Naked City (TV Series) Make It Fifty Dollars and Add Love to Nona (1962) User Reviews

Great Showcase for Two Old Pros

[lrrap · 7/10 · 24 April 2020]

Luther Adler and Ed Begley both shine in major roles in this episode. As they walked down the street conversing (near the beginning), I realized what a pleasure it is to have their performances (and, as always, NYC of the era) preserved via Naked City and home video. Years and years of theatrical, film and TV experience is represented by these two guys.

The script is well constructed for the most part, but I became increasingly wary of Ed Begley, so gregarious and dominating...as he seemed to grow more hostile and sinister with each scene. Luther Adler, despite his character's venal missteps and flaws, remained his typically charming self. I feared things were headed for a REAL unpleasant ending but, thankfully, no......everything turned out more-or-less OK at the end. And Mssrs Adler and Begley kept us very involved in their characters via their full-blooded, multi-dimensional portrayals.

I laughed out loud at Horace MacMahon's request for a "Solemn Promise" from Adam Flint at the very end. VERY funny line, delivered in Horace's typically wry, jaded manner. LR

Will you make me a solemn promise. When I ever get that old and foolish just shoot me!

[sol-kay · 6/10 · 26 February 2013]

***SPOILERS*** Put into a old age home by his son Nick, Alex Cord, former cigar and cigarette counterman Mr. Kovar, Luther Adler, feels both alone and abandoned. Mr. Kovar decides to call New York city's Idlewild,later renamed JFK, airport with a bomb threat just to get even with Nick by having his flight to Italy, together with his wife Nona played by Roxanne Arlen, canceled. It's then that Mr. Kovar develops this nasty habit of checking out the local newspapers and finding stories about man's inhumanity to man as well as animals in New York City and having the culprits pay for their actions by sending them threatening letters to do them in.

While Mr. Kovar is doing all this one of his fellow residents retired Chicago cop Jimmy Fenton, Ed Bagle, finds out about his criminal doings and then starts to blackmail or shake him down, crooked cop style, for $5.00, that a whopping $38.13 in 2013 dollars, a week to keep quite from reporting him to the police!

Claiming to be his friend, what a friend he is, Fenton starts to put the squeeze on Mr. Kovar hiking the shake down money to as much as $18.00 a week even when his son has him brought back to his & his wife's luxury penthouse apartment on the upper East Side of Manhattan. Sick and tired of being taken advantage of by his so-called "friend" this shake down artist and ex-cop Jimmy Fenton Mr.Kovar comes up with a plan to not only put him in his place but six feet under as well!

***SPOILERS*** Not too convincing ending with the unsuspecting Jimmy Fenton being set up by Mr. Kovar to pick up an envelop stuffed with $100.00 in payoff money by a bench outside of Central Park. Not only is the entire 65th police precinct at hand to make the pinch but there were also police sharpshooters hiding on roofs outside the park ready to open fire on Jimmy Fenton just when he was to pick up the envelope! All this to get an unharmed and harmless 70's like year old guy who for what all the cops on the scene knew was just taking a stroll in the park and picking up a piece of garbage, the envelop with eh $100.00, that he innocently found lying there!

This had the guilt ridden Mr. Kovar, who was hiding inside a telephone booth outside the park, have second thoughts and prevented his "friend" from getting shot. Even if it meant he'll be arrested, along with Fenton, for criminal harassment or end up being committed to a mental hospital for the "good deeds" that he thought that he was doing.