The Baxter was that it was
built around the romantic misadventures of the big screen nice guy who was always
politely shown the door so that the leading man could in the end get the dame. For
noted character actor Ralph Bellamy, this was a familiar feeling and outcome,
playing second fiddle as he often did to the likes of Cary Grant in movies like
The Awful Truth. Bellamy’s career longevity
would owe itself to his stage roots (he won a Tony Award for playing President Franklin
Delano Roosevelt), and he would reinvent himself in fare like Rosemary’s Baby as a slightly more sinister
presence. Paving the way for that, at least partially, would be his work in the
successful television series Follow That
Man.
live for several years before settling into a heavy, sponsored rotation. A gritty, short-form, above-the-law series (it was also originally known as Man Against Crime), the show
stars Bellamy as tough-talking private eye Mike Barnett, and the sixth and
seventh grouped volumes of this DVD release from Alpha Home Entertainment each group together four episodes
of the beloved series. These are scattered collections, put together in somewhat
willy-nilly fashion. In “The Cube Root of Evil,” a drunken conventioneer
looking for a good time is lured to a private party for a game of craps, but
beaten up and fleeced instead. In “A Family Affair,” Barnett keys on a bank
employee after a robbery smelling of an inside job leaves two employees dead. “Day
Man,” meanwhile, centers around a clever thief who cases houses while
pretending to collect funds for charity. “Get Out of Town,” finally, finds an
old nemesis extracting revenge on Barnett, forcing him aboard a plane to
seasons — a term more loosely defined then than now — and includes “Free Ride,”
the amusingly dated, pinko-baiting “Ferry Boat” — in which Barnett comes into
possession of a list of communist spies — plus “The Silken Touch,” in which
Barnett teams up with an FBI agent (Jack Warden) to investigate a series of
truck robberies. The best of the bunch, though, is probably “Cocoanut’s Eye,”
in which a professor suffering amnesia needs protection from gangsters who
think he knows where a clutch of stolen gemstones are hidden.
full screen, the black-and-white transfers of Follow That Man honestly aren’t the best, as there is significant
grain and some problems with pixilation. Additionally, there’s not the sort of complementary
retrospective or academic commentary that would mark these as instructive discs
for a younger generation. This isn’t found entertainment, rather, but instead a few nice stocking stuffers for your
grandparents, to go along with that DVD player you bought them last year. For more information, visit Alpha Home Entertainment’s web site by clicking here. C+ (Series) D+
(Discs)