Baffled! (1972), a made-for-television movie directed by Philip Leacock; starring Leonard Nimoy, Susan Hampshire, Vera Miles, and Rachel Roberts.
This TV movie was a pilot for a proposed series, starring Nimoy, that wasn’t picked up. An Anglo-American production, it was released theatrically as a B-movie in the UK before airing on US television. I wanted to like it, but it’s just not very good when all things are considered (like most films and series that have an exclamation point in their titles!)
Nimoy plays a race car driver with extra-sensory-perception (ESP) who sees visions of crimes before they happen. This is typical of the era; ESP was a '70s film/TV obsession, along with Satan-worshipping and cataclysmic disasters. In the same era, two notable TV movies of the ESP genre debuted, which were Sweet, Sweet Rachel (1971), starring Stefanie Powers and Alex Drier, and The Eyes of Charles Sand (1972), starring Peter Haskell and Sharon Farrell. There were also the short-lived series The Sixth Sense, starring Gary Collins as ESP researcher Dr Michael Rhodes, and The Girl With Something Extra, a rom-com series starring Sally Fields as a young wife with mind-reading abilities.
Getting back to Baffled!, it isn’t as good as the other early '70s telefilms I listed, but it’s not terrible. It’s just sort of “meh.”
The story begins with professional race car driver Tom Kovack (Nimoy) competing in an important race. He has a sudden vision, while driving in the race, of a woman and child in distress at an old manor house in England called Wyndam. An English ESP expert named Michele (played by Susan Hampshire, a pretty steady presence in film and TV on both sides of the Atlantic in the 70s) sees him discussing the episode on a TV talk show and contacts him. She tells Kovack that the Wyndam manor house really exists--operated currently as a swanky country resort--and convinces him to visit it with her.
When they arrive, they meet the woman and child from the visions; the woman turns out to be none other than a famous movie star named Andrea Glenn, played by Vera Miles of Psycho (1960) fame. Her precocious 12-year-old daughter, Jan, is under the secret spell of a man who claims to be her estranged father, Duncan. Meanwhile, the owner of the Wyndam resort, Mrs. Farraday (Rachel Roberts), is a sinister middle-aged woman who keeps getting mysteriously younger as the story progresses.
The main problems with the film are: nothing much happens until the very end, there’s no real atmosphere, and the pacing is off by a lot. The director seems to have no idea of how to build dread in a supernatural story. The light-hearted, romantic-tinged banter of Hampshire and Nimoy adds a jarring note to what is presented as a creepy. mysterious tale. Meanwhile, a predictable subplot involving Jan's estranged father and his missing occult-practicing friend doesn’t help things much, either.
To sum it up, this film is mostly for nostalgic fans of the Golden Age of television "Movies of the Week," and for Nimoy fans who may be interested in seeing what the late actor was like just after Star Trek:TOS ended, but before he was canonized as Mr. Spock, Television Icon. Presumably because of Nimoy, this film has had an official DVD release; it can also be found streaming on Amazon.
Unfortunately, the much superior film, Sweet, Sweet Rachel, directed by Sutton Roley, can only be found on bootleg DVD sites and YouTube. The Eyes of Charles Sand isn't currently streaming, but it can be had in a legitimate DVD format from the Warner Archives; a blurry VHS transfer version can also be found on YouTube, as of this writing.
