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.
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