When police officer Jack Ward and rolls his eyes at Elizabeth Ashley telling him that she hired a hitman to kill herself, I wanted to give him a thumbs up because I totally agreed with his reaction. You see, Ashley thought she was dying of leukemia when she really had mononucleosis, and when her desire to die didn't happen as fast as she thought, she decided to have herself bumped off. The first scene of the film is her meeting with the doctor giving her a diagnosis of her real condition and explaining why mononucleosis is sometimes diagnosed as leukemia. Police officer Ricardo Montalban sees her running down the street in a panic, and chases her down where he convinces her to come into the station to tell her story.
I couldn't believe this wacky plotline at all. At least on the soap opera "The Doctors" when nutty Doreen Aldrich believed she was dying of leukemia (which also turned out to be mono), she had the artistic flair to decide to go out with a bang by having one last fling. Unfortunately that meant kidnapping her former sister-in-law so she could seduce her ex-husband's brother and hiring a Hitman to kill her alleged rival. At least in that story, Pamela Lincoln was fun to watch go nutty, but poor Elizabeth Ashley, one of the best stage and screen character actress there is gets to play a character who is short of brain cells in addition to the cells destroyed by the illness that is not quite fatal.
While definitely a good cop and a concerned citizen, Montalban isn't exactly The Brightest Bulb in the San Francisco Police Department either. He becomes her protector as he tries to find out who the hitman is. In the process, other people become targets, and the only thing that I can say I enjoyed about this was seeing some vintage San Francisco location footage. It's easy to feel sorry for professionals like Elizabeth Ashley, Ricardo Montalban, Jack Warden and Roy Poole, but there obviously wasn't a shortage of TV movie scripts in the early 70's. This certainly ranks as one of the worst.
I couldn't believe this wacky plotline at all. At least on the soap opera "The Doctors" when nutty Doreen Aldrich believed she was dying of leukemia (which also turned out to be mono), she had the artistic flair to decide to go out with a bang by having one last fling. Unfortunately that meant kidnapping her former sister-in-law so she could seduce her ex-husband's brother and hiring a Hitman to kill her alleged rival. At least in that story, Pamela Lincoln was fun to watch go nutty, but poor Elizabeth Ashley, one of the best stage and screen character actress there is gets to play a character who is short of brain cells in addition to the cells destroyed by the illness that is not quite fatal.
While definitely a good cop and a concerned citizen, Montalban isn't exactly The Brightest Bulb in the San Francisco Police Department either. He becomes her protector as he tries to find out who the hitman is. In the process, other people become targets, and the only thing that I can say I enjoyed about this was seeing some vintage San Francisco location footage. It's easy to feel sorry for professionals like Elizabeth Ashley, Ricardo Montalban, Jack Warden and Roy Poole, but there obviously wasn't a shortage of TV movie scripts in the early 70's. This certainly ranks as one of the worst.