Burke's Law Terror in a Tiny Town: Part 1 (1963–1966) Online

After fifteen episodes, Amos Burke's final caper as secret agent was this two-parter, scripted by Marc Brandel.

Harlan O'Brian ( Harry Basch ) goes berserk in a restaurant after the counter man casually insults his home town of Sorrel. A policeman shoots him dead. O'Brian, Chief Security Officer at the town's atomic power plant, had also been a Government agent.

Burke finds the townspeople have been subjected to some form of mass brainwashing. The local radio station is pumping subliminal messages into listeners' heads via music. Its symptoms manifest themselves in the form of extreme oaths of loyalty to Sorrel, and blind hatred of outsiders. A Communist-backed organisation called 'The Friends Of Progress' appears to be behind it.

Congressman Jed Hawkes ( Robert Middleton ) wants to take over as leader of the country, and is planning 'the biggest surprise since Pearl Harbour'. He commands that the people eliminate Burke. Fleeing from an angry mob ( even a mother with a pram turns against him at one point ), he takes refuge in a laundromat. Inside one of the machines is the corpse of its owner, Richard Prince, who had previously given Burke information...

If you think the sight of a dead man swirling about amidst a mass of clothes funny, you'd be wrong. Its done in pretty chilling fashion.

Taken as a single story, 'Town' is a superb finale to the series, and makes one regret that no more were made.

The notion of the 'community-where-things-are not-right' had been done before, of course, most notably in John Sturges' superb 'Bad Day At Black Rock' starring Spencer Tracy. Sorrel is a typical mid-West American town, yet the atmosphere is so thick with evil Burke confides to 'The Man' that he feels as though he is 'behind enemy lines'. The seemingly innocent radio broadcasts, graffiti warning outsiders to 'Get Out!', and policemen who laugh and drive off when crimes are reported, there is far more menace here than in say, the recent remake of 'The Prisoner'.

The good supporting cast includes Kevin McCarthy ( 'Dr.Bennell' from Don Siegel's 'Invasion Of The Body Snatchers' ), Skip Homieier, Lynn Loring, and Joan Huntington.

To be continued...

I'm not familiar with the series, and was lured into watching this two-part series finale based on the plot description, and from the excellent reviews provided by ShadeGrenade (second one accessible at http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0533824/reviews). (His) has been the only input in over four years, so obviously "Terror in a Tiny Town" is far from the best known entity.

Settings where a hero finds him or herself in a town where all inhabitants think alike and pose a threat to the stranger can be irresistible. The first time I was introduced to the idea was in THE CITY OF THE DEAD (aka "Horror Hotel," 1960), which gave a very creepy feeling. The intent of that movie dealing with witchcraft had nothing to do with politics, of course. Ditto, INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, the horror classic whose intention was (ar least on the surface) only to provide chills. (In that one the protagonist was not a stranger, of course, but a town resident who had escaped the effects of the evil doers.)

As you may have determined from the IMDb's information, the villain of this story was the big power of the town who gained control of the townsfolks' minds through publicly transmitted subliminal messages. The idea was to get them all to think his way (or, as the villain put it, to goad them into "obedience"), leading to his ultimate goal, control of the whole country.

Aside from the inherent entertainment value, where the viewer's interest is easily maintained thanks to the effective way the story was handled, what I appreciated about this tale was its value as a parable to our current times.

I recall a young man appearing in a TV show who had made a name for himself when he was a kid, espousing far right ideology. What changed him? He answered that he started examining other sources, while maintaining all of the major sources of information wherever it was he grew up (perhaps Alabama or Mississippi) provided the same messages.

Indeed, some "big powers" in the United States have grown so wealthy, they have made good on a campaign to buy up newspapers, radio and TV stations in the last thirty-four years, so that in some locales, all one absorbs is the singular message advantageous to the big powers. (As an example for this case, the Koch Brothers.) Add to the mix heavyweight planners such as Karl Rove who initiate the strategy of keeping the base riled up, through knee-jerk issues with little relevance to peoples' day-to-day lives (such as gun control and abortion), in addition to financing think tanks to make available pseudo-science to support the mind-molding in effect, and what do you wind up with? A willing army of sheep who have forgotten to think for themselves, and who may be counted on to support the agenda of the big powers. This is an exact analogy for "The Terror in a Tiny Town'!

At the end of the show, the big power (wonderfully played by Robert Middleton, as Judge Hawkes) admits his intention of destroying the government of the United States. Is that not uncomfortably close to what we have been experiencing in recent times, when the extremist politicians who have been brought to office by the unthinking sheep, don't care for the government and will sometimes take unprecedented steps to slow it down (by avoiding appointees to important offices, or by not enacting laws) or to harm the government outright, through shutdowns.

It's insidious, and it's happening. Obviously, such a danger is nothing new, otherwise the writers of this episode would not have thought of it. (No doubt the McCarthy era served as their inspiration.) Yet if we may step away from reasons of political ideology (the extreme right-wing serving as the example here, but the extreme left wing poses no less a threat), and look at the big picture: it's a fact that media outlets, owned by some fifty companies back in 1980, have now dwindled down to five. We are all susceptible to the propaganda and limited windows of information the big powers prefer for the sheep of society to be guided by.

The writers of these episodes were undoubtedly repulsed by such tendencies, and they drove their points hard at the end; Amos Burke makes a joke to the pretty Mexican (played by Lynn Loring), calling her a "conformist," and when a lady voices her objection to another about the presence of the Mexican, Amos confronts the bigotry by asking, "Haven't you learned anything"?

How remarkable that an old and obscure television program from 1966 could have "foretold" the events in motion leading to a point in history where the terror in a tiny town could, not inconceivably, and quite frighteningly, become the terror of a great country.