Not just another cheap, throwaway ABC Movie of the Week, Joseph Sargent's The Man, written for the screen by Rod Serling and based on an Irving Wallace novel, this movie has the potential to be a very good political thriller. The performances are from journeyman to excellent, the dialogue, at times, crackles, and the story is a mixture of the catastrophic and the mundane (the death of the president and speaker of the house being the former and the pervasive racial dismissiveness directed toward James Earl Jones' president pro tempore-to-president is the latter).
Yet.
It's obvious ABC got a higher quality product than they wanted. The Movie of the Week series cranked out one piece of clichéd garbage after another during its 1969-1976 run, and the occasional brilliance (That Certain Summer, Katherine, Duel come to mind) would catch everyone by surprise.
What do you do with something good, when you're regularly paying for crap?
Sheesh, people might begin to expect quality.
So, ABC puts The Man into limited release. The movie looks like a TV flick because it's on a MOTW budget. Probably made $37.26 nationwide. That'll teach 'em to make something good!
But.
I'd put The Man in the box set of post-Twilight Zone Rod Serling work along with the white-knuckled Seven Days in May, the original Planet of the Apes, and some of the better episodes of The Night Gallery. Serling was a great writer, but the trouble with The Man is that it's so starved for time and funds, so shoestrung by lowest common denominatorism from the network, that the movie never gels.
That's catastrophic for the viewer and mundane for the world of networkthink.
Yet.
It's obvious ABC got a higher quality product than they wanted. The Movie of the Week series cranked out one piece of clichéd garbage after another during its 1969-1976 run, and the occasional brilliance (That Certain Summer, Katherine, Duel come to mind) would catch everyone by surprise.
What do you do with something good, when you're regularly paying for crap?
Sheesh, people might begin to expect quality.
So, ABC puts The Man into limited release. The movie looks like a TV flick because it's on a MOTW budget. Probably made $37.26 nationwide. That'll teach 'em to make something good!
But.
I'd put The Man in the box set of post-Twilight Zone Rod Serling work along with the white-knuckled Seven Days in May, the original Planet of the Apes, and some of the better episodes of The Night Gallery. Serling was a great writer, but the trouble with The Man is that it's so starved for time and funds, so shoestrung by lowest common denominatorism from the network, that the movie never gels.
That's catastrophic for the viewer and mundane for the world of networkthink.