J. Pat O'Malley Movies

After a particularly bitter argument with her divorced mother, teenager Libby Bellow (Mare Winningham) runs away from home. Eventually, she links up with a traveling carnival and takes on a variety of responsibilities, in so doing coming to the realization that her life at home might not have been so bad after all. In addition to serving as an early showcase for actress Mare Winningham, this made-for-TV film also features a number of original songs by Janis Ian. Freedom was originally telecast by ABC on May 18, 1981. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

A policeman masquerades as a homeless alcoholic and teams up with a bag lady, who is really a college professor, to bring a drug lord's assassin to justice in this memorable made-for-television drama. Along the way, the two disparate partners find themselves falling in love. The story is based upon Richard Barth's novel The Rag Bag Clan. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi

Marred by prejudice and derogatory stereoptypes of gays and Hispanics, this subpar drama by Ken Annakin does not treat women or men well either. Bill (Mac Davis) is a detective who has just been hired by a tough lawyer, K.D. Locke (Tovah Feldshuh) to check up on some deadbeat ex-spouses who are ignoring their alimony payements. Soon Bill is caught in two complicated investigations, one focuses on a storekeeper, and the other on a sex doctor who just happens to be Locke's husband. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi

Hired by Dr. Eric Albach (Larry Linville) to find the doctor's missing wife Tracy (Corinne Michaels), Jim is confused by Albach's seeming lack of concern over whether Tracy is brought back dead or alive--or at all. In fact, the farther Jim gets away from solving the woman's disappearance, the more money Albach lavishes upon him. It turns out that Albach is using Jim as the unwitting guinea pig in an elaborate behavioral experiment...and by the time Jim figures this out, a murder has been committed and an aging movie star (J. Pat O'Malley) has been sucked into the intrigue! ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Just before they end their shift, the Rampart emergency team is summoned to an apartment house which has been struck by a jet liner. Elsewhere, nurse Dixie (Julie London) administers some T.L.C. on the worried husband (J. Pat O'Malley) of an elderly patient (Florence Lake); another man suffers multiple cardiac arrests within a disturbingly short space of time; and Roy (Kevin Tighe) and John (Randolph Mantooth) try to separate the brawlers in a bar fight. And in a chucklesome subplot, Chet (Tim Donnelly) refuses to rest until he has rid the station house of a pesky rodent. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Banacek was the two-hour pilot film for the 1972-74 detective series starring George Peppard. The cigar-smoking, aphorism-spouting Peppard plays T. Banacek, Polish/American investigator for a major Boston insurance company. Independently wealthy, Banacek will only accept cases that have been deemed "unsolvable" by all previous investigators. In this pilot episode, Banacek tackles the case of a Brink's-truck hijacking in the middle of a Texas roadway. The truck and its costly cargo has seemingly vanished into thin air, and the cops are stymied. But with Banacek on the case, we learn that the whole affair was an elaborately orchestrated inside job. The subsequent Banacek series was a component of The NBC Wednesday Movie. The pilot film has been reissued to TV as Detour to Nowhere. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

In the conclusion of a two-part story (originally telecast as a single two-hour episode), Ironside (Raymond Burr) works in concert with attorney Ken Klaven (Cameron Mitchell) to secure the release of Walter Booth (William Campbell), whom the Chief had sent to prison on a manslaughter charge seven years before. Though now convinced of Booth's innocence, Ironside encounters a great deal of trouble persuading the DA's office. The Chief's only hope is to force a young woman to come forward with testimony she'd withheld during the original trial--but there are mysterious forces who are determined to silence both Ironside and his witness for keeps! Prominent in the supporting cast is Geraldine Brooks, who had played the sniper responsible for the Chief's confinement to a wheelchair in the original 1967 Ironside pilot film. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

This film is based on the novel Ratman's Notebooks, by Stephen Gilbert. Bruce Davison is Willard Stiles, a 27-year-old mama's boy whose repressions are bottled up inside and come to the fore in his nervous nail-biting. As one character describes Willard, "Willard is basically an extrovert, but it's all inside." Willard and his possessive invalid mother, Henrietta (Elsa Lanchester), live in thrall to Al Martin (Ernest Borgnine), the man who took over a foundry business after the death of Willard's father. Willard inwardly seethes but mostly stays in his run-down mansion with his mother, making friends with the rats that infest the place -- he even names them, Ben and Socrates. However, when Henrietta dies, things change. Al, in a rage, kills one of Willard's pet rats. Not only that, but Al also fires Willard from his job at the foundry. Losing his patience, Willard meets with his rat friends to exact his revenge for a lifetime of humiliation and neurosis. ~ Paul Brenner, Rovi

Racial prejudice plays an ironic role in this episode, as Officers Jim Reed (Kent McCord) and Pete Malloy (Martin Milner) answer a number of day-watch calls. Among the miscreants facing arrest at the hands of the two cops are an elusive armed-robbery suspect and a female hitchhiker who specialize in blackmailing unwary male motorists. Also, Jim and Pete have their hands full with a wino suffering from grotesque hallucinations. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Once again pulling holiday duty at Christmastime, mobile officers Pete Malloy (Martin Milner) and Jim Reed (Kent McCord) have a great deal of difficulty locating any sort of Yuletide cheer on the streets of LA. For starters, the two cops are summoned to a robbery scene, where they find that the victim is an old duffer in a Santa Claus suit (resulting in the arrest of another ersatz Santa). Elsewhere, Pete and Jim conduct an extensive search for a small East Indian boy (Tom Nasheboo) who has vanished--a crisis that bears a marked resemblance to one of the most famous Christmas episodes of Adam-12's "sister" series Dragnet. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

James Stewart and Henry Fonda star in this light-hearted western comedy, directed by Gene Kelly. In 1870 Texas, John O' Hanlan (James Stewart), an itinerant cowboy, receives a letter notifying him that he has inherited a business establishment called the Cheyenne Social Club in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Thinking that he can finally settle down from his hard life on the trail and become a man of property, he travels with his friend Harley O'Sullivan (Henry Fonda) to Cheyenne to claim his property. Once there, he finds the Cheyenne Social Club to be a brothel, run by the attractive Madame Jenny (Shirley Jones). John is appalled, and while Harley is sampling the business's wares, John is planning to close the place down and turn it into a boardinghouse. But when the citizens of Cheyenne get wind of John's plan, they try to convince him to keep the whorehouse the way it is. However, all of this talk is tabled when John finds out that Jenny has been beaten by the disreputable Corey Bannister (Robert J. Wilke). John challenges him to a gunfight and kills him. Suddenly, John and Harley discover that they have the whole Bannister clan after them, and now they have to defend both themselves and the gals at the Cheyenne Social Club. ~ Paul Brenner, Rovi

Twenty-seven-year-old Barbra Streisand seemed an inappropriate choice for middle-aged, match-making widow Dolly Levi, but her energy carries her right through the role and dominates the lackluster movie around her. The plot, drawn from Thornton Wilder's The Matchmaker (itself based on a 19th-century British farce), is set in motion when Yonkers feed store clerk Cornelius Hackl (Michael Crawford) celebrates his promotion by taking his pal Barnaby Tucker (Danny Lockin) to New York City for a "corking good time." But Cornelius and Barnaby can't avoid crossing paths with their boss Horace Vandergelder (Walter Matthau), who'd give them Holy Ned if he saw them in a fancy restaurant with two fancy girls instead of tending the store. Mr. Vandergelder himself is the object of Dolly's affections, though she pretends to have only a professional interest in the widowed merchant, going through the motions of finding him a new wife when in fact she'd like to be the lucky bride herself. The film's musical set pieces include a show-stopping rendition of the title number, with Louis Armstrong more or less playing himself. The biggest number is "Before the Parade Passes By," in which thousands of costumed marchers and atmosphere extras cavort before a huge replica of a New York City thoroughfare in the 1890s (actually the main entrance of the 20th Century-Fox studio, with period facades adorning the office buildings). An artifact of an era in which Broadway musicals were a significant part of popular culture, Hello Dolly seemed bizarrely irrelevant in the social turmoil of the late 1960s, and it became one of the late-1960s big-budget failures that led Hollywood studios toward a different kind of filmmaking in the 1970s. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi