This was a series that lasted from 1969 to 1976. Some of these movies were pilots for series like The Night Stalker and The Rookies. A couple of the most famous from this series are Duel and Trilogy of Terror, the last one featuring the late Karen Black pursued by a miniature knife-wielding Zuni doll. God bless.
share The best:
Go Ask Alice--yeah, the story is fiction and not based on a real diary
as claimed. Still a good cautionary tale movie, with William Shatner in an
understated performance in a small role.
Maybe I'll Come Home in the Spring--another teenage druggie movie,
with Sally Field running away from her phony bourgeois parents to be with
hippie David Carradine. One of the best things about this movie was the unromanticized depiction of the scummy hippie.
Brian's Song--a good tearjerker for men.
The Night Stalker and its sequel, The Night Strangler. The
TV series that resulted from these movies was never quite as good.
The Girl Most Likely To...--the best thing Joan Rivers ever did,
a black comedy about a homely girl who gets revenge on everyone who ever
treated her badly.
The Longest Night--a thriller about a wealthy man's teenage daughter
who is kidnapped and held for ransom in an underground coffin. The
perfect nightmare-inducer.
There were also a bunch of others which don't seem to appear on "ABC Movie
of the Week" lists--maybe they were featured on other nights or other networks?
These included all those other cautionary tales under the "(Name): Portrait of
a Teenage Alcoholic/Hitchhiker/Runaway," etc., The Girls of Huntington House, featuring a very young Sissy Spacek as a pregnant student at a school
for unwed mothers (in an era when pregnant teenage girls were usually expected
to leave regular public schools);and period pieces such as a remake of A Tree
Grows in Brooklyn, with Cliff Robertson as Johnny Nolan, and an excellent
re-enactment of Orson Welles' radio broadcast of "War of the Worlds," The
Night That Panicked America. These were great made-for-TV movies; I wish some
cable channel would feature some of these, instead of those cornball Hallmark
movies or the lurid, violent murder films on Lifetime Movie Network.
I'm not crying, you fool, I'm laughing!
Hewwo.
I love the ABC Movie of the Week series and I own several of the movies in different formats, including Maybe I'll Come Home In the Spring on VHS.
Everyone is entitled to their opinion, of course, but I actually enjoy the so-called 'cornball' Hallmark movies and the 'lurid, violent murder films' on Lifetime Movie Network almost as much as I love the made for TV movies of yesteryear.
You guys need to go to Youtube -- there's a whole ABC Movie of the week channel -- including the very first movie ever broadcasted - Seven In Darkness.. about some blind people going to a convention -- the plane crashes in the mountains, killing everyone on the plane who can see. The group has to make their way in the wilderness to civilization. Cast includes Dina Merrill, Arthur O'Connell, Leslie Anne Warren, Alehandro (SP!!) Ray, Barry Nelson and a really standout performance by Milton Bearle.
They also have Monte Markham's version of Death Takes a Holiday, several with Andy Griffith and Dennis Weaver -- TONS of them! I had a ball over my last vacation watching movies I hadn't seen in 30 years. And as another poster mentioned, most of them were a heck of a lot better than what passes for a TV movie now.
How sad, that you were not born in my time, nor I, in yours.
The "Movie of the Week" was a SERIES that lasted from 1969 to 1975. Of course, ABC showed many made-for-TV movies for years after that. Even more confusing, ABC showed others during 1969 to 1975 that were NOT Movies of the Week!
shareWho can forget the theme song? The best theme of any movie series on TV, in my opinion.
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