Cut the Disney jokes. This is not about Walt, laying cryptically frozen and brought back from the dead. Having supposedly died of rheumatic fever years ago, she was placed in a tank, and now a cure has brought her back to life. Caroline Carmichael is played by the lovely Donna Mills, then one of the queens of the movie of the week, and quite gorgeous, who would expect her to wake up to find herself married to the old Walter Pidgeon? Having co-starred with Greer Garson and half a dozen or so MGM films, Pidgeon was best known as mr. Men over and having played Florenz Ziegfeld in "Funny Girl" just a few years before this. Mills gets to play mother two actors older than her, Mike Farrell and Vera Miles, and her crazy daughter is definitely not ready to have a mother who is by a matter of science younger than her.
I'm going to give this movie an A for its audaciousness, and it certainly has the potential of being campy to some viewers. There's also the legendary Geraldine Page as the former Nanny and Cliff Potts as Pidgeon's creepy assistant. I don't know what category to put this in because it emulates the supernatural horror films of the 70s with a touch of melodrama and science fiction. Mills is lovely, and she wisely plays the character as a woman from another generation waking up to find herself in a world completely foreign to her. The story is indeed ahead-of-its-time because it seems like something that the remaining soap operas of today would dry, or possibly one that could have been done on "Dark Shadows" several years before this. Quite a lot of fun with a ton of surprises.
I'm going to give this movie an A for its audaciousness, and it certainly has the potential of being campy to some viewers. There's also the legendary Geraldine Page as the former Nanny and Cliff Potts as Pidgeon's creepy assistant. I don't know what category to put this in because it emulates the supernatural horror films of the 70s with a touch of melodrama and science fiction. Mills is lovely, and she wisely plays the character as a woman from another generation waking up to find herself in a world completely foreign to her. The story is indeed ahead-of-its-time because it seems like something that the remaining soap operas of today would dry, or possibly one that could have been done on "Dark Shadows" several years before this. Quite a lot of fun with a ton of surprises.