mission impossible: commandante (1969)

if i could buy this photo it would go up on the wall with all my others so fucking fast

the "is it worth watching this for lawrence dane" rating: 3.5/5

yeah, it's mission impossible again, but dane plays the main antagonist this episode and he plays it well. this is right around the time he started really maturing as an actor and it shows; it's more than five years before he filmed rituals, so it's still not quite the best he could be but there's a world of difference between this and his performances in the virginian that would have been broadcast just a year prior.

the plot: the gang are tasked with sabotaging an anti-american communist movement in south america. lol. dane plays one of the leaders of this movement and he plays the role with great panache.

i don't formally subscribe to the auteur theory of filmmaking since i feel like it diminishes the amount of collaborative effort that goes into film/television, but actors like dane go a long way in demonstrating the importance of a decent director. i touched on this in my post about dead on target - with a good director, he's absolutely phenomenal. with a crap director, it depends on the source material and/or his chemistry with the other actors. (so, for example, in the clown murders, he does well even though it was released the same year as his unfortunate turn in dead on target. the script of the former is pretty lackluster but he gives it a solid performance. is it because of the more serious source material, a pedestrian-yet-decent director, or something else? food for thought.) i think this is also when we see him finally internalize how to use small details to develop a character and act with his face/eyes versus acting with his whole body as though he were still on a stage. much as william shatner is a douchebag, i think people are a little too hard on him for his acting in star trek: tos - if he had acted like that on a stage at the time he would have been fine. the problem is that the television camera can get a lot closer than a theater audience, lol, so more nuanced performances are ideal for filmed productions.

the content of the episode itself is what lowers the rating; there is SO MUCH dane it'd merit at least a 4 (my heart and loins want to say a 5) but the rest of the episode is more cold war bullshit and boys dicking around with their toys, of course, made weirder by them putting leonard nimoy in yellowface. so on the one hand it's interesting since they've got two people who would be viewed as ethnic minorities by their dominant cultures playing different, more widely-demonized minorities (at the time anyway) in the same room, but on the other, man. yeesh. geez. all they really did to nimoy was make him squint and give him and dane different warmths of brown/grey to make him look more sallow and dane more ruddy in comparison, which is not as bad as it could have been, i guess, though it's still pretty fucking uncomfortable. at least neither of them is forced to ham up the accents - dane kinda tries to put on a vague latin-american accent but it's pretty half-assed and honestly i think that's for the best here, lol. i also love leonard nimoy so it's a little disappointing that this is the only episode where they share screen time.

mission impossible's handling of dane in general is a good illustration of how he was treated as ethnically ambiguous - he was considered "dark" enough to be pigeonholed into playing baddies, but if he made his hair straighter it was easier for people to believe he was "white enough" depending on the episode. (he was born to a lebanese family in quebec, and someone on imdb, discussing a 1975 movie where dane plays a character with an italian name, wrote "Lawrence Dane is exceptional. He must be of Italian origins. Canada has a huge Italian population." and i find this very amusing.) this episode is one of the rare times we get to see his natural hair - we know he straightened it/used product to make it look less curly because in rituals it gets progressively curlier every time it's wet - and while he looks good no matter what i do think the wavy/curly hair is extra cute uwu

we get to see a lot of him in this episode and his body language is extremely sexy - swagger but in a way that feels comfortable, confident, not just posturing. he's in a well-fitted uniform and gets to play with a knife and has a lot of fun little details for the character. truly a pleasure to watch. the rest of the episode is okay. it's not as interesting as the one where the gang builds a fake submarine in a warehouse, alas, but there's enough dane (and nimoy!) content to get us through.

highlight: sir. sir. please. why did you put your hand there and shift your hips like that. sir. please



( trying to pick screencaps that were actually useful or interesting and not just me being horny for him was so terribly difficult )

bonus: look at his goddamn body language in this otherwise entirely unremarkable establishing shot of him being driven back to base. as they say, king shit