Diane Keaton is working as a nurse for the bed-ridden Mr. Bauman whose accent makes Judd Hirsch in Independence Day sound like my Dutch grandfather. She is also fooling around with Vic the handyman who has a strange habit of waxing the car in long black pants and no shirt. We know this because Bauman has a pair of binoculars trained on them; don’t assume he is checking her out.
Keaton gets to his room 6 minutes late. She is perky and takes his nagging with a smile. He grills her on boyfriends and lovers. Keaton made her TV debut only 1 month earlier in The Love Boat. That is easier to believe than that it was only 2 years later that she was in The Godfather.
Mrs. Bauman comes into the bedroom to check on her husband. Keaton’s role in the episode is just to be a cute young nurse, not a sexpot or object of fantasy. That being said, Mrs. Bauman BLOWS HER OFF THE SCREEN! Holy crap is Angel Tompkins (I know, who?) sexy in this! Screen-caps do not do her justice.
After his wife leaves to run errands, Bauman again picks up the binoculars and sees her talking to the shirtless waxer. He’s still working on the same spot, so he’s not even very good at it. He talks to Keaton for another minute, then looks back. He needs to pan up as the action has moved upstairs to his quarters as the waxer is about to become the waxee.
Diane Keaton demonstrating Hollywood’s expertise of firearms.
Bauman asks her to have her boyfriend Vic take a look at a pistol that he keeps by his bed. Bauman claims to be so ignorant of the weapon that he doesn’t even know how to unload it. He watches through the binoculars as Keaton looks for her boyfriend beside the one shiny spot on the car, then heads upstairs with the loaded pistol to find him.
We hear the sound of gunshots, but because the story is told from Bauman’s POV, we don’t know which, or if both, were shot.
Really a pretty slight tale, running only about 11 minutes. Still, it is interesting to see the young Diane Keaton, and certainly to see Angel Tompkins. Unfortunately, Bauman’s accent is such a caricature that it is impossible to enjoy his performance.
Post-Post:
- Twilight Zone Legacy: Joseph Wiseman was in One More Pallbearer 8 years earlier. I don’t recall him having the accent.
- Diane Keaton had only three more TV roles before going into the movies. She had a great run in the 70’s with The Godfather, Play It Again Sam, Sleeper, Godfather II, Love and Death, Annie Hall, Looking for Mr. Goodbar, Interiors, Manhattan, and Reds — a couple of them even without sleeping with the director.
- OK, Reds came out in 1981, but was so long it probably started in the 70’s.
- Sadly, the more deserving Angel Tompkins has no IMDb credits in the last 25 years. I assume she married some rich guy and retired. God bless America!
Angel appeared in the 1987 movie “Amazon Women on the Moon”, which revealed the terrible truth that Jack the Ripper’s true identity was, in fact, the Loch Ness Monster.
A young Diane Keaton does a marvelous job as the chirpy (though marginally psychotic) nurse to Mr. Bauman. Too bad the implausibilities here are so many, and so ridiculous: “So you have a fiery temper, I see. Here – could you bring this loaded gun upstairs and have your boyfriend look it over?” Yeah, right.
We are to assume the bedridden Mr. Bauman can no longer perform his manly duties, so what’s a hottie like Mrs. Bauman supposed to do? I have a feeling Mr. Bauman wasn’t “up” to the task when he was vertical. She may have turned out to be a gold-digger, but then, that’s what happens when a old Jewish mensch snags himself a trophy wife….the real moral of this story.