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
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
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“If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one’s actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)