Les incorruptibles A Fist of Five (1959–1963) Online

This episode is directed by Ida Lupino, an excellent actress who earned a real name for herself as a director..particular with inexpensive, gritty films and TV shows. It also stars Lee Marvin...one of the better guest villains on the show. It also features Frank DeKova...another excellent villain.

When the show begins, Officer Mike Bannon (Marvin) is being suspended from the police force for, again, using excessive force. Bannon seems irritated that the force just doesn't see it his way and obviously he's learned nothing from this. So what's he going to do on his off time? Strike out at organized crime AND make a fortune. Bannon's plan is to, with his brothers' help, kidnap a mobster, Tony Lomberto (Frank DeKova) and hold him ransom! Now THAT'S creative police work!!! Other than being 100% illegal, the other problem is that Bannon doesn't know that Lomberto has agreed to close up his business and, believe it or not, go straight!

The episode (with a couple exceptions mentioned below) was good and exciting. Of course, any episode with DeKova and Marvin is worth seeing. HOWEVER, this episode features one of the dumbest clichés that you often see in crime shows. After Ness and his men find what they think is drugs, Ness opens the package and tastes it to see! I think even in the 1930s they had ways to test it that were a bit safer than that!! What if the white power had been drain cleaner or rat poison?!?! And, are they saying Ness is a junkie and he really needed a quick fix?! Also, at the end when the hoods attack Bannon and his brothers, why do the brother EACH just stand there and do nothing...as if waiting to be shot?!?! Both are very sloppy. I've got to knock a few points off for these things and think this one earns a lower than usual 6.

Lee Marvin was the guest star in this episode of The Untouchables playing a tough no nonsense Chicago beat cop who crosses the line once too many times. Even in those days before Miranda warnings Marvin was excessively brutal and he gets bounced from the force.

At the same time as Marvin is being dismissed racketeer Frank DeKova is looking to make a deal seeing what happened to Al Capone with income tax evasion. He asks Robert Stack to intervene in Washington with his superiors.

DeKova has been the biggest thorn in Marvin's side as a beat cop, but now he has a plan to kidnap him and hold him for ransom from his associates. He enlists his brothers in the scheme one of them being a young James Caan.

It's an interesting twist for Robert Stack, Paul Picerni, and the rest of the Untouchables trying to rescue a gangster, but the episode is a pretty good one with a lot of scores being evened up and a couple of future film stars giving big league performances.

***SPOILERS*** Lee Marvin as big brother Mike Brannon is out to clean up the Tough Tony Lamberto, Frank DeKova, Mob and is using his brothers to get the job done for him. Having been suspended from the Chicago police department by putting one of Though Tony's boys into the hospital with a fractured skull Big Mike decides to go it in his own together with his brothers to do the job that the Chicago police is incapable of doing: Put an end to the Lamberdo mob once and for all. Or so Big Mike want's us to think. In fact Big Mike is far more interested in kidnapping Though Tony and holding him hostage for $150,000.00 that he can use, now without him any means of support, to make himself and his brothers independently wealthy.

It's brother Mike's resorting to violence as well as murder that get's his sensitive younger brother Denny, Ray Thinnes, to have second thoughts about his motives and soon decides to quit his war on crime before he ends up a victim of it. The war on crime conducted by Big Mike soon turns out to be as criminal as any of the hoods he's targeting. Kidnapping Lomberto soon backfires on Big Mike in that it brings the Feds or Unouchables lead by the at one point shirtless and brief less, he only had a towel wrapped around his midsection, US Government Agent Eliot Ness, Robert Stack, into the case. Ness now working to rescue Lomberto, whom he's pressing tax evasion charges against, has Big Mike and, after the big shoot-out, his only brother left alive Keir, James Caan, trapped in the Chicago sewer system like a bunch of cornered rats where their ready to be smoked out by Ness' Feds.

****SPOILERS*** One of the more violent "Untouchable" episodes with the body count more like that of an episode of "Combat" has Big Mike have it out with both the government agents as well as the Lamberto mob as he tries to end up going down in a blaze of glory when there's no way out for him. As things turned out Big Mike survived being killed in the shoot-out and left alive so he can end up taking a one way trip to state electric chair instead. It was Ness who made Big Mike's final end a happy, if you can call it that, one promising him that he's be buried along his now four dead brothers who were stupid enough to go alone with his crazy and hair brain plan.

P.S Check out former Superman Lois Lane Phillis Coates as Tough Tony's #1 squeeze former show girl Angela Carney who was crippled in a bombing at the Chicago nightclub she worked at that was meant for him.