Just "Visiting!"

It's no surprise to longtime readers here that one of my all-time movie actresses is Miss Lee Grant. Whether it's taking on Peter Falk in a very early Columbo or fighting for justice as a recent widow in In the Heat of the Night (1967), she can nearly always be counted on for unique expressions and 110% commitment to what she's doing, no matter the quality of the project. Our own favorites of hers are the fire-breathing harpy Karen Wallace in Airport '77 (1977) and the steely mother-substitute Ann Thorn in Damien: Omen II (1978.) Completing a trio is today's featured film, a Canadian thriller that was a pay-cable and video store staple in the mid-1980s, which has receded from view since then. Visiting Hours (1982) gives Grant every opportunity to flex those Method muscles within a relentlessly mean and often hare-brained movie. 

(Not) a nice place to visit and I wouldn't want to live there! Visiting Hours places Grant in a hilariously un-secure and sometimes inexplicably-deserted major hospital. 

Television news magazine host Grant kicks the movie off with an interview discussing a local woman facing murder charges. 

She takes on her guest with the position that the long-abused woman was justified in finally doing away with her longtime tormentor. (Busy, rather putty-faced Toronto actor Michael Reynolds is on the receiving end of her point of view. I recall him from 1973's The Neptune Factor, a Canadian semi-disaster movie.)

Watching the exchange on a nearby monitor is someone who is not exactly a fan of hers...! He has to squeeze a stress ball to keep from kicking in the television. 

An employee of the station, he has a bird's eye view of the action. 

Also watching the drama unfold is Grant's producer-boyfriend William Shatner.

Presiding over a daunting situation came easy to Shat as he'd done Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) not long before. 

The more pointed Grant becomes in her message, the more aggravated her secret viewer becomes... 

Pretty soon, the man (Michael Ironside) can hardly listen to any more. 

After the taping, it falls to Shatner to convey the news that the interview cannot be aired. He feels that she went too far in her viewpoint. 

"KHAAAN!"

She is more than disappointed and bows out of their dinner plans in disgust. 

Arriving home, she is disgusted that her live-in maid has neglected to properly clean up the place after what appears to have been a dinner party the night before. 

Heading upstairs to give the woman a piece of her mind, she instead finds both the sink and the shower running... but the maid nowhere in sight. 

Then, without warning, the deranged Ironside, bejeweled and made up, springs out to attack Grant!

Wielding a large knife, he slashes at her violently as she tries to get away from him. 

After taking time to remove the baubles and put on his shirt, we see (and ludicrously hear) a teeny, tiny bell around his neck. This bell makes a sound on the movie's track that bears no relation to how it would have sounded in real life (if it would even register any sound!)

An injured Grant makes her way to a dumbwaiter and begins to lower herself to the ground floor where she can make an escape.

Unfortunately, he's on to her and begins to pull her back upstairs! 

Regardless of the low-level budget and caliber of the people involved in this movie, I felt that it often demonstrated creative camerawork and directorial setups, as seen here. Folks who saw this back in the day sure recall this sequence. 

Grant, weakened by the attack, nevertheless tries to resist being pulled back up into his clutches. But he soon has another plan and begins cutting the rope to the device!

With this, she's sent careening to the first level and is hurled out onto the floor. She manages to escape being further hacked up by the unstable intruder. 

We next see her being treated at County General Hospital for her injuries. 

Ironside heads home to the rooming house he rents from a dithering former movie bit actress.

Inside his apartment, we see that he is a highly-opinionated, vociferous letter-writer who's framed some of his most prominent works. 

For fun, he also has a variety of photos taken of victims he's knocked around violently (and likely killed!) 

Back at the hospital, we meet ultra-dedicated nurse, Linda Purl. 

Grant is weak and dejected following her ordeal... 

...but Purl is a devoted fan and attendant, despite this shot looking like a funeral visitation!

The stalwart Purl is straight-shooting compared to some of her coworkers, like this brunette who keeps sleeping with most of the men on staff and rating them in her little black book! Both gals for some reason are relentlessly chewing gum throughout their interaction here. 

Shatner shows up with some flowers, relieved to know that his gal pal has managed to survive the knife-wielding assailant. 

Grant, however, hasn't forgotten that the man is not in custody and is, in fact, still out there!

In truth, he isn't even "out there." He's posed as a floral delivery man and has come up to Grant's floor to finish her off. But he's forced to duck into a different room when in danger of being spotted. 

He's about to leave when he overhears Purl on the phone deriding the scum who tried to carve Grant up. This gets him riled up and he goes to Grant's room to do her in. 

We watch as he skulks into the room and disables a treatment machine. 

Only, surprise! It's not Grant! (And, no, it isn't Patricia Neal either!) Without his being aware of it, Grant's been shifted to another room so that this woman can use the equipment held there. 

When the gum-chewing nurse enters to see what's up, she is greeted with Ironside's much-used knife. 

Meanwhile, Purl checks in on Grant in her new digs to see if she's all right. Noticing that the call button for the other room is still lit up, she proceeds down the hall...

...and is horrified to find a bloody mess in Grant's old room!

Very shaken, Purl rather foolishly declines an escort home. 

Surprisingly, as she's just discovered two murder victims, she plods around the very dark yard at her house, collecting toys left scattered by the two youngest of her three children. One doll has an annoying, bleating cry that can only be stopped by plugging a pacifier into its mouth.

Though still uneasy, she checks on her kids before retiring for the night. (Lower left is a doll... not her son! LOL) 

At an all-night diner, we meet Lenore Zann as a, well, gal of easy virtue. 

For reasons known only to her, she is attracted to the oily Ironside. (For his part, he's just shooed away an attentive waitress who was hoping to take in a movie sometime. Really??) 

Off Zann and Ironside go to his place. 

Soon enough, she finds that his idea of fun is splashing beer between her legs, then ordering her to take off her skin-tight pants (which could take some doing!) 

Before long, things turn ugly. 

I can recall being mortified during this shot when I first saw this movie at age 15. 

Grant holds a press conference in which her stance on non-violence is called into question. 

Apparently not one to miss an appearance of hers, her old pal Ironside is tuned in, this time at a nursing home where his aged, half-senile father resides.

We learn through flashbacks that Dad was a real jerk in his day and one of his "playful" hobbies was going after young Ironside with a bottle of beer and splashing him with it...!

On the road to recovery, Grant is grateful tot he always attentive Purl. 

She heads down the hallway in her wheelchair to gift the woman in her "old" room some of the flowers that she's received. One of the nurses tries to dissuade her to no avail. When she gets there, she's startled to see a different patient inside. 

A different patient, Mr. Blabbermouth, can't resist informing her that the woman in Grant's old room was murdered, along with a nurse! 

Grant is enraged that no one told her this. (How she could NOT know that a murder happened on the floor is a tad ridiculous as there would have been all sorts of hubbub, policemen, etc...)

She even lays into Purl before being sedated for a scheduled surgery, very much against her will at this point. 

As the very groggy Grant is being transported to the OR, she can't escape the feeling that. Ironside is around. She hears his bell necklace! And he is on site, "disguised" as an orderly.

Even in the operating room, she can't stop sensing that Ironside is there!

Ironside isn't able to get her this time either. He flashes back more to the time when he was a young boy and his father repeatedly tormented his mother. 

Awakening from her procedure, Grant is in pain, but relieved that Ironside didn't slink in and finish the job on her. Shatener hysterically slurps hospital pudding while she's writhing in agony. 

When she finally gave the pudding some stinkface, I couldn't decide if Grant's character had had it with Shatner's character for gobbling the pudding that way or if actress Grant had had it with actor Shat's scene-stealing use of the prop or a little of both! Ha ha! 

Here, we see Miss Florence Nightingale herself is not only a tirelessly devoted nurse and single mother of three, but also volunteers at a clinic on her off days. One of her patients there is none other than Zann, who has lived to tell of her nightmare with the brutish Ironside!

Grant is again making progress, but Ironside seems to be as well...! He's back in the hospital after her, dressed as an orderly. 

She's still hearing the bell...!

Being relentlessly thwarted in in his pursuit of Grant, Ironside devolves into a sweaty mess down in the hospital laundry room. No one seems to be around to work on the piles of nasty linens that are everywhere around him! His next "foolproof disguise" is that of a surgical doctor.

Grant is still in a state of panic and no one seems to get it. Shatner takes her over to a window (I presume you could still open a hospital window in 1982?!) for a breath of fresh air. 

Meanwhile, Mr. Stress Ball is on site, wreaking more havoc. He can't get directly into Grant's room, so he enters the adjoining one, which shares a bathroom. 

For the first time since his initial attack, he and Grant come face to face. But once more he is unable to get her thanks to a sudden influx of help who've heard a disturbance. 

When he gets back to his apartment that night, he discovers that it's been "redecorated" heavily.

And not in a good way... 

By now, Grant has totally HAD IT and wants to leave immediately, but Shatner continues to ensure her safety, offering to stay with her all night long and then quietly slip her out in the morning. 

Things take a turn for Purl when Zann shows up, informing her that when she and her buds trashed Ironside's apartment, they found photos of Purl inside!

Just then, Purl receives a phone call and on the other end... is that crying baby doll!!

A frantic Purl tries to get the police to help her, but is so panicked and desperate, she leaves in a hurry. 

She's told Zann to take the pictures to Shatner, but she gets the runaround for quite a period of time before she's allowed to proceed. 

The harried Purl races home, desperate to see if her children are in any harm. 

There's no question that something is wrong when she spots a dismembered doll on the sofa! 

And again out of nowhere comes Ironside, who stabs Purl in the gut for speaking ill of him and interfering in his quest to vanquish Grant. 

Now the unhinged Ironside is truly tired of playing. He wants to destroy Grant at any cost and decides to injure himself in order to get inside the hospital (which is now on lockdown) one last time. Anyone who saw this film in the early-'80s will recall this memorable sequence as well. 

Following Zann's presentation of the pics, Shatner and the police descend on Ironside's apartment, where they discover a death mask he'd been assembling. 

Unbeknownst to Shatner, the man their after is now a hospital patient! 

He wastes no time in disabling the equipment of some patients in order to draw the nurses' attention away from Grant. 

Having dispatched with her security guard, he now finally has ahold of her, but the resourceful Grant manages to get away once again!

Suddenly, there is no one to be found (!) as she races as fast as she can to escape his deadly clutches. 

He pursues her deep into the bowels of the building as she clambers around in a state of near helplessness. 

Finally, Grant has an epiphany and decides that she isn't going to run any longer. She determines that she has to stand up for herself against this relentless loon. Needless to say, in the interest of not spoiling every twist, turn and event, I've avoided certain details. This movie is available for viewing in a beautiful print right here.  

You can read more about Lee Grant right here in her tribute. For career context at the time of Visiting Hours, the Oscar-winning actress had recently appeared in a couple of box office disappointments such as Little Miss Marker (1980) and Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen (1981) along with the eye-popping TV-movie For Ladies Only (1981) with Gregory Harrison shaking his ass as a stripper. Though she had a few more successful projects ahead of her such as Will There Really Be a Morning? (1983) and The Hijacking of the Achille Lauro (1989), she would soon turn her attention more deeply to directing. The divine Miss Grant has always been cagey about her age, which is currently between 97 and 99! 

Mr. Shatner, a Canadian-born actor, eventually moved to New York City where he found success on Broadway in The World of Suzie Wong. He did a lot of television while also landing roles in movies such as The Brothers Karamazov (1958) and Judgement at Nuremberg (1961) before ending up as the lead in the groundbreaking sci-fi series Star Trek. Needless to say, the staggeringly devoted fan base of that three-year series ultimately led to a string of movie adaptations that cemented him forever as Captain James T. Kirk. Always busy, even in lean times, he was never content to only be that character and, apart from another hit show, T.J. Hooker, he worked and worked his craft until finally finding critical success (and Emmys) for The Practice and Boston Legal. Because the first Star Trek movie was only a middling success, he'd floundered a bit until the second, far better received one came out in 1982. He's still with us today at 94!
 

Canadian actor Ironside began his career busily playing a variety of roles until he landed the part of an evil telekinetic in David Cronenberg's Scanners (1981.) Scanners was produced by a man who also co-produced Visiting Hours, which gave him a leg up in the competition. Amazingly, the role of the psychopath was going to be offered to Shatner (!) but they just wanted to see one more auditionee first -- Ironside. He broke his ankle early in production and has a visible limp throughout much of the film. He went on to countless roles in movies like Top Gun (1986), Extreme Prejudice (1987), Total Recall (1990) and Starship Troopers (1997), as well as plenty of TV including V: The Final Battle and, briefly, the troubled SeaQuest DSV. His voice has been heard on many video games and animated programs as well. He is currently 75. 

 

Purl was born in Connecticut, but spent a decade of her childhood in Japan thanks to her father's occupation at Nippon Unicar, a chemical manufacturer. Returning to the US around 1970, she ultimately wound up on the soap The Secret Storm as well as working opposite Robby Benson in Jory (1973.) Then came TV work like Beacon Hill, The Young Pioneers, two different stints on Happy Days and a role as one of Cloris Leachman's daughters in Crazy Mama (1975.) There was a one-year marriage to Desi Arnaz Jr (followed by three more marriages and divorces) and an eventual return to daytime TV on Port Charles, General Hospital and The Bold and the Beautiful. Currently 69, she's been in a relationship with Patrick Duffy since 2020 and the two of them make personal appearances together (as seen below on a recent trip to Cincinnati - I didn't attend, like a dummy! A friend took this picture) promoting Duffy's Dough, a bread enterprise whose profits go to hunger relief. 

Visiting Hours are now over!