The People

This TV movie opens with quiet menace as a teacher is dropped off at an isolated spot expecting to have somebody waiting for her. A woman appears from nowhere and tells the teacher that the strange acoustics of the area are deadened somehow by the mountains which accounts for her silent approach. Miss Amerson (Kim Darby) is running away from a relationship and taking on a teaching job far away even though she has been warned the community she is running to is weirdly isolationist. She tries to get the local children to express themselves freely but the children are quelled by the daughter of the head of the community. Even though the tight-lipped residents of the commune may seem to be under Puritanical law Miss Amerson learns that this not carried out on religious grounds. The lovely little white church of Nicasio California is the setting of the school of the film's fictional place-name of Bendo. William Shatner appears as Dr Curtis who is flummoxed by how immune to disease the Bendo people are. This mystery turns to sci-fi when Miss Amerson learns why the strange community needs to isolate themselves. She feels more of an outsider than she has ever done but she gain's the community's trust when a child needs help. This movie only has a running time of 74 minutes so the story is told rather deftly without much room for character examination which is OK with me. In fact little is seen of William Shatner's character so it's mainly up to Kim Darby's Miss Amerson and two other female characters to keep the story rolling along.