This pilot for David Janssen's excellent and under-appreciated HARRY O series was surprisingly disappointing in light of the series that followed. The movie was enjoyable but not exceptional in an era where excellent detective dramas raised the bar high. Janssen's performance does elevate the otherwise standard-issue story and puts it over the top.
Andrea Marcovicci, strikingly beautiful, plays Jenny English, only daughter of an aging police officer and longtime friend of Harry O's. She's a dingbat model who we learn is, in David Brock's iconic phrasing, a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty. Jenny is estranged from her father and is desperately seeking a daddy-figure to love. She left her stable marriage to shack up with a sexagenarian retired military man, The Colonel, whose outward bearing belies the rot within (it's revealed he was once court martialed in Vietnam for massacring a village of men, women, and children, which does make the charge of dirty old adulterer pale by comparison).
The Colonel soon reaps the whirlwind he sowed. Despite the title, SMILE, JENNY, YOU'RE DEAD, Jenny isn't the target as much as every man the psychotic shutterbug Zalman King believes stands in his way to winning Jenny's heart. Charley English, Jenny's estranged husband whose confession of love is met with cruel callousness, is the first to fall.
Torn from the COLUMBO playbook was the scene where the detective shows up while the person of interest is working. I know such scenes allow the viewer to gain some insight into the character, but in real life it would be very vexing for all involved. Harry O shows up and lingers on the sidelines while Harvey Jason as a British fashion photographer snaps a seemingly endless series of photos while Jenny "vogues" for the camera. This scene drags on for an uncomfortably long time. Finally a break, and a switch to some funky music, and while hapless Harvey is reloading his camera Harry slips over and tells Jenny her estranged husband has been murdered. Of course she runs crying to her dressing room. I sympathized with Harvey when he asked an unapologetic Harry, Couldn't you have waited till we were finished? Jenny is relatively unruffled by the deaths, thinking only of herself as only children are prone to do, and while the body of her husband cools in the morgue she flirtatiously suggests Harry O is hitting on her! In an unseemly and surprising turn, perhaps owing to Harry's knowing of her penchant for older men, Harry allows himself to be wooed and teased. I wonder what Harry's old friend and Jenny's father would have thought if he walked in while Harry was in bed holding Jenny, even if it's later stated the night was purely platonic. I also wondered what Harry saw in Jenny that made him fall in love with her. Jenny was self-obsessed, vapid, disloyal, unforgiving, and immoral. Oh, yeah, she was strikingly beautiful, which in Harry's world outweighs a multitude of sins.
Perhaps to show Harry is a good guy despite his swingin' seventies amorality, there's the subplot of twelve-year-old Liberty, played with aplomb by a sassy Jodie Foster. Harry looks out for this homeless young urchin and helps gets her shoplifter Mom sprung from jail. Those few scenes underscored the movie's larger theme of fatherlessness and the perils that can befall wives and children when dads go MIA.
Jenny wholly lacks the street smarts of Liberty. Her gullibility defies belief when Zalman King approaches Jenny and says he's a photographer who has been secretly taking photos of her. She's not alarmed by this creepy stalker, but instead is flattered and admires his work. Psychosis will out, however, and it isn't long before Zalman King has Jenny perilously perched atop a skyscraper under construction. Dad and Harry O rush to the rescue, King takes the fall, weepy father and daughter reunion with a promise of reconciliation, and the oft-heard "it would never work" speech from Jenny as she "friend zones" a heartbroken Harry. Roll end credits.
May-December romances between middle-aged detectives and beautiful young women were a recurring theme on TV in early 1974. SMILE, JENNY, YOU'RE DEAD aired in February and in March the pilot movie for THE ROCKFORD FILES found James Garner and the lovely Lindsay Wagner in a similar entanglement.