Joseph Ruskin gives a fabulous performance as Count Baker, a frighteningly cold-blooded contract killer in this offbeat segment of "Naked City". It was a riveting episode, unfortunately sabotaged a bit in the final few seconds.
I would have thought that veteran feature director George Sherman would have been more careful, as the final scene undercuts the show's overall impact. We have a solid story by Stirling Silliphant, not his usual kitchen-sink tale of very ordinary New Yorkers involved in some crime, but instead the last hurrah of a retired legendary hitman.
Vincent Gardenia as a colorful mobster (the sort of lovable types later popularized by Scorsese and in "The Sopranos") pulls Ruskin out of his bucolic existence in rural New York State 17 miles from NYC and offers him the chance of a lifetime: a hit designated by the mob against Salvatore Martino, a mafioso about to squeal before a Senate Investigating Committee. Ruskin has been after this big shot for decades, to make his "Baker's Dozen", namely the 13th victim of his notorious career as the best of the best among hired guns.
Replete with car chase and shootout on Manhattan locations, the episode is dominated by Ruskin, one of the most memorable mob villains I've ever seen on screen. But the climax of the show has a snatch of dialogue for him looped in (like a voiceover) that is jarringly fake, followed by some terrible "pithy" narration from Silliphant's pen that compares criminals to rodents -very hard to listen to so soon after creepy Trump has brought back Nazi rhetoric calling enemies "vermin". Shame on you Stirling.