Quinn Redeker | Through the Shattered Lens

Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Sundays, I will be reviewing the made-for-television movies that used to be a primetime mainstay. Today’s film is 1977’s The Hunted Lady! It can be viewed on YouTube.

Detective Susan Reilly (Donna Mills) reluctantly teams up with a chauvinistic cop named Sgt. Arizzio (Alan Feinstein) to investigate a United States senator who has presidential ambitions. Arizzio believes that the senator is being back by the Mafia and that it would be disastrous for the country if a mob-connected politician ended up in the White House. (Being mob-connected didn’t seem to hurt John F. Kennedy but still….)

Now, Detective Reilly and Sgt. Arizzio working together to take down a corrupt senator sounds like an intriguing premise for a movie, right? Well, oddly enough, that’s not what this movie is actually about. Instead, it’s about Susan going on the run after she’s framed for Arizzio’s murder. She escapes from police custody with the help of her father. Though she’s still recovering from being shot earlier in the film, Susan makes her way to Reno and attempts to hide out from both the cops and the Mafia assassin that has been sent to kill her.

Susan hiding out in Reno. Hmmm …. sound like an intriguing premise for a movie, right? Well, don’t get to attached to Susan pretending to be a professional gambler because it turns out that bullet wound was more serious than she realized and she ends up passing out from blood loss. When she awakens, she’s in a free clinic that is run by Dr. Arthur Sills (Robert Reed). Dr. Sills doesn’t ask Susan too many questions about her past and even hires Susan on as a nurse. Susan and Dr. Sills fall in love and try to clear the name of a Native American who has been accused of blowing stuff up.

Doing some research, I was not surprised to discover that The Hunted Lady was originally developed as a possible television show. The show would have played out like a combination of Charlie’s Angels and The Fugitive, with Susan moving from town to town and getting involved with a new set of guest stars each week. With both the police and the mob trying to track her down, Susan would try to clear her name while also helping out strangers. Unfortunately, The Hunted Lady wasn’t exactly a hit in the ratings and Susan’s further adventures went untold.

The main problem with The Hunted Lady is an obvious one. The idea of the Mafia trying to install one of their guys in the White House is considerably more intriguing that Susan falling in love with Dr. Sills while working at a free clinic. The whole time that Susan was helping the doctor’s patients, I was thinking, “But what about the senator?” Donna Mills was surprisingly convincing as a tough cop but she had next to no chemistry with Robert Reed. If anything, Reed looked annoyed at just having to be there.

Anyway, here’s hoping that Susan cleared her name eventually. You can only run for so long.

For the past seven days, I’ve been reviewing — in chronological order — fifty of the most memorable melodramas ever filmed. We started with a silent film from 1916 and now, we have reached the 80s. What better way to kick off the decade than by taking a look at the 1980 Best Picture winner, Ordinary People?

Directed by Robert Redford, Ordinary People tells the story of the upper middle class Jarrett family. On the surface, the Jarretts appear to be the perfect family. Calvin Jarrett (Donald Sutherland) has a successful career. Beth (Mary Tyler Moore) keeps a perfect home and appears to be the ideal suburban matriarch. However, one summer, their oldest son drowns in a sailing accident and their youngest son, sensitive Conrad (Timothy Hutton), attempts to commit suicide. After spending four months in a psychiatric hospital, Conrad come back home and the family struggles to put their lives back together. Even though he starts to see a therapist (Judd Hirsch) and starts dating his classmate Jeannine (Elizabeth McGovern), Conrad still struggles with his feelings of guilt over having survived. Beth’s struggle to maintain a facade of normalcy leads to several fights between her and Conrad with Calvin trapped in the middle.

Among my fellow film bloggers, there’s always going to be a very vocal group that is going to hate Ordinary People because it won the Oscar for best picture over challenging black-and-white films directed by Martin Scorsese (Raging Bull) and David Lynch (The Elephant Man). They always tend to complain that Ordinary People is a conventional film that tells a conventional story and that it was directed by a very conventional director. More than once, I’ve seen an online film critic refer to Ordinary People as being a “big budget Lifetime movie.”

Well, you know what?

I love Lifetime. Lifetime is the best network on television and to me, a big budget Lifetime movie would be the best Lifetime movie of all. And, at the risk of alienating all of my film-loving friends, if I had to choose between watching Raging Bull and Ordinary People, I’m going to pick Ordinary People every time. Raging Bull is visually stunning and features great performances but it’s also two hours spent watching an incredibly unlikable human being beating the crap out of anyone who is foolish enough to love him. Ordinary People may essentially look like a TV show but it’s also about characters that you can understand and that, as the film progresses, you grow to truly care about.

Yes, I do wish that the character of Beth had been given more of a chance to talk about her feelings and it’s hard not to feel that Ordinary People places too much blame on the mother. But, even so, the film still ends with vague — if unlikely — hope that Beth will eventually be able to move past her anger and reconnect with her family. The film may be hard on Beth but it never gives up on her. That’s what distinguishes Ordinary People for me. In many ways, it’s a very sad film. It’s a film that was specifically designed to make you cry and I certainly shed a few tears while I watched it. But, even with its somewhat ambiguous ending, Ordinary People is also a very optimistic movie. It’s a movie that says that, as much pain as we may have in our life,we can recover and life can go on and it’s okay to be sad and its also okay to be happy.

And that’s an important lesson to learn.

(That said, if I had been alive and an Academy voter in 1981, I would have voted for The Elephant Man.)