Smile Jenny, You’re Dead (1974)

Director: Jerry Thorpe
Writer: Howard Rodman
Stars: David Janssen, John Anderson, Howard da Silva, Martin Gabel, Clu Gulager, Zalman King, Tim McIntire, Andrea Marcovicci and Jodie Foster

Index: The First Thirty.

Other than her minuscule part in Kansas City Bomber, Jodie Foster’s first non-children’s film was this second TV movie about Harry Orwell, a cop who became a private investigator after he was shot in the back and forcibly retired.

He’d debuted in 1973 in Such Dust as Dreams are Made On, another TV movie, and those two pilots presaged a show, Harry O, which ran for two seasons on ABC from 1974 to 1976.

Harry O was played by David Janssen, so he’s technically the only star here. Everybody else listed above is a guest star, except for Foster, a mere co-star. And, sure she was twelve, but it’s another rather unfair credit, because she’s the main character in the secondary story and she actually gets the film underway.

The guests are listed alphabetically, or they would be unfair too, because the equivalents to Foster in the primary story are Zalman King and Andrea Marcovicci. Some of the others get very little screen time on account of not living particularly long, or just being minor support. None were rehired for the Harry O show.

At this point, Harry lives in a beach house in Santa Monica, but apparently that changed on the show. While the pilots were both shot in Los Angeles, the show moved to San Diego, but moved out after thirteen episodes, returning to L.A. for episode fifteen with an entirely new supporting cast and even a new theme tune.

On the sand in front of this beach house is a boat and Harry is surprised to find a homeless girl on its deck when he gets up one morning. She’s Liberty Cole and she cheekily claims that she has amnesia to avoid answering questions.

Foster immediately seems a lot more grown up than in her prior five movies, even though she wasn’t, at least not by much. It’s all in her acting, which is far more substantial from her first movements and words than anything she had done earlier. Liberty, and Foster, have real confidence here and seem much older. Well, at least until a moment it isn’t needed any more and she becomes a twelve year old child again. That switch is utterly effortless.

Liberty leaves that morning, but Harry finds her asleep in a public phonebooth and brings her back to feed her, give her somewhere safe to sleep and get answers from her. Apparently she’s homeless because her mother was jailed for theft and she wants to stay in the area so that her mum can find her when she gets out.

There’s no mystery to this secondary story, but what Harry does to help serves to build his character on top of giving Foster opportunity. She lives up to it too, with her first substantial part. She had more screen time in Napoleon and Samantha, but this plot strand is all about her. Liberty has inherent value as a character, not just in relation to someone else. It’s a first real look at a future career and it’s a good one.

There’s not a lot of mystery to the primary story either, because we first see Roy less than a minute after we first see Jennifer. The latter is a model who’s left her husband and is living with a much older man known as the Colonel. The former is a photographer who looks like a mad orchestra conductor in a wig. He snaps a lot of pictures of her without her knowledge, develops them and fills his apartment walls.

You know, a stalker. However, that wasn’t a word used for this until a 1995 research paper. In 1974, it was called “female harrassment”, “obsessive following” or “psychological rape”. I mention that because, with Roy’s identity out there almost from the outset—his photos back the opening credits—the impact is most seen a lot later when Jennifer realises Roy, who stole her keys, has been in her apartment.

She’s shrugged off rather a lot by that point, but this hits her hard. It’s a violation, she tells Harry, and she treats it like one, pulling off all her bedding to sob on her bare mattress, as at least he hasn’t touched that. By the end, she’s changed her locks five times in five days. I felt that deeper than the actual murders.

The actress is Andrea Marcovicci, who I may only have seen guesting on TV episodes and in genre movies, such as The Hand, The Stuff and Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone, an unrepresentative sampling of her work. She’s good here, believable as a model and, after she realises how serious her situation has become, believable as a victim too.

Her nemesis here is Roy St. John, played by Zalman King, who was still known as an actor at this point and impeccable at this creepiness level. He played good creepy psychopaths but ended up directing mainstream erotic movies, like Two Moon Junction, the Wild Orchid duology and Red Shoe Diaries, which became a TV show.

The reason Harry’s brought into her story is because he maintains contacts on the force as a useful tool for a PI but also because he cares about them. One is Jennifer’s estranged father, so he brings her the news of the first death, of her husband who won’t give her a divorce.

My better half used to watch Harry O, but I hadn’t seen him before. What struck me was how passive it all is. Harry is never hired for anything. Liberty shows up in his life so he does what he can for her and her mother, just because he’s a good man. While Jennifer’s dad does try to hire him, he refuses the money and does the job just because he’s a good man.

This passivity extends to the characters who lead the stories. Jennifer is shocked, horrified and traumatised by what happens around her, but she’s not directly threatened or placed in actual danger until the finalé. Most stalkers in movies get much more personal much sooner. Also, Liberty is only ever waiting, though it’s a lot more dangerous than that for a twelve year old girl to be homeless in Santa Monica. Even Roy gets a surprisingly passive ending.

What matters here instead of action and, to a large degree, suspense, is character. We find out a lot about what makes Harry O tick in this TV movie; he’s never underwhelming even as an old man with health issues. We also learn a lot about Jennifer and Liberty and even Roy.

Given that it’s all about character, it’s odd to consider that it’s a film about one creepy dude but Jennifer sets up two others to look they’re creepy too. Marcovicci was twenty-six and she looked it. Janssen was forty-three, so only just counts as non-creepy, but he looked a decade older, which would be. John Anderson, as the Colonel, was fifty-two, so double her age. The formula says it’s OK to date someone half your age plus seven years. That’s not half your age.

I guess that was 1974. Much has changed.