The Untouchables (TV Series) The Monkey Wrench (1962) User Reviews

"You look you got yourself a fan, Mr. Ness!"

[planktonrules · 7/10 · 23 March 2016]

In this episode, the Chicago mob (Nitti) and New York mob (Joe Kulik) are competing with each other in selling beer. It seems that Nitti's beer is higher quality since he's importing honest-to- goodness German brewmeisters to make his product. To put the hurt on Nitti's operation, Kulik hires a crazed gunman, Karl Hansa (Claude Akins) to pretend to be a brewer and infiltrate the Nitti operation. Along the way, Hansa leaves a trail of bodies. However, Eliot Ness apparently has a fan, Mady Kerner (Delores Dorn), and she's determined to not only help him but make a pass or two at him. As Mrs. Ness disappeared and was never talked about after the beginning of the first season, apparently he IS available! Unfortunately for Mady, Hansa finds out she's working with Ness.

This is generally a good and very enjoyable episode. I would have scored this one an 8 but at 30 minutes into the episode is THE sloppiest scene I've ever seen on the show. Ness and his men are chasing a 1920s model Rolls Royce. During the chase, the car with the baddies flips and explodes...and it's a 1940s model that looks absolutely nothing like the Rolls (though it did have four wheels!). Additionally, the lighting is different as well as the setting itself!! Talk about sloppy...and I am sure most of the folks at home noticed this as well!

Lake Shore Noir

[telegonus · 10/10 · 15 March 2015]

A well above average entry in The Untouchables series that focuses on the smuggling of brewmeisters from Germany into the U.S. in a lake shore community in northern Michigan called Chippewa Falls. It gets off to a good noirish start in the fog and stays in that mode for the remainder of the episode.

The story revolves around an attractive young widow, slightly ditsy but basically just lonely and too good for the class of people she hangs with, and a very dangerous and ambitious brewmeister excellently portrayed by Claude Akins,--startling to behold in his first scene--whose German accent wobbles but whose performance is baleful, so much so as to make just about every scene Akins is in feel like something out of a a horror movie.

Dolores Dorn is excellent as the widow with an overactive imagination and a crush on Eliot Ness. Her fate,--as in "will she, won't she, survive?"--drives the second half of the episode, as the noose tightens, and Akins, already in take charge mode with mobster Frank Nitti, is getting mighty suspicious of this seemingly out of place in the world of gangsters dame who might just be betraying the people she's supposed to be in league with.

The Monkey Wrench is good enough to have been a stand alone episode in an anthology series set during Prohibition; or, better yet, a first rate low budget movie, with the story more fleshed out (but not padded), with more character development for Dorn and, especially, Akins' brutal hood who, even early on, the viewer is reminded, has a bad reputation as unpredictable, a bit unhinged, and very dangerous. Danger drives this story, and it's very well done.

Better bootleg beer

[bkoganbing · 6/10 · 1 January 2014]

Bruce Gordon has a scheme to make better bootleg beer than the New York crowd. Import German brewmeisters from the old country. But when The Untouchables start raiding those breweries, Frank Nitti just kills them. That gets to be an expensive proposition after a while, still he's cutting into New York's market.

But Oscar Beregi in New York has his own scheme and his own special killing machine to wipe out the Chicago breweries. As is said Claude Akins character Karl Hanssa makes Mad Dog Coll look like a choirboy. And as Akins plays him he's pretty psyschotic and pretty deadly. Just as good as all those other psychotic villains Akins played in his career.

The unknown factor here is Dolores Dorn, widow of one of those killed who takes quite a liking to Eliot Ness. But Akins is pushing hard.

Akins and Dorn really are quite good in this episode. Watch it for those two.