Beulah Quo Movies

Things get off to a deceptively light-hearted start as popular professional wrestler Kornberg (Nils Allen Stewart) is brought into the ER with a twisted knee. But the story quickly turns deadly serious when, stuck in the middle of a street riot, Carter (Noah Wyle) is forced to man the wheel of the paramedic ambulance -- and in so doing sparks an even worse situation when he accidentally runs over a youngster. Meanwhile, Carol (Julianna Margulies), still mooning over the departed Ross, receives confirmation of her pregnancy. And Lucy (Kellie Martin) comes face to face with an intransigent Asian family who refuse to let their mother know that she is in dangerously declining health. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Forbidden Nights is set in the Red China of 1979. Robin Shou plays a Chinese radical, working on behalf of bringing political reform to his homeland. Melissa Gilbert costars as an American teacher who falls in love with Shou. The dramatic thrust of the story is Ms. Gilbert's willingness to put her own life on the line for Shou's ideals. This made-for-TV star-crossed romance was filmed in Hong Kong, seven years before it too would fall within the Mainland China orbit. Forbidden Nights was directed by Waris Hussein, the Indian-born craftsman responsible for such theatrical features as Quackser Fortune Has a Cousin in the Bronx (1970) and The Possession of Joel Delaney (1972). ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

The made-for-television American Geisha was based on the published reminiscences of real-life anthropologist Liza Dalby. Pam Dawber stars as the Dalby counterpart, here renamed Gillian Burke. As part of the research for her Stanford University grad-school thesis, Gillian heads to the Japanese town of Kyoto, there to work as an authentic geisha girl. Richard Narita costars as the Japanese gentleman with whom Gillian falls in love. Less than a year before American Geisha's September 11, 1986 premiere, Narita essayed a similar role in the white-slavery melodrama Girls of the White Orchid. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

In this made-for-TV drama, a Vietnam vet's family life is shattered when the child he fathered during wartime suddenly appears on his doorstep. ~ Jason Ankeny, Rovi

When touring Italian opera star Giorgio Fini (Luciano Pavarotti in his screen debut) mysteriously loses his voice before a performance in Boston, he goes to see throat specialist Dr. Pamela Taylor (Kathryn Harrold), and the two fall madly in love. This film features a number of songs, including "If We Were in Love" and "I Left My Heart in San Francisco." ~ Iotis Erlewine, Rovi

After literally getting away with murder, sadistic small-town bully Harry Moeller (Brion James) is himself shot to death. Six of Moeller's longtime victims step forward and confesses to the crime, which each man claiming to have taken one shot at the man with the same gun. With no way to determine which bullet was the fatal one, police chief Frank Ollano (John Anderson, happy to be rid of Moeller, is willing to write off his killing as self defense. But Quincy (Jack Klugman), who had appeared as a witness as Moeller's earlier murder trial, isn't about to let anyone get away with a second murder--even one that seems eminently justifiable. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

While Shirley Jones is given top billing in the made-for-TV The Children of An Lac, the film's true star is the late actress Ina Balin--who plays herself in this re-enactment of an episode of conspicuous courage during the Vietnam war. On the eve of the fall of Saigon in 1975, an effort is made to rescue 400 children from the An Lac orphanage. Participating in this near-impossible undertaking are Georgia housewife Betty Tisdale (Shirley Jones), orphanage head Madama Ngai (Beulah Quo), and Balin. Alas, this very worthwhile and uplifting production ran a distant second in the ratings when first telecast October 19, 1980. Its competition: The Castaways of Gilligan's Island. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Based on the best-selling novel by Howard Fast, the two-part, four-hour miniseries The Immigrants is the saga of Dan Lavetta (Stephen Macht). The son of an impoverished Italian immigrant family, Dan manages to emerge from the rubble of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake (cunningly re-created via stock footage from such films as, naturally, San Francisco and Earthquake), to become one of the port city's most powerful shipping magnates. Capping his ascent up the social scale by marrying wealthy Nob Hill debutante Jean Seldon (Sharon Gless), Dan risks losing it all when he falls hopelessly in love with Oriental lass May Ling (played by the Caucasian Aimee Eccles). The story concludes with the 1929 Wall Street crash, suggesting that the producers would have thrown in the kitchen sink had they been able to find it. The Immigrants was syndicated to local stations as part of the "Operation Prime Time" series; most markets ran the two-parter on November 20 and 21, 1978. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Star Gregory Peck went into MacArthur disliking the title character that he was slated to play, but emerged from the experience with a deeper understanding and respect for this complex historical figure. The film is framed in flashback, with an octogenarian General
Douglas MacArthur (Peck) making his final address before his alma mater of West Point. We flash back to the fall of Corregidor in 1942, with MacArthur promising "I shall return" to the beleaguered (and eventually imprisoned) American and Filipino troops. The story follows MacArthur's subsequent victories in the South Pacific, occasionally pausing to show us the General's omnipresent sense of "showmanship" (e.g. his wading ashore on the beaches of the Philippines for the benefit of the newsreel cameras). The greater part of the film involves MacArthur's attempts to restore dignity to the defeated postwar Japan, and to keep the Russian Communists from overtaking the orient as they had Eastern Europe. MacArthur is eventually fired from his post by President Truman after the general defies orders during the Korean conflict. MacArthur was intended as Universal's "answer" to 20th Century-Fox's enormously successful Patton (1970), but box-office returns were disappointing. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

"You may think you know what you're dealing with, but believe me, you don't," warns water baron Noah Cross (John Huston), when smooth cop-turned-private eye J.J. "Jake" Gittes (Jack Nicholson) starts nosing around Cross's water diversion scheme. That proves to be the ominous lesson of Chinatown, Roman Polanski's critically lauded 1974 revision of 1940s film noir detective movies. In 1930s Los Angeles, "matrimonial work" specialist Gittes is hired by Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) to tail her husband, Water Department engineer Hollis Mulwray (Darrell Zwerling). Gittes photographs him in the company of a young blonde and figures the case is closed, only to discover that the real Mrs. Mulwray had nothing to do with hiring Gittes in the first place. When Hollis turns up dead, Gittes decides to investigate further, encountering a shady old-age home, corrupt bureaucrats, angry orange farmers, and a nostril-slicing thug (Polanski) along the way. By the time he confronts Cross, Evelyn's father and Mulwray's former business partner, Jake thinks he knows everything, but an even more sordid truth awaits him. When circumstances force Jake to return to his old beat in Chinatown, he realizes just how impotent he is against the wealthy, depraved Cross. "Forget it, Jake," his old partner tells him. "It's Chinatown." Reworking the somber underpinnings of detective noir along more pessimistic lines, Polanski and screenwriter Robert Towne convey a '70s-inflected critique of capitalist and bureaucratic malevolence in a carefully detailed period piece harkening back to the genre's roots in the 1930s and '40s. Gittes always has a smart comeback like Humphrey Bogart's Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, but the corruption Gittes finds is too deep for one man to stop. Other noir revisions, such as Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye (1973) and Arthur Penn's Night Moves (1975), also centered on the detective's inefficacy in an uncertain '70s world, but Chinatown's period sheen renders this dilemma at once contemporary and timeless, pointing to larger implications about the effects of corporate rapaciousness on individuals. Polanski and Towne clashed over Chinatown's ending; Polanski won the fight, but Towne won the Oscar for Best Screenplay. Chinatown was nominated for ten other Oscars, including Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, Cinematography, Art Direction, Costumes, and Score. ~ Lucia Bozzola, Rovi

On three occasions between 1973 and 1975, Star Trek producer Gene Roddenberry attempted to launch a new science-fiction series. All three pilot films were predicated on the premise of a modern-day scientist awakening after nearly two centuries in suspended animation. The first of these feature-length pilots was Genesis 2, which debuted March 23, 1973. Alex Cord stars as Dylan Hunt, who opens his eyes to discover that he now resides in a post-apocalyptic world. He is reluctantly recruited into a resistance movement, aimed at toppling the present despotic regime. The film's "money scene" involved leading lady Lyra-a (Mariette Hartley), who at a crucial plot juncture lifts her blouse to reveal that she has two navels. When Genesis 2 failed to click as a series, Roddenberry and company tried again with Planet Earth (1974); when that didn't sell, the property was reworked as Strange New World (1975). ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

The ABC network chose to recognize the thirtieth anniversary of Pearl Harbor with the "revisionist" TV movie If Tomorrow Comes. Patty Duke Astin is a California girl who in 1941 falls in love with Japanese-American Frank Liu. Upon the occasion of the "Day of Infamy," Liu is rounded up along with other Californians of Japanese descent and interred in a relocation camp. At this point the film becomes a mufti Romeo and Juliet, with Astin and Liu entering into a suicide pact. While the film rightly condemns the wartime imprisonment of Japanese Americans, it also misguidedly suggests that virtually all Caucasians in 1941 were pigheaded bigots with no rational reason whatsoever to mistrust the Japanese. If Tomorrow Comes was filmed on location in Pasadena. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi