Monday, June 9, 2014

Movie Monday: Wonder Woman (1974)

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You're sort of a wonder, Wonder Woman!

Pretty much every comic book fan is aware (if not having actually seen) Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman, from the 1975-1979 TV series of the same name. Fewer people, however, know that this was not the first live-action Amazing Amazon to appear on television! No, a year earlier, then-tennis star Cathy Lee Crosby, trying to break her way into acting, nabbed the title role in a TV movie that was intended as a pilot for a series.

After an intro that shows us various MPs seemingly stealing volumes of top secret information from various locales (Paris, Istanbul, etc.) and delivering them to the very 1970sish George Calvin (Andrew Pine), who summarily has his field agents executed by a brother and sister assassin team!

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Our first shot of Diana Prince (the very blond Crosby) is on Paradise Island, as she prepares to leave this paradise and enter Man's World. She bids a melancholy goodbye to her mother Hippolyte and some of her Amazonian sisters, one of whom who all but begs to go with Diana.
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The whole Paradise Island sequence must be a flashback, because after a jump cut we find Diana comfortably ensconced with some sort of government agency, with her boss being one Steve Trevor (Kaz Garas):
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Trevor calls a meeting of the top brass to tell them about how the code books (seen at the beginning of the movie) have been stolen. Diana seems to be Trevor's secretary and, after fending off the advances of some other guy, overhears her boss's meeting. Trevor seems to know that Diana is Wonder Woman, or something, because she heads out to find the person who stole the books, with Trevor's winking approval.

This George Calvin guy is working for another guy, named Abner Smith, played in a series of scenes by Ricardo Montalban where you never see his face. I'm not sure what the makers of this movie thought they were doing here, since Montalban is credited at the top of the show, and his voice is so unmistakeable that there's zero suspense trying to guess who it is.

Diana starts tracking down Smith, starting with a trip to a posh hotel. Calvin meets her there, and he asks her out, going so far as to saying how much he'd like to make love to her(!). Diana takes all this sexual harassment in stride, never wavering from her mission (more on that in a second). 

For the first 2/3rds of the movie, Crosby never wears any sort of costume, preferring to beat guys up in red slacks. When she finally does put on a superhero suit, it's a sort of Adidas-style running outfit, though it's not without its charms:
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This scene--where they lure Wonder Woman into some sort of weird-ass mud room--is the only prototypical comic book moment in the whole movie. Otherwise, it's pretty much all talk talk talk, even when WW escapes and finally meets up with Abner:
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Even the final scene, with Wonder Woman apprehending Smith (spoiler alert!), is done in such a low-key, almost comical way that I was scratching my head, wondering (no pun intended) just who this movie was supposed to appeal to: probably way too silly for adults, but too bizarre and idiosyncratic for kids. Ratings were medicore, but apparently ABC had enough faith in the Wonder Woman concept that they recommissioned a new pilot, starring Lynda Carter, and the rest was history.


The one worthwhile element to Wonder Woman is not so much Crosby's portrayal (which is dull, if not bad), but how Diana is written: she is never anything but completely confident in herself and her ability to finish her mission. You get the sense she's pretty much just toying with all the men in her way, willing to lead them on in one way or the other to get what she needs. I found that quite refreshing, especially when you compare it to the starry-eyed schoolgirl version found in the failed 2011 Wonder Woman pilot. This is progress?

Other than that, this is pretty much a disaster: the effects are nil (Wonder Woman mentions, but we never get to see, her Invisible Plane--what a tease!), the dialogue ranges from weak to bizarre, and the whole thing just feels like a Bionic Woman episode. I guess this was simply a reflection of when it was produced--clearly, filmmakers didn't think a "straight" superhero show would work, so they had to dress the comic book parts in standard TV fare--Wonder Woman feels like a spy show, Dr. Strange was in parts a medical drama, etc etc.

Like Justice League of America a few weeks ago, this is only worth tracking down as a curio. It will be interesting to see if Warner Bros. has learned any lessons between 1974 and 2016, when the first silver screen Wonder Woman makes her debut!


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