BLOGTOBER 10/2/2024: THE STRANGER WITHIN (1974)
I wish I had made this the first movie of the season, because it was an ABC Movie of the Week from October 1, 1974! I really enjoyed this weird thriller about how Barbara Eden gets pregnant despite her husband George Grizzard's vasectomy, and her increasingly bizarre behavior suggests that something more than infidelity is afoot. Screenwriter Richard Matheson adapted his own 1953 novelette Trespass, and I have learned that a novelette is longer than a short story and shorter than a novella. I did not know this.
Roe v. Wade was codified the year before THE STRANGER WITHIN came out, and the film is full of casual but surprisingly frank remarks why a person might need an abortion. Barbara Eden had a traumatic miscarriage not long ago, which motivated George Grizzard's vasectomy, and his suspicions about her mysterious new pregnancy are threatening the integrity of the marriage, and then she starts getting sort of sick or something--so it's clear that a person might be reasonably entitled to end a pregnancy based on various quality of life issues for the child and the mother. I wonder if it was a big deal for Barbara Eden to choose to do this movie where she and her costar regularly and openly discuss abortion with no moral quibbling. I wonder also if it was a big deal for ABC to show it, at the dawn of legal abortion.
Anyway, soon the couple has bigger problems than family planning, because Barbara Eden becomes hypersensitive to sound, and she needs the house to be ice cold, and she makes weird paintings, and she eats pounds and pounds of salt with scalding black coffee, and she craves information which she absorbs through her hands, rubbing and touching and feeling everything in the library. The couple gets Bob the hypnotist (David Doyle) involved, and it seems like hypnotism is a really great job if you are a gigantic busybody who immediately asks and won't stop asking probing personal questions, even if people beg you to stop. Anyway, Bob has one of the best lines of dialog I've heard all year: "Why do people always assume that anything from outer space is horrible?"
THE STRANGER WITHIN is not a perfect film; it's an obvious ROSEMARY'S BABY knockoff with a little EXORCIST sprinkled in, and for a movie that is only 75 minutes long it has a few too many long scenes of Barbara Eden wandering aimlessly in nature as she communes with whatever knocked her up. But it's intriguing and entertaining, and it seems like everyone enjoyed making it, especially cinematographer Michael D. Margulies whose pedigree includes John Cassavetes' MINNIE AND MOSKOWITZ, POLICE ACADEMY, DIRTY MARY CRAZY LARRY, and of course, THE BABY. Night scenes are illuminated by dramatic pools of light and splashes of saturated color, which heightens the drama even of exposition and repetitive bickering; it's just a fun movie overall. Recommended for viewers who assume that anything from outer space is horrible.
