Denis Shaw Season: The Vise - The Very Silent Traveler
Content warning: this show depicts a racist stereotype of Irish people as stupid.
Spoiler warning: I give away the resolution of this episode.
I commented a few posts back that doing this series of posts about shows in which actor Denis Shaw had a role had happily introduced me to several new things. One of them is that I discovered that before it collapsed Network DVD released a bigger selection of surviving episodes of The Vise than I had previously been aware of, and thus doing this series of posts has furnished me with my Christmas present to myself.
Honestly I had watched several episodes of The Vise, and was convinced that it was American-made, an impression that it reinforced rather by the US-centric perspective of its WIkipedia page. In fact it's another show that was the result of transatlantic collaboration and wasn't a mystery series but was about individual human interest stories about people who get caught in a vice of fate. It is further confused by the fact that it changed tack completely into a straightforward mystery series, taking a detective who was already in another show, moving him to London and removing one of his arms. No surprise therefore that it's never appeared here! Oh, and that is even without the simple fact that in British English the noun for a thing you hold things in in a workshop is spelled vice not vise. This episode is one of the ones without Mark Saber detective, and thus is purely about people hurtling towards their fate that they have unwittingly set up for themselves.
To simplify the plot somewhat. basically everyone we see in this episode who isn't obviously an officer of the law, is a criminal. There are several different criminal operations depicted here who unwittingly end up interconnecting all together. To start off with we have Dicky Miller killing Arnold Brockley, his previous criminal partner, for putting him in prison. Brockley's current associates Rusty and Dillon discover the body and remove it from his address so they don't get blamed. The police are looking for Brockley so of course a manhunt starts because he's disappeared. Rusty and Dillon have the idea of pinning the death on Miller by putting the corpse on the night train from Manchester to London that Miller will be travelling on. Miller spots them and merely gets off the train, as you would.
At Birmingham (where else) Denis Shaw, playing a character called Gortz, gets on the train and shares the sleeper compartment with Brockley's corpse. Eventually he realises that the other passenger he is sharing with is dead and so he opens the door while the train is in motion and puts the body off the train.
Of course the body is found, but the vice that they all find themselves in is that of course every criminal involved in this wants to find out what on earth Gortz thinks he is playing at so they all follow him once he's in London and converge on him when he pays a visit. It turns out that Gortz is a diamond smuggler who the police have been following everywhere and so they arrest all the criminals in one fell swoop.
This keeps up a good tension by the fairly simple device of getting Gortz to carry out the bizarre act of throwing the corpse off the train rather than tell the conductor about it, thus making the viewer wonder what he's up to. As a role for Shaw, it's very much in his normal stable of villains, gangsters, and general unsavoury characters.
It's interesting to me that the cast are more international than I would have remembered for the show. Gorts has a German accent, other villains are depicted as Irish and there is even an American, who hilariously pronounces Birmingham the American way. The narrator is Australian. I see that this show was actually shown pretty much all over the English-speaking world, frequently slotted into schedules in different ways in different places, which adds to the confusion about it.
You will of course readily see that the plot has a massive hole in it that you could drive the night train through: it is intentionally complicated, which is alright, but the device of a wanted criminal throwing a corpse off a train falls flat on its face because we're encouraged to believe that the police were watching him from the moment he arrived in the country. This means that they very cleverly missed him throwing the corpse of a murdered man off a train, which is a slight failure.
The suggestion is therefore that all of these criminals got themselves into a vice despite the incompetence of the police, because frankly Gortz could have even thrown himself off the train and they wouldn't have noticed.
Nonetheless as a role for Shaw it's great because he has relatively quite a lot to do, including keeping up a conversation with a dead body, and gets to do the being suspicious act that he's so good at.
This blog is mirrored at
culttvblog.tumblr.com/archive (from September 2023) and culttvblog.substack.com (from January 2023 and where you can subscribe by email)
Archives from 2013 to September 2023 may be found at culttvblog.blogspot.com and there is an index to the tags used on the Tumblr version at https://www.tumblr.com/culttvblog/729194158177370112/this-blog