Cain’s Hundred “The Left Side of Canada” (May 1, 1962)

Cain’s Hundred was a lame Untouchables rip-off with Mark Richman as a vigilante out to get the mafiosos who killed his family.  Enter maverick writer S. Lee Pogostin and director Robert Altman, who fashioned this one-off episode into a stunningly perceptive disquisition on the nature of mob malevolence.  Harry Guardino was usually a ham, but Altman reinvents him here through physical transformation: sporting a mustache and gray sidewall haircut, Guardino is nearly unrecognizable as John Maychin, a gangster who banishes a nightclub singer (Beverly Garland) to Alaska after his nephew (Bruce Dern) falls for her.  Pogostin’s distinctive dialogue, beat-influenced and elliptical, remains intact, and he puts it all into the mouth of Maychin (Alaska: “It’s on the left side of Canada, and it’s different”).  Like Tony Soprano, this hood has gravitas; he’s impossible not to watch, even when his ugly, misogynistic core is revealed in the claustrophobic centerpiece scene where Maychin brutalizes the singer.  Everybody else is a wimp, especially the putative hero who’s being courted by Cain to inform, a mob accountant (Philip Abbott) in serious denial about his accountability.  His relationship with Maychin traces the central theme, a grim calculus by which implacable evil handily conquers uncommitted resistance.  “Oh, Howard, buy some books for me,” Maychin sneers, already plotting his comeback as he’s carted off to jail.  “I think I’ll study medicine.  I’ve always wanted to be a medicine man.”