Della Reese Movies

Helen (Olympia Dukakis) is an elderly widow who lives a quiet but happy life with her friends and her housekeeper Katie (Della Reese). A dark cloud appears when Helen discovers she has cancer. While receiving treatment, Helen meets Jane (Kelly Rowan), an attractive nurse who happens to be single. Before long, Helen is convinced that Jane is the perfect girl for her son Tom (John Stamos), a lawyer who handles a number of divorce cases and as a result is wary of marriage. Neither Jane nor Tom are entirely convinced they'd be an ideal couple, but Helen will not be denied. After a few dates, it looks like Tom and Jane might end up together after all, until Helen's declining health sends Tom on a mild bender that finds him in bed with another woman when Jane stops by to visit. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Virtually the quintessential "CBS Sunday Night Movie" (especially during the traditional "fall sweeps"), Anya's Bell is set in 1949, a time when handicapped people were feared, pitied, scorned, shunted away, but seldom treated as "worthwhile" human beings by so-called normal society. Della Reese stars as Anya Herpick, a middle-aged blind woman who has been cared for since birth by her elderly mother. Having seldom ventured outside her house, Anya has compensated for her loneliness by amassing a collection of small bells. When her mother suddenly dies, Anya is truly alone, and she is paralyzed with fear at the prospect. Enter 12-year-old delivery boy Scott Rhymes (Mason Gamble), whom has been written off by his parents as "slow" because he has never learned to read. At first wary of one another, Anya and Scott soon become the closest of friends. It is eventually revealed that Scott suffers from dyslexia (an all-but-unknown affliction back in 1949), for which Anya compensates by teaching him how to read the Braille alphabet, which turns out to be easier to comprehend than printed words. At the same time, Scott helps Anya to become more independent and self-reliant. The changes wrought on the two protagonists are both dramatic and heartwarming, clearing the path for a happy ending (relevant to the film's title) despite the death of one of the two. Filmed on location in Salt Lake City, Anya's Bell was first telecast on October 31, 1999. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

This two-hour TV entertainment special takes a surface skim (95 minutes minus commercials and promos) over the history of CBS, quickly skipping past decades of CBS radio to concentrate on CBS television from the late '40s to the present. It features more than a dozen hosts (Adam Arkin, Ed Bradley, Carol Burnett, David Copperfield, Roma Downey, Fran Drescher, Don Johnson, Angela Lansbury, David Letterman, Cheech Marin, Mary Tyler Moore, Dan Rather, Della Reese, Ray Romano, Jane Seymour) introducing a parade of primetime clips covering a variety of shows, events, and people -- Ed Sullivan, The Carol Burnette Show, 60 Minutes (Mike Wallace interviewing Barbra Streisand), Gunsmoke, The Honeymooners, Edward R. Murrow (his oft-seen editorial on Joe McCarthy), I Love Lucy, The Twilight Zone, The Waltons, Dan Rather reporting from Vietnam, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Green Acres, Dallas, Petticoat Junction, The Beverly Hillbillies, M*A*S*H, The Andy Griffith Show, Murphy Brown, the JFK assassination, and more -- with reminiscences from Tom and Dick Smothers, David Letterman (on Ed Sullivan), Larry Hagman (on "Who shot J.R.?"), Alan Alda, Ron Howard, Walter Cronkite, and others. At 95 minutes, these nostalgic nods, truncated tributes, and familiar faces might leave many viewers yearning for an archeological dig through the little-seen rarities and antiquities buried in the Museum of Television & Radio collection while waiting for the major networks to cover broadcasting history in depth. Premiered May 20, 1998 on CBS. ~ Bhob Stewart, All Movie Guide

Season Three of the Freddie Prinze sitcom Chico and the Man begins with a two-part episode, as Ed Brown (Jack Albertson), curmudgeonly owner of a barrio garage and the employer of lovable Latino Chico Rodriguez (Prinze, of course), discovers to his dismay that his new landlady is his old enemy Helen Rogers, the woman who'd committed the unforgivable sin of converting Ed's late wife from a Republican to a Democrat. Della Rogers is played by new series regular Della Reese, who'd been seen the previous season as a long-suffering judge in the episode "The Juror". In addition to her landlady duties, Della Rogers also runs a mobile snack wagon, thereby setting up several situations whereby the resourceful Chico tries to cadge a free meal. In another new development, retired letter carrier Louie Wilson (Scatman Crothers) is also working in Ed's garage. Guest stars this season include Dick Van Dyke Show veteran Rose Marie in the episode "Ready When You Are, CB" (the title refers not to DeMille but to the then-current CB radio craze); onetime matinee idol Cesar Romero as Chico's long-lost father in "Chico's Padre"; deadpan comedian George Gobel in "Louie's CanCan"; and perennial western sidekick Pat Buttram in "Gregory Peck is a Rooster." The third-season episode that garnered the fewest audience laughs when it originally aired on NBC was "Champs Ain't Chumps". Not that this episode was any less hilarious than its predecessors, merely that it was first telecast on January 28, 1977--one day after the suicide of 22-year-old Freddie Prinze. This devastating tragedy would have seemed to spell the end of Chico and the Man, but both NBC and producer James Komack were grimly determined to keep the franchise alive--and to that end filmed an episode in which a new and entirely different "Chico" was introduced in the form of 12-year-old newcomer Gabriel Melgar. That episode, however, would not be aired until Chico and the Man returned for its fourth and final season. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Walt Disney Pictures redefined computer animation with this technically accomplished fantasy of prehistoric life, combining live-action backgrounds with computer-generated animals. After a pterodactyl snatches a dinosaur's egg and accidentally drops it while flying away, the egg is rescued by a family of lemurs, who keep it warm until it hatches. They raise the baby dinosaur, named Aladar, as one of their own, and as he grows to adulthood, Aladar protects the primates that he has come to regard as his family. When a giant meteor appears in the sky, packs of dinosaurs have no idea what to make of the strange fiery light, but Aladar and the lemurs are convinced that they must escape to a safer place before the huge flaming stone destroys their home, leading Aladar to encounter his own kind for the first time. D.B. Sweeney provides the voice of Aladar; other actors in the voice cast include Joan Plowright, Julianna Margulies, Alfre Woodard, and Ossie Davis. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

American Gospel music is performed by Della Reese, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Miss Micki, and many more. ~ All Movie Guide

American Gospel music is performed by Della Reese, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Grandpa Jones and many more. ~ All Movie Guide

Eddie Murphy, in addition to starring as Quick, the son of 1930s Harlem gambling-house proprietor Sugar Ray (Richard Pryor), also wrote and directed the film. The plotline details the combined efforts of Quick and Sugar Ray to prevent white gangster Bugsy Calhoune (Michael Lerner) from muscling in on their operation. The supporting players include Redd Foxx, Danny Aiello and Jasmine Guy. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

The irascible Roz (Marsha Warfield) is cowed into silence and subservience by her Aunt Ruth (guest star Della Reese), who has arrived in town on a mission to marry her niece off to a good man. Hoping to keep Aunt Ruth at bay, Roz talks Mac into posing as her fiancée. And in a plot development clearly inspired by a recent legal dust-up involving Zsa Zsa Gabor, a much-married and heavily-accented actress named Sascha Minkoff (Magda Harout) is haulted into the courtroom, where her priceless diamond necklace swallowed by another defendant's dog! ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

The phenomenal success of the 1977 ABC miniseries Roots all but demanded a sequel to writer Alex Haley's epic story of his African and African-American forebears. Debuting February 18, 1979, Roots: The Next Generations picked up where its predecessor left off, with Haley's slave ancestors winning their freedom in the aftermath of the Civil War. Even so, life for black Americans was wrought with hardship and oppression thanks to the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, the staunch refusal of the white power structure to pass anti-lynching laws, and the formation of the dreaded Jim Crow laws which legalized racial segregation in the South (and much of the North). Covering the period from 1882 to the mid-1970s, the miniseries first focuses on blacksmith Tom Harvey (Georg Stanford Brown), great-grandson of Kunta Kinte (the protagonist of the original Roots), and his family. Meanwhile, reacting to the marriage of his son to a black woman, anal-retentive Southern colonel Warner (Henry Fonda) begins setting the legal wheels in motion to deny blacks like Tom the right to vote and to hold "white" jobs. A few decades later, Tom's son-in-law encourages his fellow blacks to stand firm against the KKK's reign of terror. His labors on behalf of his race are rewarded when his daughter Bertha (Irene Cara) becomes the first descendant of Kunta Kinte to receive a college education. It is Bertha Palmer who weds the equally ambitious Simon Haley (Dorian Harewood), who goes on to serve in WWI and to organize farmers and sharecroppers during the Depression. Simon's son Alex (played at various ages by Kristoff St. John, Damon Evans, and finally James Earl Jones) is just as determined to succeed in a white man's world as his father, and to that end becomes a professional writer after his own service stint in the Coast Guard during WWII. At the height of his professional success (largely due to his having ghost-written the autobiography of Muslim activist Malcolm X), Alex Haley pays a visit to his boyhood hometown -- where, almost by accident, he receives the first clue to his heritage, a clue that will lead him on an odyssey of self-discovery, arriving full circle at Kunta Kinte's birthplace in Africa. Although the miniseries' "money scene" was Haley's nervous interview with American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell (Marlon Brando in a superb cameo turn), the climactic episode, in which Haley tearfully embraces the living African descendants of Kunta Kinte, is one of the most unforgettable moments in the history of network television. Running 12 episodes and 14 hours, Roots: The Next Generations concluded on February 25, 1979, playing to huge ratings all along the way and ultimately garnering several Emmy nominations (and one win). ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide