Television: The New B Movies

It may be that 1974 will enter such television annals as there are as the year made-for-TV movies came of age. Already, three of them have imposed themselves with unusual if mixed force on audience and industry decision makers alike. The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, which used a fictional character to dramatize a huge chunk of black history, has been the season’s critical success. A Case of Rape attracted a record-breaking audience for a realistic, if dramatically ill-resolved, study of the one crime in which the victim can almost count on being further punished by the legal system. Finally, with The Execution of Private Slovik, NBC managed to flack its way into the mightiest flop of the year. Mistaking sober intentions for genuine achievement, the network promoted the film heavily. It turned out to be a long, soggy script about a pathetically masochistic G.I. who became the only American to be shot for desertion in World War II.

Despite such occasional disappointments, expensive films of this kind are good for television movies in the same way that the David Selznick-Samuel Goldwyn-Irving Thalberg “prestige” productions were good for the movie industry in the ’30s. They cause people who would not otherwise pay attention to the form to do so. But as with the old films, so with TV movies: the quick, deft westerns, mysteries and action melodramas that depend on well-established conventions may in the end exert a larger claim on our attention than their more pretentiously publicized rivals.

Indeed, made-for-TV films are already performing a cultural service by keeping alive the traditional commercial genres that, aside from the cop dramas, are seldom available now in movie houses. Across from Private Slovik, for example, ABC ran The Hanged Man. It was a tidy western—like many of these films a pilot for a possible series—about a sometime hired gun trying to reform himself by helping out the widows and orphans he had formerly oppressed. The picture’s highlight was a hellishly ingenious finale in which the hero walked down the heavy into a steamy, bubbling silver smelter.

Golden-Oldies. On ABC in recent months, a viewer could renew acquaintance with all kinds of golden-oldie situations. There was Kirk Douglas playing a worm turned psychopathic killer in Mousey; Robert Gulp as a bourgeois daddy forced to defend suburban hearth and home from a predatory adolescent gang in Outrage; Gulp again as one of a group of men who must work while their women anxiously wait in Houston, We ‘ve Got a Problem (namely a space shot gone awry); Gloria Swanson doing a dotty old lady thing with her friends the Killer Bees; Natalie Wood and Robert Wagner in a Love Story with wheelchair called The Affair. There were also obvious borrowings from Hollywood hits—among the recent ones: several mini-Poseidon adventures with oddly assorted casts trapped in runaway trains and stalled elevators and even an elegiac western whose gimmick was readily apparent from the title, Mrs. Sundance.

None of these movies approach the tense excellence of what may be the all-time best-of-breed: Director Steven Spielberg’s Duel (1971), in which Dennis Weaver plays a peaceable salesman hurrying to a meeting through rugged desert country and incurring the psychopathic rage of a truck driver by passing him on a hill. His desperate efforts to avoid murder by collision with a relentless foe, whose face neither he nor the audience ever glimpses, is an unforgettable exercise in the action-suspense category.

It is also an object lesson in what can be achieved by talented people who make a virtue of the pressures imposed by tight budgets and shooting schedules.

TV movies are mostly made by old companies, in particular giant Universal Studios, the only company left in Hollywood with its own working back lot.

There is no margin for artistic error or experiment. Producers have been known to come on the set to dismiss directors who fall behind the customary ten-day shooting schedule.

This kind of taut traditional entertainment feeds a steady freshet of interest in TV movies. They are not locked in with overly familiar characters the way series shows are; and, given the endless need for new product, producers cannot help but try an occasional novelty, just as the studios did several decades ago when they were obligated to provide a weekly change of bill for their theater chains. Sometimes TV’s good ideas do not quite come off, as in Shirts/Skins, in which no one decided whether the intense rivalries generated in a pickup basketball game were a funny or sad commentary on the modern competitive spirit. But sometimes they do, as in I Love You … Goodbye, in which Hope Lange gave a sensitive, appealing performance as a fed-up housewife running away from a middle-class marriage gone stale.

The main thing, however, is that the TV movies offer variety, but not too much of it—a nice overall blend of familiar faces and situations with newer personalities and original twists. Convenient to turn on, easy to flick off, movies made for TV approximate the conditions under which all movies used to be chanced by audiences years ago. They are a small but genuine blessing for persistently optimistic people who can remember when at least half the pleasure of moviegoing derived precisely from the fact that no sense of cultural occasion was attached to that simple, inexpensive act. “Richard Schickel