Friday, December 16, 2011

On Guard! :)

Howdy All!

Well, it happened again--while on YouTube, I stumbled upon a Jack Kelly performance I hadn't yet seen. It's in A Double Life. Unfortunately, it's not the 1947 feature film starring Ronald Colman. Nope, this is the 1978 pilot film for a short-lived NBC series called Sword of Justice.

The late Dack Rambo stars as "Jack Cole", a "millionaire playboy" who was unjustly imprisoned for a crime he didn't commit. But, Cole put his time in the stir to good use. No, he didn't raise birds or earn a law degree. He learned how to become a crook. Not to worry, though: once out of the joint, Cole uses his newfound bad skills for good.

In A Double Life, Cole puts the squeeze on the murderous mastermind (a slightly pre-Dallas Larry Hagman) behind a scheme involving counterfeit wine.

I slogged through 11 segments of A Double Life on YouTube and found the three where JK briefly appears as "Walters", a surly security guard at the winery.

In the first segment, he comes in at about 1:00. As you'll see, he wears a laughably large hat. And, although his character is generally a grouch, JK does get in a funny line near the end of the clip:







In the segment below, JK comes in about 2:23 and yells at one of the winery workers (who is actually Cole's undercover operative):








Finally, JK wraps up his appearance starting at about 4:11:





Since Sword of Justice aired in early 1978 and was produced by Glen Larson, I wonder if perhaps Walters was working undercover, too, and was actually Harry Hammond of the Justice Department who became the boss of the Hardy Boys later that year... ;-)