User reviews

Bacall's back and Rockford has got her! James Garner played detective Phillip Marlowe in "Marlowe" in the 1960's and Lauren Bacall played opposite Hunphrey Bogart who played Marlowe in "The Big Sleep". In addition, apparently Garner and Bacall had been seeing each other around this time (she also co-starred with Garner in Robert Altman's ill-fated "HealtH") so its no wonder they have a good amount of chemistry in this two parter.

Unfortunately, the story is a bit of a mess as Bacall plays Kendall Warren,the friend of a Princess (Dana Wynter from "Sink the Bismark")who appears to have had a attempt on her life. The resolution is pretty good, but in stretching the story out to fill two full episodes, it just kills the pace despite the chemistry between Bacall and Garner and the welcome presence of regulars like Angel, Dennis and Lt. Chapman. If they'd have boiled this down to one show or kept it tighter in a 90 minute episode, this would have been much better.

I'm only sorry Kendall never met Rockford's old lawyer Beth Davenport. The fur would have been flying!

Picking up where the first part left off, the man who tried to kill Lauren Bacall is killed himself falling from a terrace quite accidentally. Accident it may be, but it doesn't stop Lt.Chapman from trying to pin a homicide on Jim Rockford. The influence of society lady and princess Dana Wynter frustrates him no end.

Through some Rockford type conning aided and abetted by Lauren Bacall, Garner learns the deceased was a connected guy to mobster Carmine Caridi. Garner gets a mob like warning, but later in he and Bacall find Caridi dead while shadowing him. In fact they see him die quite violently from a poison.

In the end we find out just who and why someone wants Lauren Bacall dead. It is a motive that is incredibly bizarre, but think about the famous Raymond Chandler novel Farewell My Lovely and why someone wants poor dumb Moose Malloy dead. Something along the same lines.

More than most you want to see Lauren Bacall come back as for more episodes. She and Wynter make some more indelible characters that The Rockford Files gave for its viewers.

As much as I liked seeing Lauren Bacall and Dana Wynter ( I was excited about those stars being on the episode I was ready to sit down and enjoy), I came away unimpressed with this 2-parter.

The first half held my attention easily, and yes, I did enjoy it. But the second half was just tedious......drab.....what happened to this episode in the second half?

And I'm sorry but Dana Wynter's meltdown at the end was just silly.

Poor Jim Rockford. As this two part episode begins James Garner has a dinner date and a reservation at a really snooty place. But he's left in line as a bunch of elegant snobs that include movie queens Dana Wynter and Lauren Bacall get fast tracked to a table. But during the course of conversation with the maitre'd it is dropped that Rockford is a well known private detective.

He gets hired by Dana Wynter the next day and for once doesn't have to dog a client about a bill. Garner's mission is to protect Lauren Bacall because someone is trying to kill her.

Someone does, something Garner successfully prevents and then spends the rest of the episode trying to track him down. That only leads to questions answered in the second part.

Wynter and Bacall are an interesting pair. Wynter is a princess, she's got money oozing from every pore and influence that makes even James Luisi cower when dealing with Garner.

As for Bacall she and Garner get sufficiently friendly to let it drop that she's quite the fraud. She's a woman who is schooled in the arts of societal behavior and protocol and as such she's a valuable hanger on with the beautiful people. Lauren is a lot like Florence Bates in Saratoga trunk, broke but with connections that keep her in the societal mix.

As we know two years after this episode Bacall and Garner co-starred in The Fan. A lot of that chemistry is found here and in the second part.

This episode is interesting because of the appearance of Lauren Bacall. It is indeed a treat to see her on Rockford Files.

The story itself is rather fuzzy and pretty weak,and stretched across 2-episodes it squanders the talents of the talented cast. The basic story just doesn't ring true,in my opinion. By all means,check it out yourself and see what YOU think! 7/10.

This is a very solid episode from the final season of this great show, and the most notable aspect is the appearance of Lauren Bacall, who portrays Kendall(who names their daughter Kendall?), and she happens to be best friends with a princess named Irene(Dana Wynter), as they were classmates in high school years ago. Their friendship is slightly odd, as Kendall travels everywhere with her friend and pretends to be rich, although she is broke. This episode also has all the players involved, including several scenes with Rocky, Jack Garner(James Garner's brother), Chapman, Dennis, and the weasel Angel, who's pleasantly surprised his buddy Jim is involved with the princess; she hired him to find out who's trying to kill Kendall. Rockford has to integrate himself with the rich, pretentious snobs to dig deeper into who's out to kill her, including dressing up at a silly costume party aboard a yacht; in another scene, the guy he chases stupidly jumps off a roof and gets himself killed, and another hood who threatened Rockford gets killed by wine poisoning. As much as I enjoyed this episode and most others, the ending here has to be one of the most unfulfilling in the entire series, as it becomes known that the princess is the one trying kill her friend Kendall, although the motive seems rather weak, and I can't even recall the reason, but I think it has something to do with their old school. It left a bad taste in my mouth, considering the rest of the episode was very good. There's something else that bothered me; the princess can have the hood Tommy Manette(Carmine Caridi)easily killed, but she can't have Kendall killed, even though she's around her all the time? Those details just don't seem plausible, and a better ending could've made this an excellent episode, rather than a good one, although I still recommend watching this.

The two guest stars in this installment are Dana Wynter, as a genuine princess named Irene, and Lauren Bacall, as her broke best friend, Kendall ("Brain surgery isn't for everyone"). Chemistry is good between Jim Garner and Bacall. The Stuart Margolin character of Angel Martin, Joe Santos' character of Lt. Dennis Becker, James Luisi's Lt. Doug Chapman and Noah Beery's "Rocky" are all quite prominent in this sixth season, two-part episode. At first, everybody thinks that Princess Irene is the one being targeted, but the princess is convinced from the start that it is her BFF Bacall instead, and she's oh so right about that! The convoluted plot has several big holes in it, so I had to round up the rating to a 7 out of 10 for the presence of Dana Wynter & Lauren Bacall.