A woman from Idaho, diagnosed terminally ill, comes to San Francisco to live the remaining months of her life. While there she seeks a second opinion and learns that she is not dying after all. Things should be rosy, only while under the impression that she was near death, she put out a death contract on herself. After hearing the doctor's good news she then goes to the police for help to stop the unknown killer from fulfilling his end of the bargain. Average cop yarn.
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helpless_dancer21 February 2000
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GRW-215 April 1999"The Face Of Fear" (1971) is a terrific Made-For-TV movie/thriller with good performances by all. A great suspenseful music score by Morton Stevens - (Hawaii Five-0), especially the music he wrote for the film's conclusion.
A Quinn Martin Production In Association With The CBS Television Network (1971) -
mark.waltz26 December 2021When police officer Jack Ward and rolls his eyes at Elizabeth Ashley telling him that she hired a hitman to kill herself, I wanted to give him a thumbs up because I totally agreed with his reaction. You see, Ashley thought she was dying of leukemia when she really had mononucleosis, and when her desire to die didn't happen as fast as she thought, she decided to have herself bumped off. The first scene of the film is her meeting with the doctor giving her a diagnosis of her real condition and explaining why mononucleosis is sometimes diagnosed as leukemia. Police officer Ricardo Montalban sees her running down the street in a panic, and chases her down where he convinces her to come into the station to tell her story.
I couldn't believe this wacky plotline at all. At least on the soap opera "The Doctors" when nutty Doreen Aldrich believed she was dying of leukemia (which also turned out to be mono), she had the artistic flair to decide to go out with a bang by having one last fling. Unfortunately that meant kidnapping her former sister-in-law so she could seduce her ex-husband's brother and hiring a Hitman to kill her alleged rival. At least in that story, Pamela Lincoln was fun to watch go nutty, but poor Elizabeth Ashley, one of the best stage and screen character actress there is gets to play a character who is short of brain cells in addition to the cells destroyed by the illness that is not quite fatal.
While definitely a good cop and a concerned citizen, Montalban isn't exactly The Brightest Bulb in the San Francisco Police Department either. He becomes her protector as he tries to find out who the hitman is. In the process, other people become targets, and the only thing that I can say I enjoyed about this was seeing some vintage San Francisco location footage. It's easy to feel sorry for professionals like Elizabeth Ashley, Ricardo Montalban, Jack Warden and Roy Poole, but there obviously wasn't a shortage of TV movie scripts in the early 70's. This certainly ranks as one of the worst.