The FBI “Collision Course” (November 13, 1966)

Wait, The FBI?  Overproduced, underdeveloped and politically suspect, this QM show usually ran its expensive guests through the cops-and-robbers motions without striving for much in the way of meaning.  Occasionally, though, the ingredients would come together as a near-perfect crime or action vignette, and “Collision Course” is even a notch better than that, a towering fatalistic/romantic neo-noir that, in retrospect, looks a bit like the hypercool French heist pictures Jean-Pierre Melville was making around the same time.  Jack Lord, icily unemotive as a sociopathic killer and jewel thief who blows away a motorist in the teaser, does the Alain Delon thing in dyed-blond hair and dark shades.  Director Christian Nyby tricks it out with dutch angles and crane shots, and cast-checks the episode’s spiritual film noir ancestry with a roll call of seedy bit players: Connie Gilchrist as a blackmailing landlady, John Harmon as a fence, Malcolm Atterbury as Lord’s abusive father.  Writers Leonard Kantor and Charles Larson (a legendary TV rewrite man who was producing the show that season) humanize their beast by giving him a deaf Mexican girl as a traveling companion; by the end, Lord is dying alone and crying for his daddy, scrawling “Te amo, Teresa” in the dust of a filthy alley.  The harder your edges (and Lord’s craggy face could’ve cut the hot diamonds he spends the show trying to unload), the more sentiment you can smuggle into the soft middle.