Directed by John Badham (Bird On a Wire, Short Circuit, WarGames) and written by Robert Malcolm Young (Escape to Witch Mountain) from a Fritz Leiber story, this trip to the Night Gallery has photographer David Faulkner (James Farentino, Dead and Buried) becoming slowly obsessed with his new model. She has no name. Just eyes that want something. That’s where this gets its title, “The Girl With the Hungry Eyes.”

The Girl is played by Joanna Pettet, making this episode her fourth Night Gallery role. She’s also in The Evil which also makes use of her ethereal beauty as she plays a vampire who haunts every man that sees her. Helping her exactly that are the photos taken by Harry Langdon Jr., a legendary Hollywood photographer.

Pettet

told authors Scott Skelton and Jim Benson in Rod Serling’s Night Gallery An After Hours Tour, “Doing “The Girl With the Hungry Eyes” was just a total ego trip! I walked onto the set and there were floor-to-ceiling huge blowups of me! I looked out the window and they had literally made a huge billboard out of me, sipping beer, and erected it on a building across the street. And it was probably the best I ever looked in my life. We all go through our periods — “the look,” you know? It was just perfect. And for the rest of my career I got to use these incredible shots from Harry Langdon. When would I ever have had a chance to get an entire day with somebody like that?”

Plus, you get Night Gallery regular John Astin as a beer company owner desperate to meet The Girl and a script as packed with eroticism as 1972 network television will allow. Badham argued with Jack Laird for more money and more time, even going way over to capture the final scenes inferno which got him fired until, as he said, “the next time they needed somebody.” And they did just a few days later, working on an episode of Ozzie and Harriet.

As for the life-sized photos of Pettet, she wanted one for her own. By the time she asked for one, the crew had taken all of them. Somewhere in garages and dens across Hollywood, appreciative men were now staring at their very own girl with the hungry eyes.