The Screaming Woman

Is the aged rich woman crazy or not?

The owner of a large estate near Santa Barbara in SoCal has returned from a mental health facility (Olivia de Havilland). When she hears the sounds of a desperate woman on her grounds no one believes her and those who lust for lucre want her declared incompetent. Charles Robinson plays her son and Laraine Stephens his witchy alcoholic wife. Meanwhile Ed Nelson is on hand as a shady neighbor. Joseph Cotton and Walter Pidgeon show up for bit parts.

"The Screaming Woman" debuted as a movie-of-the-week in January, 1972. I’m a fan of 70’s TV flicks as many of them are quite good and some even great, like "Tribes,” “Duel,” “Gargoyles,” “Home for the Holidays,” “Go Ask Alice,” “Scream of the Wolf,” “Winter Kill,” “Pray for the Wildcats,” Satan’s Triangle,” “Trilogy of Terror,” “Summer of Fear” and many more.

This is cut from the same low-budget cloth, but I found it kinda underwhelming, albeit still enjoyable. It effectively balances two plots, that of the wealthy woman of questionable mental state staving off greedy relatives and that of a compromised husband. One memorable scene was later borrowed for the theatrical “Carrie” (1976).

Blonde Alexandra Hay is notable on the female front in a small part.

The movie is short-and-sweet at 1 hour, 13 minutes, and was shot at Bliss Estate, Montecito, California, which is just east of Santa Barbara, near the coast, about an hour’s drive west of Malibu; other scenes were filmed in Pasadena and Universal Studios.

GRADE: C+

For some reason I kept seeing Helen Hayes in the role played here by Olivia de Havilland. She is a wealthy woman who claims to have heard screams from a body buried in the grounds of her estate. When she reports this to her family, they seize on the chance to have the old girl certified and to take control of her fortune. Can she get to the truth before she ends up in a padded cell? I liked her performance here. For a star of this calibre to play a scatty, and frankly unglamorous, elderly woman showed a skill and a courage that few of her peers would ever have tried to do. Joseph Cotton also joined in the mystery and, along with the imperious Walter Pidgeon, helped generate a frequently amusing and engaging thriller. The writing is a bit ropey and the ending is shocking - it really lets the whole thing down - but as television movies go, this moves along well for just over the hour and is quite entertaining.