Tuesday's Overlooked TV Movie: The Borgia Stick

This crime drama was one of the first made-for-TV movies in the mid-Sixties, and it made a big impression on me when I saw it. Don Murray and Inger Stevens play a typical suburban couple who are actually anything but. They're not really married, and they work for the mob. But then they make the mistake of falling in love and want to get out of their life of crime, which leads to all sorts of complications, especially when their best friend and next-door neighbor is a cop (played by Barry Nelson, who is a great trivia answer since he was the first actor to play James Bond on-screen).

THE BORGIA STICK takes a rather low-key approach, as I recall, without a lot of blood and thunder until the end, but it generates plenty of suspense anyway. Lots of good character actors in the cast, including the villainous Fritz Weaver and Sorrell Booke. The big plot twist at the end, which I remember more than 40 years later, seems to me now like it must have been awfully predictable, but it didn't seem that way at the time. I recall being really surprised and impressed by it.

According to the reviews on IMBD, THE BORGIA STICK holds up well. I haven't seen it in decades, myself, but I wouldn't mind watching it again. It's never been released on DVD, although gray market copies can be found.