Watching these episodes of The Saint, as I watch every Sybil Danning Adventure Video, has given me the warm-blanket feeling I need on a rainy, humid August as work overwhelms me.
This time, two episodes: “The Counterfeit Countess” and “Escape Route.”
A mysterious plane crash in an English field sets Simon Templar on the trail of a dangerous counterfeiting operation. With the pilot missing and later found dead, Templar follows the bloody trail from London to Paris and ultimately to a Swiss villa. There, he confronts a deceptive countess (Kate O’Mara, The Vampire Lovers) who is not only running the counterfeiting ring, but is living a lie herself. Packed with classic 1960s espionage vibes, fistfights and close calls, Simon has to use every ounce of his signature wit to survive the gang’s ringleader.
In Philip Broadley’s original script, Simon was supposed to be held up on the road by a flock of ducks instead of the herd of sheep that made it to the final cut. Speaking of the writing, series creator Leslie Charteris wasn’t shy about his disdain for this specific installment. In his production notes, he found the opening plane crash coincidence “the most preposterous yet” and dismissed the episode as an unoriginal hash. Despite the creator’s reservations — he said, “I don’t think the show would last long on NBC with plots of this caliber” — it remains a beloved piece of 1960s television craftsmanship appreciated by fans of the era’s spy craze.
“Escape Route” starts with Simon getting caught burgling a house by Inspector Teal. After years of wanting to arrest The Saint, Teal finally wins, and our hero is swiftly handed a ten-year sentence in Princetown Prison. Of course, The Saint isn’t actually going to spend the rest of the show behind bars. It’s an ingenious undercover play to bust open a syndicate orchestrating high-stakes prison breaks. When a fellow inmate approaches Templar with a £50,000 buyout for a daring helicopter breakout, Simon finds himself right where he wants to be, navigating double-crosses, underworld kingpins and breathtaking aerial stunts to crack the case wide open.
Before becoming a star, Donald Sutherland delivered a memorable guest performance in this episode, a milestone that Moore himself helped showcase to Hollywood producers during the editing phase. A few weeks after shooting wrapped, Sutherland reached out to Moore to ask to screen the footage for the producers. Moore arranged a studio viewing of a rough cut, which helped pave the way for a star-making role in The Dirty Dozen.
In his autobiography, Moore detailed a hair-raising moment during production. The plan? A sequence where characters grab a helicopter’s landing skids as it takes off. Sutherland threw himself so intensely into the action that he began frantically kicking a stuntman’s fingers as the aircraft climbed—with no safety lines used whatsoever—prompting a panicked Moore to scream for the director to cut. That helicopter — a Sud Aviation Alouette II helicopter — is the exact same aircraft featured in the cult classic television series The Prisoner.
