Burke's Law: Whatever Happened to Adriana and Why Won't She Stay Dead? (1965)

Burke’s Law was an American detective TV show that aired for three seasons from 1963 to 1965 on ABC.  It starred Gene Barry as Amos Burke, a millionaire homicide detective.  However, in the third and final season (which only lasted for 17 episodes), the series was converted to a spy show called Amos Burke, Secret Agent, and Burke was working for a secret government agency without any of the supporting characters from the first two seasons.  

Jocelyn guest-starred in one of the third season spy episodes called Whatever Happened to Adriana, and Why Won’t She Stay Dead? (Season 3, Episode 11), which originally aired on December 1, 1965.   Variety was reporting in late July that Jocelyn had been signed for the episode.  Based on some other notices in Variety about the series, and an October 7 report that Jocelyn was scheduled to return from shooting Poppies Are Also Flowers in Italy, leads me to believe that this episode was probably shot in mid-October of 1965.

In this episode, Burke is sent to Sicily to track down a drug dealer that is also smuggling missiles.  The drug dealer is getting the missiles from a Colonel, whom he is blackmailing.  The Colonel’s girlfriend died of a drug overdose, creating a major scandal, until a family came forward to say that the body of the dead girl was their daughter, Adriana.  It turns out, however, that Adriana (played by Jocelyn) is really alive and well and in the custody/care of the missile smuggler.  Burke comes into contact with her, and she helps him stop the smuggler as he helps her to escape.  Burke ultimately has to free Adriana, retrieve the girlfriend’s body from the cemetery, and win over the Colonel in order to stop the missile smuggler.

Jocelyn, as is the case for several of her U.S. television appearances, plays the role of a young European woman, speaking her English lines with an Italian accent.  She did a respectable job with the accent.  There were only a few words here and there where I noticed that her pronunciation slipped back toward the English sounds for some vowels.  The episode is in black and white, but you can tell that she generally has the same red hair that she wore for all of her U.S. work.  She has a decent amount of screen time, and she has a shower scene that I’m sure was considered quite scandalous for mid-1960’s U.S. television.  Barry is pretty good in his role.  He seems rugged enough, though he doesn’t look to be in particularly good shape for a super spy.  He adds a bit of flair that sometimes comes across as something like Dean Martin’s Matt Helm character.  For Jocelyn fans, this one is worth tracking down.

 

Season 1 of Burke’s Law has been released on DVD in the U.S. (2008) and the U.K (2006), but seasons 2 and 3 may never be released.  The series has aired on the TV Land channel, and the version of Jocelyn’s episode that I viewed had been recorded from TV Land and posted by someone on youtube.