Combat! Season I, Episode 9: “Cat and Mouse,” Classic Story Guest Starring Albert Salmi, Directed by Robert Altman (“Shoe Clerks”)

 

Vic Morrow, left, and Albert Salmi, in Combat, "Cat & Mouse," 1962 

Re-posted by Nicholas Stix

Sgt. Jenkins (Albert Salmi): I’m fighting this war with a bunch of shoe clerks. You handcuffed volunteers are all alike. You’re soft. That’s why the war’s taking so long. Soft.

Jenkins: And I’m right in the middle, with a bunch of shoe clerks.

Sgt. Saunders (Vic Morrow): Since I’ve been over here, I’ve seen a lot of dead shoe clerks.

Saunders: What did you do before the war, Jenkins?

Jenkins: I was a soldier, regular army. Since I was 18 years old, I was a soldier. How about you, Saunders?

Saunders: Me? I sold shoes.

Jenkins deliberately gets himself caught by the German officers, in order to divert attention from Saunders. One of the officers threatens to shoot Jenkins as a spy. The officer acts as though Jenkins knows German, and when the latter denies this, asks Jenkins how much German he knows, to determine how much he understood of what he overheard.

Jenkins: Everybody knows "Sprechen sie Deutsch."

German Officer: What else do you know?

Jenkins: Achtung, attention. Schissen, shoot. Meinen, mine. Ein, one. Zwei, two. Nazi shoe clerk!

A second German officer slaps him.

 

Thanks to Public Domain Cinema for the upload.

Also from Combat! at WEJB/NSU:

“COMBAT! Season 1, Episode 16: ‘The Volunteer’ (1963) (Complete, High-Quality Video of a TV classic!).”