MILL CREEK THE SWINGIN’ SEVENTIES: The New Adventures of Heidi (1978)

Directed by Ralph Senensky (Death Cruise) and written by John McGreevey (The Death of Richie), this remake moves Heidi from Switzerland to New York City. It’s also a musical.

Heidi is played by Katy Kurtzman and her friend Elizabeth Wyler is played by Sherrie Wills. It’s the same story you expect, as Elizabeth is fascinated by the rural life of Heidi and her grandfather (Burl Ives).

While you see a lot of snow in this, it was shot in the summer in Los Angeles, so the acting is pretty decent. After all, it was in the 80s while fake snow was falling on the ground. Also: the grandfather is assumed dead for nearly a year and no one calls the police or tries to help Heidi. Instead, they bring her to live with the rich people and treat her like a pet, then solve the grandfather’s blindness by paying for surgery because money solves everything.

Maybe I’ve never seen Heidi before or something.

Tales from the Crypt S2 E2: The Switch (1990)

Arnold Schwarzenegger has only directed two projects: the TV movie Christmas In Connecticut and this episode. It’s based on “The Switch” from Tales from the Crypt #45, written by Carl Wessler and drawn by Graham Ingels. Strangely, this is the first story from the actual Tales from the Crypt comic book to be adapted for the show.

It’s a simple little parable. A rich elderly bachelor named Carlton Webster (William Hickey) wants to impress Linda (Kelly Preston) by switching his body with Hands, who is a more vital younger man (Rick Rossovich). Tey being young again turns out to be very expensive. And is she looking for looks or — shudder — money?

The Crypt Keeper even gets interrupted by Arnold in this!

Crypt Keeper: “Welcome horror hooligans, this is your shiver chef. It’s disgusting what people will do to stay young.”

Arnold: What’s the matter with you? Want to keep that 90-pound corpse for the rest of your death? Keep pumping while I tell the story. Tonight’s story is about an old man who finds a new wrinkle in the fountain of youth. A twisted tale that we call “The Switch.””

Roy Brocksmith, who plays the doctor who operates on Carlton, must be an Arnold favorite. He was Dr. Edgemar in Total Recall, the man who sends Arnold on an adventure. Arnold also enjoyed working with Kelly Preston on Twins, so he cast her, and he was in The Terminator with Rossovich (who is in Spellbinder with Preston).

MILL CREEK THE SWINGIN’ SEVENTIES: Maybe I’ll Come Home in the Spring (1971)

Denise Miller (Sally Field) has come home after a year of living with hippies. Her younger sister Susie (Lane Bradbury) is about to do the same thing. As for Denise, her boyfriend Flack (David Carradine) is driving across the country to save her from her family. And her parents Ed (Jackie Cooper) and Claire (Eleanor Parker) wonder where they went wrong.

Directed by Joseph Sargent (The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, Jaws: The Revenge) and written by Bruce Feldman, this reunites Field and Parker, as they played sisters in Home for the Holidays. If you think it’s odd that she’s her mother in this, well, Bradbury is her younger sister but is really eight years older than her.

This also has a Linda Ronstadt soundtrack, if that makes you want to watch.

Don’t have the box set? You can watch this on Tubi.

MILL CREEK THE SWINGIN’ SEVENTIES: F. Scott Fitzgerald and The Last of the Belles (1974)

Directed by George Schaefer and written by James Costigan, this has a pretty fun cast. There’s Richard Chamberlain as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Blythe Danner as Zelda Fitzgerald, Susan Sarandon (a year before The Great Waldo Pepper and The Rocky Horror Picture Show) as Ailie Calhoun, David Huffman (who died way too young as he was stabbed by a criminal while outside the Old Globe Theater in San Francisco) as Andy McKennam, Ernest Thompson (the writer of On Golden Pond) as Earl Shoen, Richard Hatch (Battlestar Galactica) as Bill Knowles and Planet of the Apes TV show cast member James Naughton as Captain John Haines. And Brooke Adams!

This is the story of how Fitzgerlad met his wife. I worked with Blythe Danner a bunch on health care commercials and I always got her after she’d been through twelve other agencies, so she was exhausted and would turn a :30 second commercial into a :90. I purposefully watched the time she hosted SNL and told her. After nearly years of us barely interacting, she sparkled and said, “Was I any good?” It wasn’t a great episode, the kind of one that aired in 1982 when the show was finding its way back. It was the kind of SNL where the music guest — Rickie Lee Jones — did three songs instead of two. But I told her, “Your monologue was perfect.”

Don’t have the box set? You can watch this on YouTube.

MILL CREEK THE SWINGIN’ SEVENTIES: Katherine (1975)

Katherine is based on Diana Oughton of the Weather Underground, a radical who died in 1970 when a bomb she was building accidentally exploded and Patty Hearst, who was kidnapped by and then joined the Symbionese Liberation Army the same year this movie aired on ABC.

Director and writer Jeremy Kagan also made Conspiracy: The Trial of the Chicago 8, The Journey of Natty Gann and Big Man on Campus. He also directed Roswell: The UFO Conspiracy, a TV movie about the people that were near the crash.

Katherine is filled with actors who weren’t stars yet. Sissy Spacek was a year away from Carrie, Henry Winkler was not yet the Fonz and Julie Kavner was years from being Marge Simpson (although she was on Rhoda).

Katherine (Spacek) falls in love with Bob Kline (Winkler) and runs from the upper class life her parents Emily (Jane Wyatt) and Thornton (Art Carney) live in and becomes part of the Weathermen wing of Students for a Democratic Society. So much of the story is told by Katherine facing the camera and talking directly to the camera. It’s pretty interesting how that makes you feel for her as this movie never makes her seem misguided which is a pretty brave idea for a TV movie in 1975 much less something made these days.

Don’t have the box set? You can watch this on Tubi.

MILL CREEK THE SWINGIN’ SEVENTIES: Jane Eyre (1970)

This movie had its theatrical debut in the United Kingdom in 1970 and was released on television in the United States in 1971 where it won John Williams an Emmy for Outstanding Achievement in Music Composition.

Jane Eyre (Susannah York) is the kind of classic heroine you read about in high school whose best friend had a cough and was forced to sleep in the rain and died the next day and you wonder, “Why are they making us read this book?” Well, she’s also in love with her boss Edward Rochester (George C. Scott), who is much older than her and he’s the father of Adele, the girl she’s raising. But oh the foggy secrets of Thornfield Hall.

Based on the Charlotte Bronte book, this was directed by Delbert Mann, who had directed MartyShe Waits and David Copperfield. The script was from Jack Pulman, who had worked with Mann on the aforementioned David Copperfield and also wrote Kiss the Girls and Make Them Die and The Executioner.

Don’t have the box set? You can watch this on Tubi.

MILL CREEK THE SWINGIN’ SEVENTIES: James Dean (1976)

This movie was directed by Robert Butler, who also directed the pilots for Star Trek, Hogan’s Heroes, Batman and Hill Street Blues as well as four Kurt Russell Disney movies — Guns in the Heather, The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes, The Barefoot Executive and Now You See Him, Now You Don’t — and also Night of the Juggler and Turbulence. What a career!

It was written by William Bast, who had already written about his five-year relationship with James Dean in his book James Dean: a Biography and The Myth Makers, a drama about what Bast saw as the publicity-mad funeral of Dean and the damage it did to his family and hometown of Fairmount, Indiana. It was a TV movie in England and an episode of NBC’s Dupont Show of the Month as The Movie Star. He also wrote The Legend of Lizzie BordenThe Valley of Gwangi and The Betsy as well as creating The Colbys.

Bast is played by Michael Brandon in this movie. Strangely enough, in the 50s, Butler worked at CBS Television in charge of the studio audience ushers. James Dean got a job there through Bast but was soon fired by Butler. The movie also has someone else who knew Dean. Christine White, who plays a secretary, met Dean when she was his agent’s typist. She was his girlfriend from 1951 to 1954 and the two successfully auditioned for the Actors Studio. In the movie itself, White is played by Candy Clark.

There’s an interesting cast here. Amy Irving is a young Marilyn Monroe, Meg Foster plays another of Dean’s rumored lovers, Dizzy Sheridan (who went on to write Dizzy & Jimmy: My Life with James Dean: A Love Story, play next door neighbor Raquel on ALF and Jerry’s mom on Seinfeld) and strangely in the way that movies are, she was married to Stephen McHattie at the time, the actor who plays Dean.

Plus you get Jayne Meadows as Reva Randall, Katherine Helmond as Dean’s agent Claire Forger, Brooke Adams as Beverly and Julian Burton as Ray.

Don’t have the box set? You can watch this on Tubi.

MILL CREEK THE SWINGIN’ SEVENTIES: How Awful About Allan (1970)

Along with What’s the Matter With Helen?, this movie is one of the two collaborations between writer Henry Farrell and director Curtis Harrington.  It was the ABC Movie of the Week on September 22, 1970 and has stood the test of time as one of the better TV movies. And there’s some stiff competition for that.

Shot in just 12 days, it stars Anthony Perkins as Allan Colleigh, who has psychosomatic blindness after an accident — he left paint cans too close to a fire — that killed his abusive father and scarred his sister Katharine (Julie Harris from the 1963 version of The Haunting).

After Allan returns to their home after time in a mental hospital, he’s convinced that everyone is out to get him, including a new boarder with speaks in a hoarse whisper and one of his sister’s ex-boyfriends on the phone.

Joan Hackett — who was in two great TV movies, Dead of Night and The Possessed — appears as Allan’s former girlfriend. She gets caught up in his mania as rooms of the house explode into flames and he’s kidnapped by that mysterious ex.

How Awful About Allan has plenty of actors as comfortable on the stage as they were on the big or small screen. Perkins agreed to wear special contacts that completely made him blind so that his performance would be more realistic.

This didn’t get great reviews when it came out, but do the movie we love ever do?

Don’t have the box set? You can download this on the Internet Archive.

MILL CREEK THE SWINGIN’ SEVENTIES: The Hanged Man (1974)

James Devlin (Steve Forrest, Mommie Dearest) survives his own hanging and decides to become a hero, defending Carrie Gault (Sharon Acker) from Lew Halleck (Cameron Mitchell). There are some fun supernatural elements in this, as this is nearly the TV version of High Plains Drifter and was intended to be a series that would follow Devlin across the West as he tried to make up for his past sins.

Director Michael Caffey had a long career directing TV and even did an episode of The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. Writer Andrew J. Fenady wrote Black NoonTerror In the Wax Museum and Yes, Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus, which has Charles Bronson play Francis Church, the publisher who wrote to a young girl named Virginia to explain Santa Claus. He also developed the TV shows Hondo and The Rebel.

You can watch this on Tubi.

MILL CREEK THE SWINGIN’ SEVENTIES: The Gun and the Pulpit (1974)

Based on the book The Fastest Gun in the Pulpit by Jack Ehrlich, this ABC TV movie has Ernie Parsons (Marjoe Gortner) escaping the noose and taking the identity of a murderer holy man. He heads off to take over that man’s church, a job he really knows nothing about, but it’ll keep him alive hiding out for a while.

While there, he finds himself standing up to the man who has taken over the town, Mr. Ross (David Huddleston). It’s not totally noble, as he falls for the daughter of a man Ross has murdered, Sally Underwood (Pamela Sue Martin).

Jeff Corey is in the lynch mob at the beginning and Slim Pickens plays Billy One-Eye, who helps Ernie. Plus, Geoffrey Lewis is a hired killer named Jason McCoy who comes in to take out Ernie and they end up missing each other at close range and then decide to just go their own way.

Directed by Daniel Petrie (Moon of the WolfA Howling In the Woods) and written by William Bowers (Support Your Local Sheriff!), this isn’t the finest ride into the West you’ve seen, but it’s pleasant and I always love Gortner.

You can watch this on Tubi.