THE WILD WILD WEST: "THE NIGHT OF THE VICIOUS VALENTINE" (1967)

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *sociological*


In memory of the late Robert Conrad, I decided to review one of my favorite WILD WILD WEST episodes. To be sure, Conrad doesn't have any of his best scenes here. "Valentine," written with tongue-in-cheek by female scriptwriter Leigh Chapman, is all about the villain, Agnes Moorehead's "Emma Valentine." This episode garnered one of three Emmy nominations for the show, and Moorehead was the only nominee who won-- though, for possibly political reasons, the actress never won for her famous role of "Endora" on BEWITCHED, though she was on the Emmy ballot nine times.

Chapman begins with a weak premise: an "Alphabet Killer" has slain four rich men, and their last names are in alphabetical order, going A-D. The actual party responsible for the murders has absolutely no reason to organize her victims in this manner, and the script finds some hand-waving reason to drop that premise. Clearly the writer threw in this concept so that agents West and Gordon would have a reason to associate the apparently unrelated killings. The real element uniting the murders is that in each case, one of the rich man recently married a young bride, who now inherits the dead fellow's wealth.

Inevitably the agents track down the mastermind: Emma Valentine, famous socialite and matchmaker. She's been responsible for setting up rich older men with pretty young brides, who will then merge all of these riches together and make it possible for Valentine to RULE THE-- uh, country. The sixty-something socialite vacillates about whether or not she wants to be the first American queen or the first female president. But she's not the least bit hesitant about trying to get West and Gordon out of her way, in order to advance her cause-- which includes a nineteenth-century version of women's liberation. To be sure, Emma's going to be the queen bee in this hive, since she holds a club over at least one of her young brides, who doesn't want to kill anyone and may have actually fallen for her relatively good-looking middle-aged groom.

The best scene in the episode is the confrontation between West and Valentine, which takes place in a drawing-room festooned in pink. West is imprisoned in a chair fitted with mechanical clamps made to look like women's arms, able to tighten upon the victim to squeeze him like a package of Charmin tissue. Since West was endlessly desirable to nearly every woman who appeared on the show, Valentine briefly tries to sway the agent to play drone to her queen bee. James won't swing with a lady old enough to be his grandmother, so he and Gordon end up in one of the series' better death-traps.

Unlike the majority of crazy world-beaters on WILD WILD WEST, Valentine represents a part of society that was genuinely marginalized in the nineteenth century, but Chapman keeps the tone light enough that no one is likely to believe the villainess to be any sort of liberator. One of the script's best touches is that Valentine's method of matching up brides and grooms amounts to a primitive version of a computer designed to match people up in swingin' sixties style.

ADDENDA: I should note that the main reason I rated this episode as "good," even though most WILD WILD WEST episodes are fair at best in their mythicity, is because "Valentine" both evokes and subverts the show's main premise: that West, like James Bond, could seduce almost every woman he ever met. Valentine wasn't the only female mastermind in the show's history. But she's the only one that was such a blatant incarnation of femininity-- and not only in her emphasis of using guile rather than force and her predominantly pink color palette. Note that though the tete-a-tete between Valentine and West does require that the agent be securely bound the whole time, there's no literal reason that the script had to include a scene in which Evil En-- er, Emma-- shows how she can crush him with her feminine-flavored gimmick. The sheer peculiarity of this motif suggests to me that this scene may be referencing another "vicious V"-- which, as it happens, does bear a loose resemblance to the stylized form of the valentine-heart.