TV Movie Time Tunnel: ...better with Shelley Hack!

1979 was the year when the familiar face of a perfume model suddenly became a household name. True, Shelley Hack had popped up briefly in Annie Hall (1977), had done a bit of episodic TV (Married: The First Year) and even costarred in a perfectly awful feature called If Ever I See You Again (1978), but it was 1979 when things went "viral" (we didn't have that term then.) 

Television viewers and magazine readers had seen her face splashed before their eyes in a series of ads for Charlie perfume. "There's a fragrance that's here to stay and they call it - Char-lie!" So it was more than fitting when Hack was selected to replace a departing Kate Jackson in the hit series Charlie's Angels.

Intended to bring a bit of eastern class and smarts to the west coast "jiggle" show, it wound up an imperfect fit with the casting decision lasting but one year. The same fall that saw Hack appearing as the newest Angel also brought today's TV-Movie to the small screen. 

If the title of this post has left you perplexed, I give you its source. An episode of The Golden Girls, in which Betty White's Rose is making a home video project of the ladies' lives, provided the hysterical remark. Rose is going on and on about how it would be better with this or better with that when Bea Arthur's Dorothy has had it and exclaims, "It would be better with Shelley Hack! Just turn it on!" 

Somehow I had only heard of, but never seen, this instant camp classic -- Death Car on the Freeway -- which debuted on CBS September 25th, 1979.

Hack is given sole, top billing with everyone else noted as being "Cameo Stars." If you think I'm letting you see the names of these people first, you're crazy. Ha ha! I have to build a smidge of suspense.

The first six or eight minutes of the movie belong to someone who wasn't even listed in the opening credits because she wasn't yet a name in her own right just yet! A young lady stops for gas (check out that $0.63/gallon in L.A.!) and chats up the attendant.

It's Miss Morgan Brittany!! (You just know this came up in my algorithm because of my recent post about Glitter.) She plays an actress on her way to "do a Barnaby Jones" but needs $1.50 worth of gas to get her to Van Nuys!  

Unfortunately, she ain't gonna get to Van Nuys this time. As she's driving to her destination, she attracts the attention of a dark van with a tinted windshield.

It's mysterious inhabitant dons heavy gloves then puts in an 8-track tape (!) of crazed fiddle music. 

Then he proceeds to outpace and crash into Brittany's compact car, scaring the bejesus out of her. 

In fact, he'd love to kill her! Before it's said and done, he's come pretty close. Somehow her ride winds up teetering on the edge of an overpass! 

Later, having missed her 8 o'clock call for Barnaby Jones, she feverishly describes her ordeal to TV reporter Alfie Wise. 

Back at the newsroom, Wise and his associates take a look at the footage.

Said associates include...

A scoffing Frank Gorshin, producer, is more interested in whether she's single than if she was nearly murdered...!

News anchor Barbara Rush is just as skeptical, claiming that the girl got more mileage out of this TV interview than any previous acting work. 

Reporter Shelley Hack is a bit more dogged about it all. She places a call to her estranged husband, who happens to be a big name reporter at a rival (and higher-rated) news program. 

She has a recollection of an old interview of his in which he spoke with a psychiatrist who profiled the modern woman and how access to automobiles has increased her mobility and activity. 

We meet the husband from the feet up as he's being fitted with a new three-piece suit. The tailor is adjusting the hem while we can see that the man "dresses left!" 

Hack's smarmy, shallow husband is played by none other than George Hamilton.  

He delivers the tape in person as he is keen on getting back with his wife (eight years his junior, in case you were curious.)

Hamilton isn't happy after a three-month separation and tries to win Hack back with lines like, "The snapper's fresh at Antoine's."

She's not 100% averse to the idea, but at the moment she has other fish to fry...

...and it's southern-fried, child. Miss Dinah Shore is featured in an old news interview with Hamilton, relaying the petrifying experience she had on the freeway with a deranged driver. (This was prior to our highways today, where every fifth driver treats our roads like his personal video game and where road rage results in shootings every so often!) She delivers all her dialogue in this heavy "suthin" dialect, the one show business attempted to rid her of back in the early years. 

Smelling a potentially explosive story, Hack tracks Shore down at the tennis court and tries to press her to recall more details of her ordeal, such as what the van looked like. 

Enter police detective Peter Graves. (This was just before Graves filmed his infamously hilarious role in Airplane!, 1980, revealing untapped - and somewhat unintentional? - comic ability.) 

Like many others, he is skeptical of the idea that a serial vehicular aggressor is on the loose and he debates the notion with Hack down at the TV station.

Meanwhile, a hospital patient is being seen to by a pretty nurse. 

The patient is played by Barney Miller's Abe Vigoda in a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment. These two shots of him are back-to-back, providing a continuity error. In the initial shot, he's reclined against a pillow. One nanosecond later he's upright! I guess Mr. V. didn't want his entire appearance in the movie to be supine...

His attentive nurse is played by Tara Buckman. (In real life she really DID do a Barnaby Jones! LOL)

Soon after this, she's changed into some slinky '70s duds and has redone her hair and makeup. In a hurry to reach her destination, she soon attracts the attention of our favorite van (the color of which keeps changing after every couple of attacks.) 

The results ain't pretty. 

Somehow she lives through that conflagration, but just barely. 

Her husband is played by an unbilled Christopher Allport, who'd been on Another World and done many other gigs (including a Barnaby Jones!) He would later appear as the dreaded Jesse on the eighth season of Dynasty. 

The gravely injured woman agrees to speak with Hack, who's trying to connect these accidents to each other. 

Hack listens as Buckman describes loud fiddle music blaring as the assailant tried to knock her off. 

After a date with her husband Hamilton, Hack gets a call. 

It's Shore, who apparently lives directly ON a tennis court. Ha ha! She confirms that the time someone tried to do her in, there was indeed bluegrass fiddle music screeching.

Back at the studio, Rush is delivering some of the top stories (with body language I've never witnessed a news anchor use in my lifetime...! She looks like she's pleading for a kidnapper to return her husband.)

Meanwhile, Gorshin is informing Hack that she may be onto something with her investigative story on the Freeway Fiddler.

But before she can revel in her delight too long, Wise has them turn on the TV to Hamilton's station, where a rival newscaster is breaking the story on the air!

While still in Stepford-like shock, she received a phone call...

...it's Hamilton, having his makeup applied, offering a flimsy apology about how Graves got ahold of someone at his station and managed to scoop her. He basically tells her that this is the breaks. All she can do is just hang up on him.

Still intrepid, she soon licks her wounds and continues to pursue the story. She interviews the female psychiatrist that Hamilton had spoken to long before and the doctor paints a mental portrait of the person they're looking for, who has by now killed a number of women drivers. 

Directly describing the killer's mind and basically making it clear that she is on the case, she creates the potential for a target on her own back. 

She heads here to make sure she's up to snuff on how to evade a music-loving, glove-clad psychopath who's hell bent of running women off the road or into a median!

Her driving instructor is an interesting one. It's the movie's director (!) Hal Needham. Needham was a longtime movie stuntman who segued into movie directing, most notably with Smokey and the Bandit (1977) and The Cannonball Run (1981.)  

Hack finds the whole prospect of defensive driving rather exhilarating. 

But the bodies are still piling up...! Needham's participation on this film ensures that the many car stunts are handled quite well and are at times eye-popping. 

Hack and Graves still can't quite see eye-to-eye as this crime wave continues. The reporter shown in the middle here (Jack Collins, who played the mayor in The Towering Inferno, 1974, encourages her to "go easy" with Graves as she may someday need his help.)

Hack is relaxing at home in her apartment one night (in an oversized T-shirt - the de rigueur nightwear of that time if a football jersey wasn't available) when there's a sudden knock at the door. 

Thankfully it turns out to be merely Hamilton, with some flowers. He wants to congratulate her on her news show moving ahead of his own in the ratings.  

At the station, Rush is agonizing over a particular misspelled word in her news-script. (It's "reprehensible.")  

She's about to go on a two-week vacation and, having realized that the younger Hack is in line to cover for her, exclaims that she's going to head to a spa to find the fountain of youth!

It's no cake walk for Hack, in any case. Thanks to her stories, some auto manufacturers are threatening suits because they feel she's somehow blaming them for the havoc on the roads. Also, because she's become the face of the story, there is personal risk.

Because she won't relent on the angle of her broadcasts, she's ultimately fired from the station. (As an aside, take a close look at Hack's smile. Think about the way today's celebrities generally must have a row of gleaming white, super-straight teeth and then look at hers! She was a TOP model for Revlon. That's how much things have changed.)

Now unemployed, she remains in the thick of the investigation into the Freeway Fiddler. She gets a call from the leader of a biker gang who asks her to drop in for a meeting. 

The imposing gentlemen (including cult actor Sid Haig) don't want to be blamed for the actions of the lunatic in the van, so they give her a lead on a suspect.

She now has to navigate through some rough neighborhoods as she attempts to locate the man they think might be behind the killings. 

Surely these are actual bikers and not actors as they look way too authentic to be performers playing dress-up. 

She wends her way through the junky surroundings, looking for this outsider who was known to play rowdy bluegrass music while he worked on his van. 

She comes upon a landlady who's tending some potted plants outside. 

The lady is played by none other than Harriet Nelson of The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet! She's blind, but listens to Hack and allows her to go into the recently vacated apartment of the mystery man. 

I think we're on to something here...

Finally Graves can offer a bit of appreciation to Hack for the work she's done on the case. 

But they still don't have their man! And he's gunning for her. 

It may be curtains for this Hack journalist...

There are a couple of ways to watch this, should you be so inclined. My caps came from an uninterrupted YT upload here. 

But the first time I watched, it was this version, which is the initial 1979 airing, complete with all the wondrously nostalgic ads and promos - quite a relief from today's plethora of prescription drug and car insurance annoyances! 

I had no memory, ZERO, of Doritos ever coming in a sour cream & onion variety! ('Course I also wouldn't have eaten them then - or probably now either.) 

I couldn't help but be fascinated by the participation of Miss Shore in this. Principally because the director was Burt Reynolds' close friend and associate and Reynolds had been her highly publicized boyfriend for a time. But I guess when the dust settled, everyone was friends. 

I will leave you with this hysterical video cassette cover. No stars in the artwork, just a woman spread-eagle on the tarmac next to a blazing automobile! Who comes up with this shit?! LOL Till next time, my loves.