Diana Van Der Vlis Movies

John Cheever's "misery in suburbia" short stories, brief and to the point, have always proven excellent TV fodder. Director Frank Perry's The Swimmer, adapted for the screen by Perry's wife Eleanor, is a rare, and for the most part successful, attempt at offering a Cheever story in feature-length form. Dressed only in swimming trunks throughout the film, Burt Lancaster plays a wealthy, middle-aged advertising man, embarked on a long and revelatory journey through suburban Connecticut. Lancaster slowly makes his way to his split-level home by travelling from house to house, and from swimming pool to swimming pool. At each stop, Lancaster comes face to face with an incident in his past. Informing Kim Hunter that he once harbored a secret love for her, Lancaster is mildly upset by Hunter's indifference. Elderly Cornelia Otis Skinner is incensed at Lancaster's intrusion in her backyard and orders him to leave. At the next home, Lancaster tries to seduce the nubile Janet Landgard, who'd once baby-sat for his daughters, but she runs away in horror. And so it goes: as each subsequent suburbanite peels off his self-protective veneer, Lancaster grows more and more disillusioned with what he thought was his ideal lifestyle. The more intensely painful episode is the confrontation between Lancaster and ex-mistress Janice Rule (this scene was directed, without credit, by Sydney Pollack). Thoroughly defeated, the all-but-naked Lancaster laboriously makes his way through the Connecticut woods in a blinding rainstorm, desperately seeking out his own home where he fully expects his "loving" wife and daughters to greet him. Not this time. Dismissed as too self-consciously "arty" at the time of its release, The Swimmer's reputation increased over the decades following its release thanks to constant late-night TV exposure. The film represents the first movie work of 22-year-old composer Marvin Hamlisch. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Martin Sheen may be the Grey Eminence of movies nowadays, but back in 1967 he often as not played switchblade-wielding punks. This he does, in the company of Tony Musante, in The Incident. After mugging a helpless old man, Sheen and Musante take over a subway car, terrorizing its occupants. In Stagecoach fashion, all the best and worst qualities of the passengers are brought to the surface by the presence of danger. Among the passengers are angry black man Brock Peters and his supplicative wife Ruby Dee, ex-alcoholic Gary Merrill, timorous Jewish couple Jack Gilford and Thelma Ritter, blowhard Ed McMahon, and homosexual Robert Fields. It is furloughed army private Beau Bridges who puts an end to Sheen and Musante's reign of terror. Based on Ride with Terror a 1963 TV play by Nicholas E. Baehr, The Incident is an unpleasant but undeniably fascinating character study. And yes, that cute young blonde playing Alice Keenan is Donna Mills. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Dr. James Xavier (Ray Milland) is a brilliant but unorthodox researcher whose work with human sight has yielded an experimental chemical that may vastly increase the range of what we can see. Despite the misgivings and warnings of the two people closest to him, Dr. Diane Fairfax (Diana Van Der Vlis) and Dr. Sam Brant (Harold J. Stone), he uses it on himself and finds that he is able to look inside the human body in real-time. This gives him the ability to save the life of a patient in surgery, but in the process, he offends a top physician and calls his own judgement into question. He won't stop or even slow his experiments, however, and when Sam is accidentally killed trying to stop him, he is forced to flee. Soon he is living the life of a hunted man, and is protected and exploited by Crane (Don Rickles), a larcenous carny-man who sets him up as a "healer" on skid row, taking peoples' pennies while Xavier makes his diagnoses. After getting away from Crane, Xavier is found by Diane, who joins him on the run, and by now his own worst nature is coming to the surface. They head to Las Vegas, where his ability to see through objects allows him to win at most of the games in front of him, but he is discovered because of the attention that his "streak" draws to him. Pursued out of town, he heads out to the desert, and by now his ability to see transcends the boundaries of earthly space, leading him to a terrible quandry and a hideous solution to his plight, inspired by an encounter with a preacher. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide

A round robin of betrayal and murder takes up most of the running time in this episode. First off, Elise Taylor (Diana Van Der Vlis) falls in love with Bish Darby (James Best), who is married to a woman named Jackie (Madeleine Sherwood), who in turn makes arrangements for Bish to die and for Elise to be blamed. But someone beats Jackie to the punch -- namely, the husband of another woman with whom Bish is fooling around. Ultimately, Elise is punished for her indiscretion...but not in the way that Jackie had expected. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide