From 1969 to 1975, ABC put out weekly films. They functioned as TV pilots, testing grounds for up-and-coming filmmakers, and places for new and old stars to shine. Every month, Chloe Walker revisits one of these movies. This is Movie of the Week (of the Month).
The made-for-TV movie was born from financial necessity.
Over the course of the 1950s, TV ownership in the US rocketed from less than 10% of households, to almost 90%. The three networks started their lives showing features that had been sold to them by the major studios, but as TV became more and more popular, the studios ramped their prices up, existentially scared by the competition from the small screen. Eventually, it just made business sense for the networks to start producing their own films. The first of these was See How They Run, which aired on NBC in 1964.
The landscape of both big and small screen entertainment has changed multiple times since then – now, in the streaming era, more films than ever are being produced that never get a theatrical release.
Although they have always been regarded as “lesser” than their big screen counterparts, the history of that underloved medium has been full of creativity and experimentation; current big names let loose from the usual expectations by the freedom of a smaller budget, and future big names trying to make a name for themselves on the way up.
And the intimacy of the TV movie, designed to be watched in the comfort of home, allows for a different kind of connection with the viewer than films made with theaters in mind. Most viewers of a certain age have at least one indelible memory of being curled up on the couch, screaming or crying or laughing at a movie that has, quite literally, hit them where they live.
Here are 15 examples–presented in chronological order–that show how adventurous, absorbing, and often just plain fun TV movies can truly be:
Evening Primrose (1966)
Stephen Sondheim write an extra-length musical episode of The Twilight Zone, starring Anthony Perkins? Well, not exactly – but Evening Primrose gets pretty close! The movie sees Perkins as writer Charles Snell, who decides to abandon his life and live in a department store after closing, hiding during the day. Soon, he discovers he’s not the first to have had this idea, and there’s a whole secret society in place. He falls in love with the beautiful Ella (Charmian Carr). When they decide to leave, however, the society’s elders take objection, and the young lovers find themselves in terrible danger.
Only fifty-one minutes long, Evening Primrose is a fascinating artifact – both sublimely creepy, and boasting a couple of Sondheim’s loveliest songs. Though familiar ground for Perkins, this would be the only other movie Charmian Carr starred in besides The Sound of Music, where she played oldest Von Trapp daughter Liesel. Quite the filmography!
Duel (1971)
At the beginning of the 1970s, a 24 year-old Steven Spielberg had little to his directorial name but a handful of TV episodes. Not that you’d have guessed it from his feature debut.
Based on a short story from the legendary Richard Matheson, Duel tells the tale of traveling salesman David Mann (Dennis Weaver), who is relentlessly pursued by the driver of a huge gas truck he dares to overtake. Shot on the run in just 13 days, with a crew largely as inexperienced as Spielberg, it seems miraculous that the end result is so sleek, gripping, and visually ravishing. Duel was so well-received that soon after its first TV airing in November 1971, the film was released into movie theaters across Europe, Australia and Japan, with some extra scenes recorded specially for this expanded version – that’s the main version that survives today.
A Cold Night’s Death (1973)
Few TV movies have made as atmospheric use of their limited budgets as ABC Movie of the Week A Cold Night’s Death. The film follows two scientists (Eli Wallach and Robert Culp) called to a remote arctic research station to investigate the disappearance of their colleague – who had frozen to death – and continue his work. Soon, cold and alone, paranoia sets in, and it looks like the two will head the same way as their fellow researcher.
Eerily anticipating John Carpenter’s The Thing in particular, which would be released a decade later, A Cold Night’s Death is an exquisitely sparse and eerie two-hander that really gets under your skin. TV movie royalty Robert Culp, in particular, was never better.
Someone’s Watching Me! (1978)
Aired weeks after Halloween hit cinemas, Someone’s Watching Me! was John Carpenter’s first TV movie, and gave Lauren Hutton her first solo starring role. She plays Leigh, a live TV director who’s just moved into a swanky new LA high rise apartment, and instantly finds herself menaced by increasingly unnerving crank phone calls. With the police no help, she must rely on herself and her friends to locate the crank caller, and stop him before he takes things any further.
Although the narrative is standard pulp stuff, reminiscent of Black Christmas, Someone’s Watching Me! is elevated by an immensely charismatic lead turn from Hutton – who really had the mettle to be one of the era’s great scream queens – and Carpenter’s fun, stylish riffs on Rear Window.
The Plumber (1979)
Released after Picnic At Hanging Rock had bought him international acclaim, but before he made a move to Hollywood with Witness, Peter Weir’s low-budget Australian TV movie follows the wife of an academic couple (Judy Morris), menaced by a man (Ivar Kants) who claims to be a plumber come to look at their bathroom. The thing is, there’s nothing wrong with their bathroom – or there isn’t until he’s started to work at it.
A queasily intimate, blackly comic domestic drama, The Plumber surrounds its riveting central battle with thorny additional layers concerning class and gender, leading to a far thematically richer and more complex journey than its svelte TV movie runtime would suggest. Like Duel, it proved so popular after its initial domestic TV airing that it was subsequently granted an international theatrical run.
Who Am I This Time? (1982)
The credits for this one could hardly be more impressive – directed by Jonathan Demme, from a story by Kurt Vonnegut, starring Christopher Walken and Susan Sarandon – but Who Am I This Time? is as charming as it is because it’s so sweet and understated.
Walken plays a shy shop clerk who also happens to be the most talented actor who’s ever performed in his community theater group. Sarandon is new in town, and falls in love with him when she’s playing Stella to his Stanley – problem is, off stage, he’s too timid to even maintain eye contact with her. Both the way they get around this problem, and the performances from Walken and Sarandon, are almost too charming for words.
Threads (1984)
Arriving the year after The Day After horrified America, BBC TV movie Threads produced an even more frightening, and far more graphic warning about the grim reality of nuclear armageddon.
The film tracks two families going about their lives as the drumbeat of catastrophe grows louder, and then follows the ones that remains after the bombs drop, and society collapses: radiation sickness, enormous food shortages, unburied corpses, deformed babies, and freezing temperatures thanks to thick clouds of debris from the blasts. Made all the more realistic and unsettling thanks to the dispassionate BBC narration and the dryly delivered onscreen facts that pepper the production, Threads is the TV movie at its most intimately terrifying.
Ghostwatch (1992)
The BBC were at it again! Famously, in 1938, Orson Welles caused chaos when his radio broadcast of H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds convinced grand swathes of Americans that aliens had landed. In 1992, similar drama erupted in the UK when a BBC broadcast managed to convince the country that ghosts were real.
Adopting the guise of a real telecast, and starring well-known BBC presenters Michael Parkinson, Craig Charles, Sarah Green and Mike Smith, Ghostwatch followed events over one night at a regular suburban house. There are jaunty outside broadcasts from the hosts, “Paranormal experts” are interviewed, and viewers are invited to call in with stories of their own – the BBC format is adhered to so accurately, it’s not at all surprising so many were taken in. All is typical light entertainment fun at first, but as the evening progresses, things become increasingly disturbing. Even three decades later, knowing the whole thing was a hoax, Ghostwatch has lost little of its power to haunt.
U.S Go Home (1994)
Made as part of a French TV series encouraging film directors to make coming-of-age movies from the eras of their youth (other episodes were helmed by Chantal Akerman, Olivier Assayas, and Cedric Kahn), Claire Denis’s U.S Go Home is set in the 1960s just outside Paris, near an American military base. Teenager Martine learns that her friend has just lost her virginity, and over one night and two parties, Martine is determined to catch up.
Sensitive but unsentimental, U.S Go Home is told largely through the physicality of its characters, and the songs chosen for the incredible soundtrack; with very little dialogue, we are taken through an extraordinarily nuanced emotional journey over one fateful night. Though the movie is just a hair over an hour long, the richness of feeling and Denis’ eye for the importance of body language means it’s every bit on the same level as her renowned feature films.
Nightjohn (1996)
Adapted from the children’s book by Gary Paulsen, Nightjohn tells the story of 12 year-old Sarny (Allison Jones), an enslaved girl living on a plantation ran by the cruel Mr. Waller (Beau Bridges). When Sarny is taught to read by John (Carl Lumbly) – who escaped slavery, but returned to share his gift of literacy – her life, and the lives of everyone on the plantation, changes forever.
Few would expect Disney Channel Original movies to be a source of artistic excellence, but this one happened to be directed by the great Charles Burnett. Ostensibly a children’s movie, Burnett doesn’t soft pedal the violence of slavery, but neither does he revel in it in the way of certain filmmakers; although the film is about the importance of literacy, he doesn’t deliver that message in a cheesy way, but a vital, lived-in one.
Burnett’s avoidance of these pitfalls, his deft direction, and a hugely charismatic turn from Carl Lumbly combine to make Nightjohn absolutely riveting.
In The Gloaming (1997)
Two years after a horrifying accident left him quadriplegic, Christopher Reeve made his directorial debut. To make any film with all the extra restrictions the condition forced upon him (he had to direct most of the movie in a different room from the actors, so the camera didn’t pick up the sound of his noisy ventilation equipment) would have been impressive. To make one as sensitive and deeply moving as In The Gloaming is extraordinary.
The film follows the last months in the life of Danny (Robert Sean Leonard), a young gay man who has come home to his chilly upper class family to die from late stage AIDS. Though he has a close relationship with his mother (Glenn Close) – most of the movie involves their far-ranging conversations – he is distant from his father (David Strathairn), with both men doubtful they’ll be able to close the gap until it’s too late.
12 Angry Men (1997)
By all rights, the decision to remake the Sidney Lumet 1957 classic at all, let alone as a TV movie, should have been a ridiculous one. Nevertheless, director William Friedkin pulled it off his own version of 12 Angry Men with class.
It helped that the cast – Jack Lemmon in the Henry Fonda role, George C. Scott as Lee J. Cobb, with Ossie Davis, James Gandolfini, Edward James Olmos and Armin Mueller-Stahl among the support – are no slouches. Some of them even arguably outperform their predecessors. Original screenwriter Reginald Rose returned to update his masterpiece; and although the screenplay is largely word-for-word the same, an extra dimension is added by the racial integration of the cast. Friedkin’s fluid directorial approach doesn’t always work, but POV shooting elevates a pivotal scene from the original.
Make no mistake – the 1997 version is still no match for the first. But as remakes go, it is so much better than it had any right to be.
Temple Grandin (2010)
An autistic woman who invented a more humane form of cow slaughter does not seem the most obvious candidate for a biopic, but if there were more biopics like Temple Grandin, maybe the genre wouldn’t be in such a sad state.
The HBO movie threads an impressive needle, managing to be earnest without schmaltziness, uplifting without ever becoming glib, and treating Temple’s autism pragmatically. Temple Grandin is powered by an ebullient central turn from Claire Danes; wonderful, warm supporting performances (Julia Ormond, Catherine O’Hara, and David Strathairn are on top form), and a genuinely fascinating, inspirational subject – Grandin herself loved the movie, praising its accuracy to her own experiences. The film won a galaxy of awards, and deservedly so.
Bessie (2015)
Although Queen Latifah was Oscar-nominated for her supporting role as Matron Mama Morton in Chicago, overall her movie career – dominated as it’s been by small parts in light comedies – has never matched up to her formidable talent. In Dee Rees’ Bessie, she finally got a role worthy of her.
Playing Blues legend Bessie Smith, Latifah is a hugely charismatic, voracious, irresistible presence, who does not take any nonsense from anybody. Nevertheless, her gravitas never outweighs Smith’s vulnerabilities, and the ultimate portrait of the short-lived singer (she was dead at 43) is a rich and nuanced one.
The Tale (2018)
When Jennifer Fox (Isabelle Nélisse) was 13 years old, she wrote an essay detailing an awful relationship – clearly abusive, but she was too young to realize – that she’d had with an older man. 35 years later, her horrified mother (Ellen Burstyn) finds the essay, and phones her daughter up to ask some urgent questions. Now a successful documentarian, adult Jennifer dives back into the past she’d forgotten to discover just what happened to her.
An extraordinarily brave examination of memory and trauma from writer/director Fox, The Tale is a deeply difficult, but important watch, spearheaded by remarkable performances from Isabelle Nélisse and Laura Dern. The way Fox stages conversations between her older and younger selves is particularly remarkable. It’s hard to imagine a better example of the intimate emotional catharsis of the TV movie.
Chloe Walker is a writer based in the UK. You can read her work at Culturefly, the BFI, Podcast Review, and Paste.