The Untouchables (TV Series) Little Egypt (1960) User Reviews

Violence as usual...

[planktonrules · 8/10 · 9 March 2016]

When the show begins, Mayor Stone is elected on the reform ticket in a Southern Illinois area referred to as 'Little Egypt' (???). Soon, the mobster who's been in charge there decides to have the Mayor killed as well as the Sheriff...and the Mayor's wife also was killed in the process. Not surprisingly, the Governor wasn't at all pleased and asks Ness for his help. Ness' plan is to infiltrate the mob run by Major Byron (Fred Clark) and the fake mobster will be a new member of the Untouchables, Cam (Anthony George). To communicate with Ness, Cam will use carrier pigeons.

A hiccup in all this is that after Cam joins the mob, eventually the gangsters start to wonder if they have a leak in the organization. One guy, Ed Carlton (John Marley), wonders if it could be Cam and asks a lady to seduce him and search his belongings. The only unusual things she finds is a receipt for pigeon feed...and Ed searches Cam's apartment and finds the birds. What's next? See the show.

By the end of the show, the Untouchables are (once again) outnumbered and outgunned but manage to somehow win the climactic gun battle and save the day. I mention this because it's a weakness in the series--that no matter what the odds are, Ness and his men almost never get shot--even when the baddies are using shotguns and machine guns! Still, despite this, it's a good and engaging show...well worth seeing.

The Untouchable Cavalry

[bkoganbing · 6/10 · 7 March 2014]

Robert Stack steps out of the picture for most of this Untouchables episode. Carrying the ball here is Anthony George playing newly recruited Treasury agent Cam Allison who goes undercover in a gang run by Fred Clark who controls a downstate Illinois county with ties to the Chicago wise guys that Eliot Ness is forever trying to put out of business.

Fred Clark who probably was in the cavalry back in his military days, styles himself the Major and wears riding boots and carries a riding crop for affectation and a little use on people. Anthony George who plays Cam Allison infiltrates the gang, but Clark's number one trigger man John Marley remains unconvinced.

Nice shootout in the end with Robert Stack bringing the Untouchable cavalry to George's rescue. He needed it.

"Ripped from the headlines"?

[actionsub · 6/10 · 11 February 2020]

There is some historical context for this particular episode, like many of the shows in the first season.

The southern third of the state of Illinois is known as Little Egypt because it is bordered by two major rivers. This episode, more than likely, was inspired by the "Bloody Williamson" gang wars in the 20s between Charlie Birger's gang and the Shelton Brothers' gang. In real life, the mayor of a small town called West City, near Marion, had ties to the Sheltons. Charlie Birger sent his men first to bomb the mayor's house, and later shoot him dead.

However, the city of Moraine depicted in the episode is nowhere near the real "Little Egypt". In real life, Moraine is a Chicago suburb. On the show, it was 100 miles away according to the dialogue. In reality, the events where the episode took place were about 400 miles from Chicago. The "carrier pigeons" that Allison used to communicate with Ness would have taken a couple of days to fly from Williamson County to Chicago. Just an instance where creative license and a lack of knowledge of geography would spoil an otherwise good episode.