James Keach Movies

While still grieving over the murder of her son, Joanna Portman (Kim Hunter) is visited by a young girl (Gretchen Corbett) claiming to her daughter Gail--who for several years has been presumed dead. Though Joanna is delighted by the girl's arrival, Ironside suspects that Gail's sudden reappearance is too good to be true. Sure enough, it turns out that there are sinister forces who are trying to kill off Joanna's entire family...and that the girl calling herself Gail may be at the center of the carnage! ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Its title inspired by the famous Robert Frost poem "Stopping By a Woods on a Snowy Evening," Miles to Go Before I Sleep stars Martin Balsam and MacKenzie Phillips. Balsam plays a lonely senior citizen, seeking a means of keeping busy in a world that has shut him out. He takes a part-time job at a youth rehabilitation center, where he meets incorrigible delinquent Phillips. Tentatively reaching out to one another, the two lost souls both find a reason for living. Miles to Go Before I Sleep was first telecast as a 90-minute GE Theater special on January 8, 1975. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

The long-standing blood feud between the Hatfield family of West Virginia and the McCoy clan of Kentucky is effectively dramatized in this made-for-TV movie. Jack Palance and Steve Forrest star as the family's respective patriarches, Devil Anse Hatfield and Randall McCoy. Remaining faithful to the facts (more so than the 1949 Sam Goldwyn production Roseanne McCoy), the film charts the fluctuating relationship between the two warring factions -- sometimes they actually made overtures of peace, which of course didn't last too long -- as well as the star-crossed romance between Devil Anse's daughter Rose Ann (Karen Lamm) and Randall's son Johnse (Richard Hatch). Featured in the cast are Palance's former wife Virginia Baker as Devil Anse's present wife Levicy and his daughter Brooke as Mary Hatfield. The Hatfields and the McCoys first aired January 15, 1975. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

The action in Death Play takes place during the opening night of a Broadway show. Interestingly enough, the cast is comprised of New York stage performers, including James Keach (Stacy's brother), former Hester Street star Stephen Strimpell, and future Benson co-star James Noble. The notion of a murder taking place while a show is going on is not new, though the depiction of the mystery killer demonstrates a bit of creativity, especially on the sound track. Death Play wasn't widely distriubed in 1976, so tracking down a copy may be difficult. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Directed by Stacy Keach, this 1976 made-for-television movie features a performance of Nobel Prize-winner Luigi Pirandello's fantastical drama Six Characters in Search of an Author. Starring Andy Griffith, the play takes place on the set of a made-for-television adaptation of Pirandello's The Rules of the Game and finds the cast and crew questioning their reality when six strangers magically appear. Also starring John Houseman, Julie Adams, Beverly Todd, and James Keach, the program was released as part of Kultur's Broadway Theatre Archive series. ~ Matthew Tobey, All Movie Guide

Old man Ewing (Jason Robards) owns a ranch right next to the ranch of Ella (Jane Fonda). This is a source of two problems: Ewing wants to gobble up most of the land around the two ranches and also wants Ella's ranch; secondly, when Ella was too young to know better, she went to bed with the man, which, many years later, she considers to have been a grievous error on her part. A third problem arises when oil companies begin pressuring both of them to allow drilling on their land, and Ewing won't allow it -- on his or anyone else's land. Before long, war-veteran Frank (James Caan) enters Ella's life and helps her fight to save her land and her sanity, with added assistance from Dodger (Richard Farnsworth), an old local who knows the score. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

In this suspenseful drama, an angry husband hatches an ingenious plot to get his avaricious wife and the pesky detective she has hired out of his life. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

This film showed up on TV as Forbidden Paradise, but you can't fool us. It's really The Hurricane, producer Dino De Laurentiis' ill-advised remake of the 1938 Sam Goldwyn production of the same name. The story of the casual cruelties imposed by the white ruling class on the natives of the isle of Manakoora had the advantage of timeliness in 1938; forty-one years later, the story plays like a Gilligan's Island amateur production of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Playing the old Jon Hall role of the native lad whose rambunctiousness incurs the wrath of the provincial governor, the uniquely ungifted Daton Kane makes Hall look like Sir John Gielgud. Even the expensive hurricane finale (which ate up most of the film's $22 million budget) isn't one-tenth as exciting as the corresponding sequence in the earlier film. The saddest aspect of the 1979 The Hurricane is that it was directed by Jan Troell, who showed flashes of brilliance in his earlier The Emigrants and Zandy's Bride; perhaps significantly, Troell hightailed it back to Sweden after wrapping up his obligation to Dino De Laurentiis. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

After football player Joe Ramsey (Lee Paul) dies of a brain aneuryism, Quincy (Jack Klugman) performs an autopsy and finds that the man was suffering from a drug-resistent strain of gonnorhea. In his efforts to trace the source of the disease, Quincy orders a round-up of the city's prostitutes--and when one of the hookers turns up murdered, it seems that the feisty medical examiner has stumbled onto a widespread conspiracy and coverup. This episode can be regarded as a seminal example of the "AIDS dramas" which proliferated on television during the next two decades (though of course AIDS had not yet been identified as an international epidemic). ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

The hook in Walter Hill's mythic retelling of the James-Younger outlaw legend is in the casting; the James, Younger, Miller, and Ford Brothers are played by a string of acting brothers, the Keachs, the Carradines, the Quaids and the Guests. The film begins as outlaws are robbing a bank. After the robbery, Ed Miller (Dennis Quaid) finds himself kicked out of the gang for needlessly killing a man during the robbery. Jesse James (James Keach) hands over Ed's share of the money and tells him to leave, a feeling held mutually by Ed's brother Clell (Randy Quaid). After the killing the gang decides to split up for awhile. The James boys return to their wives and farms, while Cole Younger (David Carradine) travels to Texas with his prostitute girlfriend Belle Starr (Pamela Reed). After the brief respite, the gang reunites to rob a well-stocked bank in Northfield, Minnesota. The robbery turns out disastrously, with most of the gang either wounded or dying. The James boys are the only ones not seriously hurt, and they leave the rest of the gang behind, escaping while they can. After the James boys leave, the remnants of the gang are captured. But trailing the Jameses is a relentless posse. Frank and Jesse manage to keep one step ahead until the Ford brothers (Christopher Guest and Nicholas Guest) make a deal with the Pinkerton detectives trailing the outlaws. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide

In this drama, an attorney tries to prove that his incarcerated client is indeed innocent of murder. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide