The Judge and Jake Wyler Film Review

An elderly Bette Davis as the head of a detective agency. Count me in. Davis barking out orders, showing total disdain, insulting everyone, glaring, snarling and ready to spit in your eye. That is the Davis I love. Her career post-the 1950s was a very peculiar one with a lot of strange choices. A bunch of horror films, TV episodes in various shows and TV movies. Even for a legend like Davis who may have been the greatest actress of her time, when you hit fifty your choices narrow. Maybe not as much now but back then it was mother roles or Madams. Whether she needed the money or just loved her profession, I don't know but she just kept going no matter how small the role. Even after a series of strokes. She was one of the great ones. I have a biography of her that I keep meaning to read and watch most of her films. One of these days.

This was a TV pilot with Doug McClure as well and for what it is, it is pretty good. A solid whodunit with some action and a few fine well-constructed scenes. The Judge is an ex-Judge who had to retire because of her allergies to pretty much everything. So, she lives in a nearly hermetically sealed home and directs her two detectives who are out on parole - McClure and James McEachin. The pilot wasn't picked up which is a shame - a series with an irascible Davis in it would have been a delight. Though the focus is on McClure she gets a fair amount of screen time. The one scene in which a suspect in murder breaks in and opens the window and blows smoke in her face is a classic as she refuses to flinch.

They are hired by the daughter (Joan Van Ark) of a man found hanging in his hospital room to prove it isn't suicide but murder. There are plenty of suspects from wife (Lisabeth Hush) to his business partner (John Randolph) to an Albanian spy (Eric Braeden). McClure keeps running into guns on him, a car trying to kill him and getting beaten up by a violin. 90-minutes.