Susan Brown Movies

In this first episode of Frasier's second season, Frasier Crane (Kelsey Grammer) discovers, to his horror, that his old Boston acquaintance, Thomas Jay Fallow (John O'Hurley), whom he took into his confidence back at Cheers, has written a sexy bestseller in which one of the characters is based on Frasier. Worse still, the novel describes in vivid detail the moment in which the 17-year-old Frasier surrendered his virginity to his piano teacher, Clarice (Constance Towers). A confrontation with Fallow leads to an awkward reunion with the now-elderly Clarice -- and yet another surprise for our beleaguered hero. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In this romance, a widowed businesswoman, believing she has an incurable disease begins a series of romantic encounters only to discover that she has been misdiagnosed. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

An affectionate reverie about war, childhood, and British stoicism, John Boorman's Hope and Glory is the veteran filmmaker's recollection of the bombing of London during World War II. Set on the British home front during the early days of the war, this episodic movie shows the blitz through the eyes of seven-year-old Billy Rohan (Sebastian Rice Edwards). At the war's outset, Billy finds himself alone in a house full of women, as all the men are called off to join the war effort. With wide-eyed wonder and an outsized imagination, Billy sees the war as a grand diversion, an extension of his world of knights, tin soldiers, and war games. As bombs fall and houses burn, Billy's mother (Sarah Miles) struggles to keep the family together in her husband's absence. Even as Billy seeks to escape the harem of aunts and sisters, Dawn (Sammi Davis), his older sister, falls for a Canadian soldier who gets her pregnant. After the Rohans' home catches fire (not, ironically, as the result of a bomb blast, but from a domestic accident), the family is forced to move in with Billy's cantankerous grandfather in the countryside, where they spend the rest of their summer and enjoy an unusual idyll amid the raging war. Nominated in 1987 for a Best Picture Academy Award, Hope and Glory proved to be another high point in the career of the remarkably protean Boorman. ~ Elbert Ventura, All Movie Guide

In the second half of Murder She Wrote's two-part Season Three opener, Jessica's long-missing brother in law Neil Fletcher (Jackie Cooper), who has been working under an alias with the Carmody Circus, has confessed to the murder of circus manager Hank Sutter. Jessica (Angela Lansbury) is convinced that Neil is innocent, and that he is covering up for somebody else--and this proves to be a reasonable conclusion when a second murder occurs, in which the victim is rival circus owner Harry Kingman (Joe Dorsey). Seriously hampering Jessica's investigation is the stone wall of resistance built up by the highly clannish circus folk--and by the curiously hostile local authorities. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Kate Mulgrew made her American TV debut in the taped 90-minute melodrama Alien Lover. She plays a lonely, orphaned teenager, recently released from a mental institution. While wandering around in the family attic, Mulgrew switches on an old television. She sees the image of a young man (John Ventantonio)-who promptly begins talking to her. Girl and boy gradually fall in love....but is he for real, or merely a figment of her troubled psyche? And if so, where does he come from and why is here? Pernell Roberts, Susan Brown, and Steven Earl Tanner costar in this ABC Wide World Mystery presentation, which debuted November 25, 1975. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

The setting is Atoka County, Alabama -- the time is somewhere after the peak of the civil rights movement, after cities such as Birmingham, Alabama were out of the headlines. The movement is coming to the sticks, including Atoka County, and a lot of the white residents don't like it and are prepared to commit felonious assault, rape, or murder to get their point across. In the middle of this powder keg are two men on either side of a very dangerous line -- County Sheriff "Big Track" Bascomb (Lee Marvin) and Mayor Hardy (David Huddleston). Each man is playing both ends against the middle in the impending race war -- Bascomb wants to keep the peace as best he can, blocking the local klavern of the Ku Klux Klan from their worst excesses and making sure that the Klan's business and the county's business remain separate; Hardy, who also owns the lumber company that employs most of the county and the bank on which most of the residents depend, wants a good environment for business, which includes keeping enough poor blacks around to do the most menial work for the miserable pay he's willing to fork over; this, in turn, requires that they be too scared to ask for too much, including better treatment, but not so scared that they leave the county altogether, which would wipe out his business. Between them is Breck Stancill (Richard Burton), an eighth-generation resident with lots of land but little money and even fewer friends; a wounded war veteran and loner, he still resents the lynching of his grandfather and no longer respects what the white south purports to stand for -- he's even allowed dispossessed blacks to live for free on his property, angering the poor whites around him even more. Bascomb would like Stancill to be a little less high profile, while Hardy would like him to sell out and disappear, and wouldn't mind it if the local Klan helped that process along by trying to kill him. Bascomb's balancing act fails because of two events -- Nancy Poteet (Linda Evans) is raped one night, apparently by a black man, which precipitates the murder of a black teenager and her being violently ostracized by the white community; and a civil rights rally is planned for the town, bringing in lots of "outside agitators" and getting the local klavern eager to act against them. The prime mover in all of this is Big Track's deputy, Butt Cut Bates (Cameron Mitchell), a hardcore klansman who won't be reined in by Hardy and who is not above raping a black woman prisoner (Lola Falana) that he's arrested illegally, or trying to kill Stancill; directly opposed to him is Garth (O.J. Simpson), a young black man who witnessed a Klan murder and, in response, gets a rifle and starts meting out justice on his own. Before it's over, a major part of the county is at war and the bodies are falling everywhere. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide

Richard Alan Simmons, scriptwriter of Fear No Evil, evidently held fond memories of the old British chiller Dead of Night (a cornucopia of inspiration for programs like The Twilight Zone). The "Mirror Sequence" in the earlier film was gussied up for the basic plotline of this 1969 TV-movie. Bradford Dillman purchases an antique mirror, which turns out to be the portal for a supernatural world. Upon Dillman's death, his fiancee (Lynda Day) discovers that the mirror might be able to bring back her lost lover. Fear No Evil did so well in the overnight ratings that it spawned a sequel, 1970's Ritual of Evil. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Paladin (Richard Boone) is hired by the family of wealthy Mexican Don Esteban (Hans Conried) to return the aging aristocrat to his hacienda. Now in his dotage, the eccentric Don Esteban is laboring under the delusion that he is Don Quixote, and has dashed off into the wilderness to tilt at windmills and rescue fair damsels. Also interested in the old man's welfare--but for entirely mercenary reasons--is an unsavory character named Dirty Dog (Robert Carricart). Like many another episode of Have Gun, Will Travel, this one is largely location-filmed at Lone Pine, California. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Henpecked husband Leonard Thompson (Martin Balsam) shows up at funeral parlor, where he orders an expensive casket and makes arrangements for an even more expensive funeral. When asked who the "dear departed" is, Leonard replies that the future occupant of the casket has not died just yet. However, the funeral will go on as scheduled the following day...and Leonard will definitely be in attendance. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide