No wonder she went to play one of primetime's most memorable seductresses. She started off as a troubled former nun on the daytime soap opera "Love is a Many Splendored Thing", was stalked by the psychotic Jessica Walter the previous year in "Play Misty For Me" and here, is the subject of a mob hunt after being brutally paralyzed in a nasty car accident. If mobster Chuck Conners doesn't get her, physical therapist Agnes Moorehead just might with her non-stop exercising.
For a woman suffering from cancer, Moorehead doesn't show that here, and in spite of her age is able to maneuver Mills from a gurney into her wheelchair. It's the feisty Agnes audiences had known and loved since her first movies in the 1940's, and in spite of limited time on-screen is truly commanding.
Young Catherine Burns plays her fellow school teaching roommate, witnessing a mob hit on one of their own, violently pushed over a banister with a very long drop where the audience is fortunately spared the thud.
Conners and his crony's stalk Mills and Burns, beating Burns up and later driving her into a psychotic tizzy that results in one death and Mills without the use of her legs. Detective Martin Balsam is assigned to protect her and takes her to his rustic house with ocean view and thanks to training from Moorehead, sets out to make Mills better and find out more information to bring these nasty killers to justice.
Unlike other television movie thrillers of this kind, this fortunately has a light-hearted atmosphere through much of it, particularly with Balsam and Mills' interactions. Of course, the danger of the mob never completely leaves Mills' mind, and it's obvious like the end of "Play Misty For Me" that they will locate her.
While this movie is certainly suspenseful, there are elements of it throughout that are completely unbelievable and thus it becomes aggravating at times. The cast of veteran actors and newcomers is somewhat starry even though it's not a big ensemble. fortunately, films of this type made for TV at the time without commercials come in at just above 70 minutes so they are very easy to get through.
For a woman suffering from cancer, Moorehead doesn't show that here, and in spite of her age is able to maneuver Mills from a gurney into her wheelchair. It's the feisty Agnes audiences had known and loved since her first movies in the 1940's, and in spite of limited time on-screen is truly commanding.
Young Catherine Burns plays her fellow school teaching roommate, witnessing a mob hit on one of their own, violently pushed over a banister with a very long drop where the audience is fortunately spared the thud.
Conners and his crony's stalk Mills and Burns, beating Burns up and later driving her into a psychotic tizzy that results in one death and Mills without the use of her legs. Detective Martin Balsam is assigned to protect her and takes her to his rustic house with ocean view and thanks to training from Moorehead, sets out to make Mills better and find out more information to bring these nasty killers to justice.
Unlike other television movie thrillers of this kind, this fortunately has a light-hearted atmosphere through much of it, particularly with Balsam and Mills' interactions. Of course, the danger of the mob never completely leaves Mills' mind, and it's obvious like the end of "Play Misty For Me" that they will locate her.
While this movie is certainly suspenseful, there are elements of it throughout that are completely unbelievable and thus it becomes aggravating at times. The cast of veteran actors and newcomers is somewhat starry even though it's not a big ensemble. fortunately, films of this type made for TV at the time without commercials come in at just above 70 minutes so they are very easy to get through.