50th Anniversary Viewing
The ABC Sunday Night Movie
"Charlie's Angels"
Originally aired March 21, 1976
Wiki said:
Charles "Charlie" Townsend's [uncredited John Forsythe] client wants to prove that a missing vineyard owner, Vince le Maire, was murdered by his second wife and his foreman. The Angels set up a sophisticated caper in which Kelly Garrett [Jaclyn Smith] and Sabrina Duncan [Kate Jackson] pose as the wealthy heiress and Jill Munroe [Farrah Fawcett-Majors] as a dowdy secretary and backwoods gunslinger.
Following the previously posted introductory sequence, Charlie assigns the Angels to investigate the disappearance of Vincent Le Maire, the owner of Samarra Vineyards who vanished seven years prior. An anonymous client has reason to believe that he was murdered. His estate is now owned by his alcoholic second wife Rachel (Diana Muldaur), and run by former truck driver Beau Creel (Bo Hopkins). With Le Maire about to be declared legally dead, the rightful heir according to the will should be Janet, Le Maire's daughter by his first wife who struck out on her own and hasn't been seen in years.
Kelly shows up at the estate on a motorcycle claiming to be Janet. Beau takes the first opportunity to check her passport, then calls in the family lawyer, Henry Bancroft (John Lehne), who knew Janet all her life, is in on embezzlement of the estate, and is an accessory to Vincent's murder. Bancroft tests Janet's memory and personal habits, but Kelly's come very well prepared, correcting him on various false details. Kelly keeps in contact with Woodville (David Ogden Stiers) by walkie talkie. Taking a spin around the grounds, she has an accident with pickup-driving Aram Kolegian (Tommy Lee Jones) and his dog Mike.
It turns out he's an old close acquaintance, and not knowing about Janet's private history with him, Kelly goes along with everything he brings up. After she moves on, Aram tells Mike that she's a phony.
At Beau's order, Rachel tries to poison Kelly via her nightly glass of warm milk; while Beau and henchman Wilder (Grant Owens) plan to dispose of her body and bike. Checking on her, Beau makes a comment about her father being in the swamp where she's about to be taken. But he and Rachel are interrupted by an unexpected visit from Woodville, who says that he's an attorney working on behalf of the real Janet, who'll be arriving in the morning, and warns them that the woman staying with them is an imposter. After he leaves, they find Kelly gone. She subsequently confronts Rachel and Beau, portraying herself as a scammer who had the real Janet on ice. She offers to work with them for half of the estate's true value, which she claims Janet said under a truth drug was estimated to be $20 million for undetermined reasons.
Sabrina arrives in a Learjet as the "real" Janet, greeted by Woodville and accompanied by Bosley (David Doyle) and Jill posing as a dowdy secretary. This Janet's wealthy lifestyle, which includes expecting to have an entire floor of the hotel at short notice, lends credence to the story of the estate's value. Sabrina and Jill maintain their characters in private, quickly determining that a bouquet of flowers is bugged. Bosley catches interest for staying separately at a cheap motel and claiming to be a birdwatcher. From the Angels' hotel, he makes an in-character call to Charlie about testing the property and overseas investors.
Aram has a separate run-in with Sabrina's Janet, and she volunteers memories of their past that were supplied by Kelly. He calls her out as a phony who's obviously working with the other fake Janet and she comes clean, determining that he isn't in with the people running the estate and didn't out Kelly to them. He encourages her to continue with whatever she has planned against them. Sabrina tells the estate gang--including Kelly now posing as Rachel's cousin--about her kidnapping ordeal, during which she was supposedly drugged and thus wouldn't recognize her captors. She drops the bomb that she plans to turn the swamp into a bird sanctuary. Beau and Wilder confront Bosley, who's been in a swamp boat testing the water while claiming to be birdwatching, and ask him about the call to Charlie. Under threat, he reveals that it's really about oil in the swamp. They look into Charlie and determine that his investors are Iranian.
It turns out that Beau had sold the swampland to a rural homesteader named Hawkins. At the Hawkins shack, Jill in pigtails holds Beau at bay from a shotgun, claiming that she and her grandpa (voice-acted by Bosley from inside) bought the place from Hawkins. Beau offers to buy the swamp from them and turns out to be competing with an offer from the Iranians, which gets him to agree to $250,000, all that the estate has. Kelly radios Woodville that Creel and his men are planning to retrieve the body from the swamp that night to prevent it from being found when the oil men come in.
Woodville and the Angels stake out the swamp, planning to call in the sheriff once the body's been found; but Woodville is caught by Wilder. Creel and Bancroft go out in a boat with a diver, who brings up the wrapped body. When the Angels can't raise Woodville, they try to split, but Kelly's caught by Wilder, who radios the others to come out of hiding using her as a hostage. Wilder then calls for Creel, who upon seeing the assembled Angels realizes that it was all a con. They stall him over the money, but he doesn't want to play, now knowing what they were really after. Bancroft being assaulted by a shadowy figure gives the Angels an opportunity to make a break for it, following which Creel's men go into the swamp after them. Aram pops up to aid Sabrina, but Wilder ultimately gets the two of them at gunpoint. In the boat, Creel finds where Jill's hiding underwater and is about to shoot her when he's bull-horned by Sheriff Hopkins (Russ Grieve), who has spotlights shone on him when he attempts to dump out the body. It turns out that Aram rounded up a posse of volunteers after being called in by Charlie.
Back at the office, Charlie explains with the aid of slides that their client was the real Janet Le Maire (actress uncredited), who's since hooked back up with Aram; and that the $250,000 is their fee.
Photos:
The Bionic Woman
"Jaime's Mother"
Originally aired March 24, 1976
Edited Wiki said:
Jaime meets a spy whom she believes to be her dead mother.
Two shady types (Vic Boylin [Joseph George] and Henderson [Dan Barton]) exchange info about how a woman (Barbara Rush) that the latter shot in the arm is headed to Ojai to tell Jaime Sommers that she's her mother. They resolve that if that happens, they may have to kill both women.
By striking coincidence, Jaime has dreams of her mother, Ann Sommers (Barbara Rush), giving her a pendant as a child (9-year-old Carlena Gower) and teaching her to play tennis. Jaime bionic-bends her brass bed in her sleep. When she's awoken by a call that her parents' graves have been vandalized, she runs out to the cemetery to find them undisturbed, then is approached by a dog named Puzzles, who matches her childhood pet. The dog gets in a car that's driven away by a woman whom Jaime thinks looks like her mother. Back at home, Helen assures her that her mother was buried in '66 (as established by the headstones). Jaime's miffed to learn that Oscar and Rudy asked Helen to keep an eye on Jaime for her established emotional issues. Jaime heads to her old house, now owned by Betty Noah (Norma Connolly), to learn that Puzzles does still live there. (Given Jaime's age in the flashbacks, this seems very unlikely.) Jaime sees the car again and starts to go after it, but loses it as a truck comes down the road.
Jaime returns home to find that Helen's called in Oscar from a visit to the AFB. Rudy has remote-diagnosed that Jaime's imagining things based on her dreams, but Oscar shares with Jaime that her mother was a top-echelon government agent, not knowing how much of this Jaime would have been aware of at the time. Later, Betty calls Jaime to tell her that a woman who looked just like her mother paid a visit and that she had a bouquet of yellow roses that could have been picked at the house. Jaime rushes back to the cemetery to find the woman visiting the gravesite. At first the woman denies being Jaime's mother, then switches tracks. Meanwhile, there's a clumsy, voiced over insert of the bad guys heading to Ojai.
Oscar consults with an agent named Mark Russell (Sam Chew Jr.) for access to Ann's files and learns that there were two Anns, which he immediately calls Helen about before he has all the facts. The bad guys are still getting to Ojai (if only they had access to Oscar's JLA teleporter tube) as Alleged Ann explains to Jaime how she became an agent in the early '50s and had a double named Chris Stuart who helped her maintain her cover while she was traveling on assignments. The woman describes how she kept tabs on Jaime over the years while the government mandated that she maintain the cover provided by her supposed death. Jaime brings Alleged Ann to Helen's, so hah, Jaime's not crazy! A confused Jaime implores Ann to tell her something only she could know, so she indicates having given Jaime the pendant that she's wearing. Oscar prepares to have Ann's grave dug up on the assumption that Chris Stuart's inside.
Jaime tells the woman she now believes to be her mother about her accident and demonstrates her bionics by jumping up into a tree, taking a little slo-mo jog, and lifting the front end of a rusty old tractor. Ann in turn confesses that she was eventually laid off by the government, and went on to work for "the other side"...which is described as her being a double agent, though that would mean she was working for both sides at the same time. While the grave is still being dug up, Oscar calls to share his foregone conclusion with Jaime, who holds back on having hooked up with her mother. Then, a solid 2/3 of the way into the episode, the bad guys are finally done fucking around at Stuckey's and have arrived at Jaime's place. They pull guns on Ann, but Jaime knocks them into a barn with a hurled bale of hay, locks them in, removes one of their wheels, and tosses it into the distance before fleeing in Ann's car. At the gravesite, Oscar's shocked by the result he seemingly hadn't considered--that the woman in the grave really is Ann Sommers.
Oscar arrives at the Elgin ranch after the baddies have escaped, having somehow gotten another car sent out a lot faster than they got there in the first place. Oscar shares with Helen that the woman is Chris Stuart and his concern that she could sell Jaime's secret to the other side.
Oscar (on phone): This is Oscar Goldman speaking. I want an all-points bulletin out on Chris Stuart, alias Ann Sommers. Now I want everybody in on this! The OSI, the MPs, the California Highway Patrol, the local police. Everybody!
This might've been a good time to call in Young Tommy Lee Jones and the Warehouse/Whorehouse/Henhouse/Outhouse/Doghouse of Doom.
After Jaime pulls money out of the bank for a trip with her mom, the baddies catch up and run Chris's car off the road. Chris gets out to talk to their gun-weilding opponents, and Jaime hears them identify her as Chris. Contrary to Always-Wrong Oscar's assumptions, Chris doesn't sell Jaime out, instead vouching for Jaime's lack of knowledge about Chris and arguing that killing her would attract too much attention. Chris tells Jaime that the men are with the FBI and leaves in their car...which Jaime runs after, overtaking it via offroad shortcut and knocking down a tree in its path. The driver is knocked out, while Chris struggles with Boylin in the back over his gun, to the usual result. The rewounded Chris confesses to what Jaime already knows about her identity.
Jaime visits Chris at the hospital with flowers and news that Oscar could get her leniency in return for intel. When Jaime asks why Chris didn't betray her, she describes how she grew attached to Jaime and her family during her assignment, and explains why she came back and tried to escape into her Ann identity. Jaime returns to Helen and re-bonds with her as an adoptive mother.
50th Anniversary Midnight Special
March 26, 1976
Hosted by Helen Reddy
Featured guest: Donna Summer
"Love to Love You Baby"
"Could It Be Magic"
There's another movie I would highly recommend. Pretty much everything about it is great, including the cast.
I've been planning to get to it, as well as
Cuckoo's Nest. It's funny that both just came up as news items in the same week, and just as hiatus season's about to kick off.
Yeah, defeating that flowerpot singlehandedly must have scared the hell out of them.
You gotta respect a man who thwarts the flowerpot.
Spirit of '68 tonight! 
Note also the obvious whitebreading of some of the lyrics that were considered too suggestive for white audiences in the day.
