Salvage-1 (1979)

          Featuring one of the loopier premises in the history of primetime drama, this feature-length pilot movie launched a short-lived series, which has since become a minor cult favorite among sci-fi fans. Beloved TV icon Andy Griffith stars in the movie as a junkyard owner who builds his own private spaceship for a trip to the moon, where he plans to salvage abandoned NASA equipment and sell it to the highest bidder. Once the concept went to series, Griffth reprised his role, with his character piloting the spaceship for missions to remote locations around the globe; in the first regular episode, the goal was to retrieve monkeys for a zoo and to explore the possibility of bringing back an iceberg for a California community suffering from drought. Not hard to see why the series got canceled. Still, two things make the Salvage-1 pilot movie charming—Griffith’s affable persona and the lightness of the storytelling. Written by Mike Lloyd Ross, whose character development and dialogue are as clunky as his narrative concepts are wild, Salvage-1introduces Harry Broderick (Griffith) as an expert in repurposing junk—he buys a World War I biplane for a song, then guts the vehicle and sells parts to various buyers, making a $14,000 profit in the course of a morning’s work.

          Harry’s gotten hip to the multimillion-dollar value of tech that NASA left on the moon, and he’s identified an aeronautics expert with a theory that might facilitate inexpensive space travel. Harry hires the expert, ex-astronaut Skip Carmichael (Joel Higgins), who in turn enlists the aid of fuel specialist Melanie Slozar (Trish Stewart). Together with Harry’s regular employees—including a pair of former NASA ground-control techs—Harry cobbles together a spaceship called the Vulture. Meanwhile, uptight FBI agent Jack Klinger (Richard Jaeckel) sniffs around Harry’s junkyard because he senses something strange is happening. Salvage-1is predicated on an inordinate number of convenient plot twists, and Ross’ script is so upbeat that there’s never any real tension, but Salvage-1 is fun to watch simply because it’s such a lark. Even the laughably bad special effects featured during the Vulture’s moon shot aren’t enough to diffuse the good vibes. This is pure gee-whiz escapism, and the saving grace of the piece is that it never pretends to have meaning or substance. So, yes, the acting is hokey and the story is borderline stupid, but who cares? Fun is fun.

Salvage-1: GROOVY

Winter Kill (1974)

          After actor/producer Andy Griffith left the series that bore his name, the 1960-1968 family favorite The Andy Griffith Show, he spent nearly two decades casting about for another project that curried equal favor with the public. Some of the failed pilots and short-lived series he made during these wilderness years, which extended until the 1986 launch of his geriatric-lawyer show Matlock, are interesting because they’re edgier than the kind of material one normally associates with Griffith. For instance, the 1974 telefilm Winter Kill, the first of three TV movies designed to launch a new series featuring Griffith as a small-town sheriff facing grislier problems than The Andy Griffith Show’s unflappable Andy Taylor ever encountered, is a suspense story about a serial killer. It’s startling to see good-ol’-boy Griffith tracking down a psycho who slips on a ski mask and prowls around a snow-covered resort town by night, blowing away victims with a shotgun and spray-painting the number of each murder near the crime scene. Mayberry, this ain’t.

          Even aside from the novelty of seeing Griffith in a new context, Winter Kill is fairly effective, and with good reason: Screenwriter John Michael Hayes, whose career was winding down at this point, counted three Alfred Hitchcock classics, including the seminal Rear Window(1954), among his past credits, so he clearly learned a few things about generating tension from the Master of Suspense. Winter Kill unfurls in a straightforward fashion, with Sheriff Sam McNeill (Griffith) uncovering his neighbors’ tawdry secrets while he looks for connections between murder victims. This prompts flashbacks showcasing the sordid sex lives of various townies, and we also discover the pressures McNeil faces when he starts treating his constituents as suspects.

          Although the specifics of the story are a bit on the generic side and the supporting cast is largely populated with workaday actors (exception: a young Nick Nolte shows up as a cocky ski instructor), Winter Killmanages to sustain interest from start to finish because Hayes and director Jud Taylor stay focused on the race to catch the killer. Furthermore, the murder scenes are memorable for their docudrama simplicity: Watching the masked killer methodically load his weapon and then trudge through snow toward his next victim preys upon the universal fear of something awful creeping out of the night. And who better to protect us than our beloved Sheriff Andy? If nothing else, Winter Kill is a reminder of Griffith’s versatility, something worth remembering on the sad event of his passing today at the age of 86. (Available at WarnerArchive.com)

Winter Kill: GROOVY