I watched two more of Garner's lesser movies.

"Cash McCall" is adapted from a Cameron Hawley by Lenore J. Coffee and
Marion Hargrove. Hargrove wrote a number of "Maverick" episodes, a
couple of "Nichols", and a "Bret Maverick" episode and the adapted
screenplay for another Garner movie, "Boys' Night Out".

It's one of Garner's earliest movies, only his second film starring
role. Does anyone know if it was in production after the second season
of "Maverick" or the third?

Garner is a businessman who buys failing companies then turns them
around for a quick sale. He romances Natalie Wood, the daughter of the
owner of the currently targeted business (Dean Jagger). Henry Jones
plays the management consultant who works for Garner who was in a total
of six movies with Garner. The great E G Marshall is his lawyer. The
beautiful Nina Foch thinks she's in love with Garner and tries to come
between him and Miss Wood.

Miss Foch was a guest star in numerous episodes of Universal tv dramas
in the 1970's but not an episode of "Rockford Files".

The acting is fine but the script is poor, failing to give the
characters any motives for their actions. By the end of the movie,
everything has happened with little surprise but you're left wondering
why any of it happened at all.

"36 Hours" is certainly intriguing. Produced around the same time as
"The Americanization of Emily" but released afterward, the invasion of
Normandy is key to the plot. I swear, some of the sets look the same as
well as the footage of the launch point for the invasion itself. Both
were MGM so I suppose it's possible.

Garner plays an American intelligence officer whose close to the Allied
generals planning the D-Day invasion. He works with a British colonel,
Alan Napier (Alfred from "Batman"). He runs a contact in Portugal but
suspects he's being fed false intelligence by the Germans. His general,
Russell Thorson (Capt. Bart Friday on radio's I Love A Mystery and was in
"House on Willis Avenue"), orders him to meet with his contact anyway
to verify some last bit of intelligence. Garner objects. What if he's
captured? He knows too many important details of the planned invasion.

Sure enough, he's captured.

A German psychiatrist, Rod Taylor, has developed a radical interrogation
technique in which enemy soldiers are captured but tricked into
believing the war is long ended by a false setting, then being led into
revealing their secrets. A similar setup is the basis of "The Prisoner"
starring Patrick McGoohan; Garner looking out his window at the
facility's grounds was used in the tv show's title sequence.

Taylor's biggest enemy is the S.S. who wish to take credit for Taylor's
work and win the political infighting.

Eva Marie Saint plays Garner's "wife" in the fictional universe,
a role similar to Eve Kendall in "North by Northwest" but even less
sympathetic. I didn't care for her performance. She'd also appear with
Garner in "Grand Prix".

The plot's setup is fascinating and it's a great picture up until the
point at which Garner realizes it's all a gag. After that, it's a series
of coincidences substituting for any effort at plotting Taylor is well cast,
certainly unusual for him to play the bad guy. Unfortunately the S.S.
man played by Werner Peters is a mustache-twirling villain and so
uninteresting for a key character. Toward the end of the movie, John
Banner (Sgt. Schultz) plays a border guard readily bribed.

Four people are responsible for the script's mess:
George Seaton (screenplay)
Roald Dahl (story "Beware of the Dog")
Carl K. Hittleman (story) and
Luis H. Vance