Fear not, for ‘ere this day is done, you shall have a hole in one.

The Avengers

4.16: The Thirteenth Hole

A strange one this, for the first twenty minutes The Thirteenth Hole looks as if it’s going to be the most generic of all oddball Avengers scenarios – super villains up to murderous acts on the golf course, and Steed and Mrs Peel must investigate – but turns things around for a highly entertaining last half as Steed engages in a tournament filled with dirty tricks (many of them courtesy of Mrs Peel, aiding and abetting him).

Steed: Poor Ted. Never had the chance to swing his steel-shafted handle-to-head niblick. He was shot with a rifle at long range.

Mrs Peel: Right down the fairway?

No time is wasted showing who is doing what, namely Reed (Patrick Allen, his most illustrious credit being the announcer of The Smell of Reeves and Mortimer. I’m kidding. Or am I?) and Jackson (Victor Maddern, Hobson in Fury from the Deep), offing agent Ted Murphy (Bill Hibbert) at the thirteenth hole in the opening scene (303 being the “club” of choice). This sets Steed and Emma on the trail, owing to Ted having kept tabs on scientific types. Helpfully, there are a load of score cards in his wardrobe, so soon they are off to the Craigleigh Gold Club, to hang about, get admonished by patrons and generally snoop.

Waversham: I wouldn’t mind giving you a stroke or two. On or off the course.

Various types announce themselves, including the club professional Collins (Francis Matthews), who acts suspiciously but is actually just suspicious (of others, and who ends up killed by a gas-propelled golf ball for his troubles) and Waversham (Donal Hewlett, Hardiman in The Claws of Axos), who’s keen on Emma, in the lascivious old buffer sense.

Also present are Colonel Watson (Hugh Manning) and Dr Adams (Peter Jones, the Book in The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, keeping with the voiceover theme), who is part of Reed’s scheme (it’s eventually revealed that the bunker at the thirteenth contains an actual bunker – geddit? – complete with mastermind Colonel Watson, periscope and communications with a Russian satellite, Vostik 2).

Mrs Peel: Fear not, for ‘ere this day is done, you shall have a hole in one. I am your fairy godmother. I want you to win this game.

Steed: Why, have you got money on me?

By this point, Emma has been taken captive while Steed completes his round with Adams, who has been told to let Steed blow himself up on the twelfth via an explosive in the hole (“I’m afraid it will damage the greens considerably”). But that’s getting ahead of the good stuff. If you can get past the constant alternating studio close ups and location wide shots (and you’ll need to, to enjoy any of the latter seasons of the show), Steed’s various matches are hugely enjoyable.

Helping matters is Allen, not because the part is up to much, but because he gives such incredulous reactions to Steed’s various put-ons (checking the course with various gauges to judge wind, course and correction; he also keeps his ball in his hat), and is such a dirty cheat (dropping his caddy as Steed is about to strike). Whatever Reed gets up to, though, Emma gets up to worse, burying his ball in mud and depositing Steed’s in the hole.

Mrs Peel: It really is the height of pessimism to have a hat lined with chain mail.

Adding to the amusement, Jackson fails to execute Steed with a golf ball (“If it hadn’t been for my trusty hat”), so the latter is raring to go against Adams, whom Jones gives just the right air of out-of-his-depth angst (“Got you worried, ay? The game ahead?”), added to by the fully-apprised Steed needling him (“One up, Still, things may change. Around about the thirteenth”) and procrastinating by cutting the grass with nail scissors. When Steed eventually comes across the landmine, he manages to win the round by potting his ball from the shelter of the bunker with some impressive cueing action.

Even the big fight is entertainingly offbeat, with the Russians on the other end of the TV monitor reacting to the altercation (until Steed smashes the screen), Emma fighting while cuffed to a chair and Steed finally taking out a fleeing Watson with a well-aimed ball.

The handcuffs inspire a gag about Emma’s handicap and there’s another during the subsequent golf cart drive off in regard to Steed’s champers-uncorking wrist action (“I thought you said you could do it in one”). Why the bad guys need the ruse of playing at all is anyone’s guess, but that’s part of the pleasure of this kind of episode. It’s not so much the final logic, but the playing of the game.

Agree? Disagree? Mildly or vehemently? Let me know in the comments below.

Comments

We live in a twilight world.

Tenet (2020)
(SPOILERS) I’ve endured a fair few confusingly-executed action sequences in movies – more than enough, actually – but I don’t think I’ve previously had the odd experience of being on the edge of my seat during one while simultaneously failing to understand its objectives and how those objectives are being attempted. Which happened a few times during Tenet. If I stroll over to the Wiki page and read the plot synopsis, it is fairly explicable (fairly) but as a first dive into this Christopher Nolan film, I frequently found it, if not impenetrable, then most definitely opaque.

She was addicted to Tums for a while.

Marriage Story (2019)
(SPOILERS) I don’t tend to fall heavily for Noah Baumbach fare. He’s undoubtedly a distinctive voice – even if his collaborations with Wes Anderson are the least of that director’s efforts – but his devotion to an exclusive, rarefied New York bubble becomes ever more off-putting with each new project. And ever more identifiable as being a lesser chronicler of the city’s privileged quirks than his now disinherited forbear Woody Allen, who at his peak mastered a balancing act between the insightful, hilarious and self-effacing. Marriage Story finds Baumbach going yet again where Woody went before, this time brushing up against the director’s Ingmar Bergman fixation.

You can’t climb a ladder, no. But you can skip like a goat into a bar.

Juno and the Paycock (1930)
(SPOILERS) Hitchcock’s second sound feature. Such was the lustre of this technological advance that a wordy play was picked. By Sean O’Casey, upon whom Hitchcock based the prophet of doom at the end of The Birds. Juno and the Paycock, set in 1922 during the Irish Civil War, begins as a broad comedy of domestic manners, but by the end has descended into full-blown Greek (or Catholic) tragedy. As such, it’s an uneven but still watchable affair, even if Hitch does nothing to disguise its stage origins.

Anything can happen in Little Storping. Anything at all.

The Avengers 2.22: Murdersville
Brian Clemens' witty take on village life gone bad is one of the highlights of the fifth season. Inspired by Bad Day at Black Rock, one wonders how much Murdersville's premise of unsettling impulses lurking beneath an idyllic surface were set to influence both Straw Dogs and The Wicker Mana few years later (one could also suggest it premeditates the brand of backwoods horrors soon to be found in American cinema from the likes of Wes Craven and Tobe Hooper).

James Bond. You appear with the tedious inevitability of an unloved season.

Moonraker (1979)
Depending upon your disposition, and quite possibly age, Moonraker is either the Bond film that finally jumped the shark or the one that is most gloriously redolent of Roger Moore’s knowing take on the character. Many Bond aficionados will no doubt utter its name with thinly disguised contempt, just as they will extol with gravity how Timothy Dalton represented a masterful return to the core values of the series. If you regard For Your Eyes Only as a refreshing return to basics after the excesses of the previous two entries, and particularly the space opera grandstanding of this one, it’s probably fair to say you don’t much like Roger Moore’s take on Bond.

He tasks me. He tasks me, and I shall have him.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
(1982)
(SPOILERS) I don’t love Star Trek, but I do love Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. That probably isn’t just me, but a common refrain of many a non-devotee of the series. Although, it used to apply to The Voyage Home (the funny one, with the whales, the Star Trek even the target audience for Three Men and a Baby could enjoy). Unfortunately, its high regard has also become the desperate, self-destructive, song-and-verse, be-all-and-end-all of the overlords of the franchise itself, in whichever iteration, it seems. This is understandable to an extent, as Khan is that rare movie sequel made to transcendent effect on almost every level, and one that stands the test of time every bit as well (better, even) as when it was first unveiled.

My name is Dr. King Schultz, this is my valet, Django, and these are our horses, Fritz, and Tony.

Django Unchained (2012)
(MINOR SPOILERS) Since the painful misstep of Grindhouse/Death Proof, Quentin Tarantino has regained the higher ground like never before. Pulp Fiction, his previous commercial and critical peak, has been at very least equalled by the back-to-back hits of Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained. Having been underwhelmed by his post Pulp Fiction efforts (albeit, I admired his technical advances as a director in Kill Bill), I was pleasantly surprised by Inglourious Basterds. It was no work of genius (so not Pulp Fiction) by any means, but there was a gleeful irreverence in its treatment of history and even to the nominal heroic status of its titular protagonists. Tonally, it was a good fit for the director’s “cool” aesthetic. As a purveyor of postmodern pastiche, where the surface level is the subtext, in some ways he was operating at his zenith. Django Unchained is a retreat from that position, the director caught in the tug between his all-important aesthetic pr…

My dear, sweet brother Numsie!

The Golden Child (1986)
Post-Beverly Hills Cop, Eddie Murphy could have filmed himself washing the dishes and it would have been a huge hit. Which might not have been a bad idea, since he chose to make this misconceived stinker.

Twenty dwarves took turns doing handstands on the carpet.

Bugsy (1991)
(SPOILERS) Bugsy is very much a Warren Beatty vanity project (aren’t they all, even the ones that don’t seem that way on the surface?), to the extent of his playing a title character a decade and a half younger than him. As such, it makes sense that producer Warren’s choice of director wouldn’t be inclined to overshadow star Warren, but the effect is to end up with a movie that, for all its considerable merits (including a script from James Toback chock full of incident), never really feels quite focussed, that it’s destined to lead anywhere, even if we know where it’s going.

When I barked, I was enormous.

Dean Spanley (2008)
(SPOILERS) There is such a profusion of average, respectable – but immaculately made – British period drama held up for instant adulation, it’s hardly surprising that, when something truly worthy of acclaim comes along, it should be singularly ignored. To be fair, Dean Spanleywas well liked by critics upon its release, but its subsequent impact has proved disappointingly slight. Based on Lord Dunsany’s 1939 novella, My Talks with Dean Spanley, our narrator relates how the titular Dean’s imbibification of a moderate quantity of Imperial Tokay (“too syrupy”, is the conclusion reached by both members of the Fisk family regarding this Hungarian wine) precludes his recollection of a past life as a dog.

Inevitably, reviews pounced on the chance to reference Dean Spanley as a literal shaggy dog story, so I shall get that out of the way now. While the phrase is more than fitting, it serves to underrepresent how affecting the picture is when it has cause to be, as does any re…

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

Search This Blog