{"id":39632,"date":"2024-06-29T00:01:13","date_gmt":"2024-06-29T06:01:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/?p=39632"},"modified":"2024-06-21T13:12:35","modified_gmt":"2024-06-21T19:12:35","slug":"telefilm-review-blackes-magic-ten-tons-of-trouble","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/telefilm-review-blackes-magic-ten-tons-of-trouble\/","title":{"rendered":"Telefilm Review: Blacke&#8217;s Magic: Ten Tons of Trouble"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/V9EpFKcSLz8?si=Cea6jdcJvV7-yXN9\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>We continue our reviews that focus on Batman actors in other detective and mystery programs as part of our\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/category\/amazingradio\/\">Amazing World of Radio Summer Series<\/a>, focusing on their old-time radio work. This week, we take a look at Cesar Romero&#8217;s guest appearance in the first episode of the 1986 mystery series <em>Blacke&#8217;s Magic<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p><em>Blacke&#8217;s Magic<\/em> was NBC series in which Hal Linden (<em>Barney Miller<\/em>) and Harry Morgan (<em>Dragnet<\/em> and <em>Mash<\/em>) play son and father. Linden is Alexander Blacke, a stage magician who also serves as a part-time consultant to the police on seemingly impossible cases, and Morgan is an old-school conman who will often lend his son some assistance. The series was created by mystery legends Richard Levinson and William Link.<\/p>\n<p>The series was preceded by a pilot TV movie. This episode firmly establishes the status quo for the new ongoing series, as Alexander is called in to investigate the seemingly impossible disappearance of a 10-ton statue brought from a museum where it had been brought by an Italian businessman (Romero). The CCTV was running and nothing appeared on camera. It appeared to have vanished without a trace.<\/p>\n<p>Cesar Romero displays the typical charm and charisma that made him so fun to watch throughout his career, whether playing a dashing hero in the 1940s or the Clown Prince of Crime. He&#8217;s a delight to watch in this, even though it becomes clear from early on that he&#8217;s behind this. This isn&#8217;t really a spoiler as this episode is less about &#8220;whodunit&#8221; and more about figuring out why and, more importantly, how.<\/p>\n<p>The solution to the case is actually pretty clever, although there are a few finer points of it which would warrant an expert in 1980s technology weighing in.<\/p>\n<p>Linden and Morgan play well off each other, with Linden making for a believable magician, and the more sober and responsible of the pair, while Morgan captures the lovable rogue with eccentric quirks that call to mind his character on <em>Dragnet<\/em>, Bill Gannon, despite having been on the opposite side of the law. The episode did have a subplot of a glory-hungry insurance agent (Jane Badler) trying to hog media publicity that takes up time but is really hard to care about.<\/p>\n<p>The series, which ran for only thirteen episodes, is a real curiosity. The concepts seem to be an amalgam of ideas from other obscure detective programs. The prominence of the &#8220;impossible crime&#8221; element is reminiscent of <em>Banacek; <\/em>the protagonist being a magician calls to mind Bill Bixby&#8217;s series <em>The Magician, <\/em>and one of our leads being a conman calls to mind <em>Tenspeed <\/em>and <em>Brownshoe. <\/em>These were all programs that aired within the previous fifteen years. Like\u00a0<em>Blacke&#8217;s Magic,\u00a0<\/em>none of these made it long-term.<\/p>\n<p>Beyond that, this is a series that doesn&#8217;t feel like the decade that produced it. I don&#8217;t say that as a criticism but more as an observation. This doesn&#8217;t feel like it fits into the same decade that gave us <em>Murder, She Wrote; Magnum, PI; Matlock; <\/em><em>Simon &amp; Simon;<\/em> and the <em>Perry Mason\u00a0<\/em>movies. Only the trappings (clothes, cars, and some of the elements of the solution) feel of its time. The style of the story and the way the two leads relate wouldn&#8217;t have been out of place in a 1940s B-detective film. I liked it, but I could definitely see why audiences in 1986 might not have gone for it.<\/p>\n<p>Still, this was a fun curiosity, boosted by a strong performance from Cesar Romero.<\/p>\n<p>Rating: 4 out of 5<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We continue our reviews that focus on Batman actors in other detective and mystery programs as part of our\u00a0Amazing World of Radio Summer Series, focusing on their old-time radio work. This week, we take a look at Cesar Romero&#8217;s guest appearance in the first episode of the 1986 mystery series Blacke&#8217;s Magic. Blacke&#8217;s Magic was&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[123,248],"tags":[5439,5437,5365,5442,5438,5440,5441],"class_list":["post-39632","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-golden-age-article","category-telefilm-review","tag-1980s-mystery","tag-blackes-magic","tag-cesar-romero","tag-hal-linden","tag-harry-morgan","tag-richard-levinson","tag-william-link"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pECdK-aje","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39632","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39632"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39632\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39715,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39632\/revisions\/39715"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39632"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39632"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39632"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}