Catherine Bach Movies
American actress Catherine Bach was born in Ohio, but spent most of her high school years in South Dakota with her father. As soon as she finished high school, Catherine flew to California to pursue the acting career she'd been dreaming about since seeing her actor uncle, Tony Verdugo, in a stage production. Supporting herself with various day jobs, Catherine took dancing lessons, made the audition rounds, and eventually attained a few TV bits and movie roles. Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1973) was her most widely seen film role, principally because of what she didn't wear in it; but her best role was an all-too-brief appearance in The Midnight Man (1974), as Natalie Clayborne, the troubled college coed at the center of a mystery involving blackmail and murder.In 1978 Bach was cast along with John Schneider and Tom Wopat as the "Dukes of Hazzard" in the weekly CBS TV series of the same name. The series was a comedy adventure about a hillbilly family, their souped-up automobile (The General Lee), and their corrupt antagonist, Boss Hogg. As Daisy Duke, Catherine spent most of her time in T-shirts and cutoffs, and thus the actress became a favorite of the young-college-boy set. Within a few months of Dukes of Hazzard's debut, the Catherine Bach poster was outselling the Farrah Fawcett and Suzanne Somers posters in quite a few cities. Catherine stayed with Dukes until its cancellation in 1985, even weathering the "siege of 1981," when her costars Schneider and Wopat left over contract differences and were briefly replaced by two lookalike actors. Like many 1970s TV stars, Catherine Bach found the movie offers, poster contracts, personal appearances and talk-show gigs slowly evaporating as her series faded from the public's memory. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- 1974
- R
One night after finishing his rounds as security chief at Jordan College, Quartz Willinger (Cameron Mitchell) stops by an after-hours club for a drink and walks in on the middle of a robbery, during which he is savagely beaten by three hillbilly thugs. While recovering from his injuries, he needs a replacement and arranges to hire an old friend, Jim Slade (Burt Lancaster), an ex-cop who has just been paroled on a murder conviction, for killing the man he caught with his wife. He finds the job an awkward fit but a welcome relief from prison, especially once he meets his parole officer, Linda Thorpe (Susan Clark). On his first night on the job, there's a break-in at the office of the college's resident psychiatrist (Robert Quarry), and the theft of some tapes made by students, only one of whom -- Natalie Clayborne (Catherine Bach), a pretty yet troubled coed, and daughter of a very powerful politician (Morgan Woodward) -- isn't upset by the incident. The next night, Slade finds her getting drunk in town and gets her back to the campus. When Natalie turns up dead, the county sheriff, Casey (Harris Yulin), glances at him briefly as a suspect before arresting the custodian Ewing (Charles Tyner), who was a religious nut with a collection of pornography and a fixation on Natalie. But Slade isn't convinced of Ewing's guilt and starts to investigate the crime himself with help from Linda. Despite Casey's pressuring him to stay out of it, the ex-cop soon discovers Jordan College, the town, and the surrounding county are a nasty border-state version of Peyton Place, populated by lots of people with skeletons in their closets, including blackmail, incest, and murder, with hardly an institution not corrupted by some part of it. What's more, in a series of twists worthy of The Big Sleep (book or movie), he uncovers a connection between the thugs who beat up Quartz and the stolen tape and the murder, which results in the brutal killing of his witnesses and Slade fighting for his life. And he still has to face the truth about the two people in the midst of this corruption that he trusted. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Burt Lancaster, Susan Clark, (more)
As much an eccentric character study as a road movie, Michael Cimino's directorial debut follows the adventures of a quartet of misfits in their life of crime. Retired thief Thunderbolt (Clint Eastwood) and sweet drifter Lightfoot (Jeff Bridges) meet cute when Thunderbolt jumps into Lightfoot's stolen car to escape a gunman. The pair embarks on an oddball journey to get Thunderbolt's loot from an old robbery before his former associates, the sadistic Red (George Kennedy) and cretinous Goody (Geoffrey Lewis), get to it first, but all four are too late; the one-room schoolhouse hiding place has apparently vanished. So instead, the four play house and work legit jobs while they plot to rob the same place Thunderbolt and Red hit before. Although the plan goes awry, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot discover that they may still have succeeded-or so they think. As the easy-going mediator between the two, Eastwood's Thunderbolt was a move away from his tough cop-westerner image; his audience accepted this then-atypical performance enough to turn Thunderbolt and Lightfoot into a moderate hit. Bridges received his second Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination, but Cimino turned down a subsequent deal with Eastwood, moving instead to his artistic peak with The Deer Hunter (1978) and career nadir with Heaven's Gate (1980). ~ Lucia Bozzola, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Clint Eastwood, Jeff Bridges, (more)
Catherine Bach, Charlene Dallas and John Saxon star in this thriller about a reporter investigating a series of strange disappearances and deaths. She soon discovers a mysterious predator is living in a network of catacombs under the city, and uncovers a link to a sinister web of slave labor and murder, all taking place under the city. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
- 1983
In this adventure, a luckless photographer meets a handsome kayaker and joins him in the fight to keep a wild mountain river from being exploited by self-serving developers. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Catherine Bach, James Brolin, (more)
