Beverly Hills Madam (1986 TV Movie)
Cheeseball Soap Opera That Could Be A Bad Cable TV Series Today
5 February 2015
The title character is one Lil Hutton (Faye Dunaway) who runs a high class out-call service catering to the kind of wealthy and powerful men who can afford $1000 a night for discreet encounters with very beautiful women who ask few questions and tell no tales.

Her very small roster of working girls includes some very flawed and damaged young women. Law student Wendy (Donna Dixon), jilted alcoholic Claudia (Anderson), snarky dancer (Robin Givens) are joined by an Amazon of a Nebraska farm-girl Julie (Terry Farrell) whom Lil has rescued from the streets of Los Angeles.

Lil's roster seems far too small for the kind of agency that can pay for her pampered lifestyle I should think unless the women were working around the clock instead of for $1000 a night.

Logically there would have to be more women in a real agency. That is something which could easily have been provided by bringing in peripheral call girl characters filled by actresses from central casting. All I'm asking is for a few short extra scenes with a few women then perhaps the mere mention of names of other women employed by the agency.

The dialogue is unbelievably clunky and without an ounce of originality. It is so poor I wondered whether or not the director just told the actors to say whatever they wanted as it would be dubbed in a foreign language later.

Going from poor melodrama in it's lacklustre first half to tawdry soap opera in its second half and featuring thoroughly unlikeable characters from lead to supporting roles there is very little that is appealing about the actual story here. Even with its short run-time it exhausts whatever real interest this story may have had early on and then drifts along to its implausible conclusion.

This exploitation drama with provocative subject matter was sanitized for TV to the point of being silly. Overall this was a huge missed opportunity to explore the lives of people in a high-risk and unconventional profession. They tried to turn it into a kind of romance with Jackie Collins style novel touches.

Faye Dunaway was at one time an A-list Hollywood star who appeared in highly regarded and commercially successful films like Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Chinatown (1974) and Network (1976). But she was apparently such an unbelievable pain to work with for so many, for so long that fewer and fewer people wanted to work with her by the early 1980s.

Few seem to remember what a breathtakingly beautiful woman Melody Anderson was. Those that think Canadians aren't sexy either never met her or don't know that she is Canadian. I don't believe she ever got the kind of shot at A list stardom she deserved in Hollywood.

The very appealing Terry Farrell would go on to fame on TV shows like Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Becker.

Robin Givens had her first role here before going on to stardom in TV and feature films.
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