ANOTHER TOM TURKEY: THE GYPSY WARRIORS (1978) – BAD MOVIE REVIEW

For Thanksgiving week, here’s another Turkey from the years before Tom Selleck broke through to tv stardom.

THE GYPSY WARRIORS (1978) – Yesterday I reviewed the godawful 1979 telefilm The Chinese Typewriter, an obscure disaster from Stephen J. Cannell starring Tom Selleck and James Whitmore, Jr. Today I’m keeping the theme going with this look at an even earlier telefilm that Cannell wrote and executive-produced for his new darlings Selleck and Whitmore.

Like The Chinese Typewriter, The Gypsy Warriors was a pilot movie for a potential series to star Tom and James. Overall, it’s even worse than the 1979 effort, but at least that one was fun-bad. The Gypsy Warriors spends too much time mired in boring-bad territory, so I consider it much less enjoyable.

This 1978 tv-movie starts out by turning “show, don’t tell” on its ear. As bad as the opening of The Chinese Typewriter was, the opening to this World War Two snoozer is even worse. The beginning devotes FOURTEEN entire minutes of the 76-minute runtime to a portentous announcer merely narrating as we see mismatched footage of hands, arms and the backs of heads plus second unit film of buildings, airplanes and vehicles.

The vehicles don’t fit the 1940 setting and neither does the darkened New York City skyline being passed off as a European port city even though the World Trade Center Towers are visible. That’s a special level of not giving a damn.   

But wait, there’s MORE!

The entire premise of this flick makes no sense because it depicts the United States taking on the Nazis and the Imperial Japanese in June 1940 even though America did not enter the war until December 1941. That could have been easily remedied by just having our heroes Selleck and Whitmore get warned by their superior officer (Ted Gehring) that if they get caught, the U.S. will disavow them since America’s not even in the war yet. They didn’t bother, though.     

Instead, nothing is ever mentioned about it, as if Cannell’s creative team wasn’t even aware that America hadn’t entered World War Two yet. American soldiers are openly bivouacked in England and dialogue indicates they’ve already clashed with Germans on the battlefield, adding to the historical impossibilities.

Enough preamble. Let’s take it from the top. Whitmore got billing over Selleck this time, partly because he had already been a costar of Cannell’s Black Sheep Squadron while Tom was still struggling to make it.

The mustachioed Adonis Selleck played West Point graduate Captain Ted Brinkenhoff, an American paratrooper experienced at undercover sabotage missions behind German lines. He is introduced – more than 14 minutes in, remember – in a scene that’s almost like a dry run for Tom’s later film Lassiter.

Our black-clad hero is shown surreptitiously evading patrols and using a grappling hook to break into what viewers assume is some enemy outpost. Instead, it’s the home of a beautiful British lady (Kathryn Leigh Scott) and Captain Brinkenhoff was avoiding English patrols to make this illicit romantic rendezvous with her.

It’s a case of Selleck Interruptus, however, as MPs show up to drag Ted off to get briefed on an emergency assignment. Tom Selleck shines as the roguish captain despite the mediocre dialogue, demonstrating how he survived turkeys like this to become Thomas Magnum in a few years.

Now we meet James Whitmore, Jr.’s character Captain Sheldon Alhern. In contrast to the smooth lothario Ted Brinkenhoff, Sheldon can’t even get to first base with the woman he’s playing chess with. It’s just as well, since MPs show up to drag him off to a briefing, too. Even worse, the woman makes it clear to Sheldon that chess is all he will ever get out of her.

Wow! Gratuitous and unnecessary roughness to a soldier being sent out on a deadly mission for the war effort! Anyway, Sheldon Alhern is a scientific whiz whose genius makes him great at improvising weapons on his missions with Brinkenhoff.   

Even though the excruciating opening 14 minutes made it painfully obvious what Ted and Sheldon’s mission will be, we viewers have to sit through a briefing from their general explaining what we just sat through.

It’s early June 1940 and the Nazis are tearing through the French forces. Among their objectives is a bioweapons research laboratory concealed under a French vineyard in wine country. The lab’s scientists had crafted a deadly toxin which, when exposed to the air, can kill everyone within several miles. The Nazis want the toxin, so it’s our heroes’ mission to keep it out of their hands. 

Selleck and Whitmore’s chemistry brings all their scenes to life but not even they can elevate The Gypsy Warriors above its incoherence, bad script and historical inaccuracies. Because this is a pilot for a series, we’re told that captains Brinkenhoff and Alhern will work with their new permanent partners – a band of Gypsies struggling to avoid death at the hands of Hitler’s forces.

The Big Three among the caravan of Gypsies are a father (Joseph Ruskin), his sexy daughter Leela (Lina Raymond) and her overly protective brother Androch (Michael Lane). Both Ted and Sheldon try to make time with Leela while carrying out their mission but keep getting blocked by the muscular Androch.

Our heroes enact their Hogan’s Heroes-level plan in very, very boring scenes that drain most of the unintentional laughs out of this bomb. Ted, the German American, impersonates a Nazi colonel while Sheldon poses as a French plumber.

In conjunction with the trio of Gypsies, they steal the bioweapon and render it harmless while foiling and blowing up the lab and the villains (Albert Paulsen and others, including Richard Sanders, Les Nessman himself).

In a last-minute complication, Ted and Sheldon had to rescue the Gypsies from being used by the Nazis as human guinea pigs to test the toxin’s deadliness. All of this can’t help but make The Gypsy Warriors sound better than it really is. It’s all in the execution.   

Tom Selleck’s character gets a love scene with Leela and the gypsies then ride off, promising to help our heroes the next time they meet. Even though this lackluster effort seems like it should be over, it’s not. Stephen J. Cannell, anticipating his dragged-out finale for The Chinese Typewriter, brings back the narrator from the telefilm’s opening for several dull minutes.

He’s the same narrator from the beginning of Riding with Death, the tv-movie consisting of 2 episodes of Ben Murphy’s series The Gemini Man, so Psychotronic fans already know how absurdly grandiose he is. The narrator drones on about a series of events which followed our heroes’ mission.

Some of his spiel contradicts itself and much of it messes up history, but by this point we’re beyond caring. Unlike The Chinese Typewriter, this production puts you to sleep and lacks the nonstop unintentional laughs of that tv-movie. 

I’ll mention again that Tom Selleck towers above the material and perfectly plays the daring, cavalier and charming Captain Brinkenhoff. He deserved to survive this mess to achieve his success on Magnum P.I.