinate Hitler.
TV Guide reviewer Cleveland Amory said of the show in 1968 that despite it being ludicrously one-sided, a second-hand idea, and third degree violence, that it was a first rate show.
Read more about this topic: Garrison's Gorillas
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“Trade and the streets ensnare us,
Our bodies are weak and worn;
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And we despoil the unborn.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
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“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)