This one starts promisingly enough, w/ Mark the victim of an (attempted) assassin's bullet, but once it gets going, all it's got going for it is some unintentional humor. Even when his live-in-aide-de-camp is shot down right beside him (at an amateur chef's contest!), the Chief's fabled impassivity reigns supreme; he barely grunts. In fact, he makes more of an emotional display later on when someone brings him coffee. And then, as Mark clings precariously to life, Ironside wallows in reflections of his OWN attempted murder. That cracked me up. Once the investigational legwork kicked in, however, my interest quickly waned, even with Robert Alda playing a kind of "genteel", dandified narcotics smuggler. The postscript is cute, though.