The Beverly Hillbillies: The Official Fifth Season [DVD]

Season five of The Beverly Hillbillies finds the sturdy Clampett clan -- Jed (Buddy Ebsen), Elly May (Donna Douglas), Jethro (Max Baer Jr.), and Granny (Irene Ryan) -- still retaining their mountain-grown values and essential decency despite Jed's millionaire status and the family's luxurious Beverly Hills surroundings. Two of the season's best plotlines are characteristically manifested in story arcs, spread out over several successive episodes. In the first, Jed is targeted for blackmail by a pair of slick con artists, played by Leon Ames and Gayle Hunnicutt. This is followed by a farcical escapade in which Granny forces a trained gorilla (actually a costumed stunt man, played by George Barrows) to take over the chores at the Clampett estate. Otherwise, season five follows the pattern established in season four of enlivening the traditional Beverly Hillbillies nonsense with choice guest-star appearances. Veteran comic actor Charles Ruggles makes a return appearance as Mr. Farquhar, the skirt-chasing father-in-law of Jed's banker Milburn Drysdale (Raymond Bailey). Gloria Swanson plays herself in another episode, wherein the Clampetts, acting under the misapprehension that Swanson is broke, bankroll her "comeback" in a brand new silent movie (and no, William Holden did not write the screenplay). And in the episode "The Indians are Coming," John Wayne makes what must have been the best-publicized "surprise" guest appearance in TV history! But perhaps the most memorable of the guest-star turns is contributed by the voluptuous Joi Lansing, cast as the wife of country singer Lester Flatt. In "Delovely and Scruggs," Mrs. Flatt is given a Hollywood screen test, with Jed's bumptious nephew Jethro Bodine (Max Baer Jr.) launching what he hopes will be an illustrious Hollywood career as the test's director. The Beverly Hillbillies closed out its fifth season on CBS as America's seventh most popular TV series, indicating that the corn pone-comedy well had not yet run dry!~Hal Erickson