Best Tv Movie Movies of 1972

Three miners plan a weekend fishing.

A brilliant tort attorney gets rid of her boring husband by faking his kidnapping and keeping the ransom. The FBI may be fooled, but not Columbo.

Wisecracking reporter Carl Kolchak investigates a string of gruesome murders in Las Vegas. It seems that each victim has been bitten in the neck and drained of all their blood. Kolchak is sure that it is a vampire. He's hot on the trail, but nobody believes him. His editor thinks he's nuts and the police think he's a hindrance in the investigation, so Kolchak takes matters into his own hand.

Paxton, an amateur archeologist, travels to the town of Seaburgh and inadvertently stumbles across one of the lost crowns of Anglia, which, according to legend, protect the county from invasion. On digging the crown up, Paxton is stalked by its supernatural guardian.

With the school election looming, Linus is talked into running for school president. With Lucy and Charlie Brown as his campaign manager and Snoopy and Woodstock assisting, he stands a decent chance of victory. Soon however, he makes unrealistic promises and learns the hard way that preaching about the Great Pumpkin can not be considered a sound campaign strategy.

Orphaned and left in the desert as an infant, Evil Roy Slade (John Astin) grew up alone—save for his teddy bear—and mean. As an adult, he is notorious for being the "meanest villain in the West"—so he's thrown for quite a loop when he falls for sweet schoolteacher Betsy Potter (Pamela Austin). There's also Nelson L. Stool (Mickey Rooney), a railroad tycoon, who, along with his dimwitted nephew Clifford (Henry Gibson), is trying to get revenge on Evil Roy Slade for robbing him.

Elwood P. Dowd's constant companion is Harvey, a six-foot tall invisible rabbit. To his sister, his obsession with Harvey has been a thorn in her plans to marry off her daughter. However, when she decides to put Elwood in a mental institution, a mix-up occurs, and she finds herself committed instead. It's now up to Elwood and "Harvey" to straighten out the mess.

This BBC/MGM-TV co-produced documentary on the life and career of Judy Garland includes interviews with Liza Minnelli, Charles Walters and Mickey Rooney.

A shocking exposé of the deplorable conditions and abuses from the Willowbrook State School for children with intellectual disabilities.

Maggie Cole is a research scientist who, after the sudden death of her husband, takes a position as an on-call doctor in an inner-city clinic. There, she must fight a battle on two fronts: against the medical conditions endangering her patients and against sexism toward a female doctor.

Adaptation of the classic novel. A priceless jewel, originally plundered from a Hindu shrine, is presented to Rachel Verinder on her 18th birthday. The jewel goes missing and suspicion falls over the household, threatening to destroy someone close to Rachel's heart.

Liza Minnelli stars in a television concert directed and choreographed by Bob Fosse. She performs such songs as the title number and "Son of a Preacher Man." The concert concludes with a medley of songs from the film Cabaret (1972). The special, Minnelli and Fosse all won Emmy Awards. Bob Fosse also won the Oscar and Tony that year, in the only instance of any person ever winning all three in a one-month period.

A CIA agent is used as a pawn in an insane woman's plan to steal a Polaris submarine.

A research team from an electronics company move into an old Victorian house to start work on finding a new recording medium. When team member Jill Greeley witnesses a ghost, team director Peter Brock decides not only to analyse the apparition, which he believes is a psychic impression trapped in a stone wall (dubbed a "stone tape"), but to exorcise it too - with terrifying results...

A talking squirrel must save the holiday by rescuing a young Pilgrim boy and a young Native American boy that has gone missing in the woods on Thanksgiving day.

Gruff gumshoe Francis Hogan is hired by a mysterious woman to find her boyfriend who has gone missing. With his perpetually hungry partner in tow, Hogan must untangle a web of intrigue involving the criminal underworld and a dead courier. One double-cross follows another as Hogan investigates the whole sordid affair.

An ex-schoolteacher is asked by the police to help locate a missing heiress.

A young girl named Addie, living in Nebraska in 1946 wants nothing more for the holidays than a Christmas tree, but her widowed father, is bitter and refuses due to events from the family's past.

The first US teleplay to deal sympathetically with homosexuality. Divorced San Francisco contractor Doug Salter is looking forward to a summer visit from his fourteen-year-old son Nick, who lives in Los Angeles with his mother Janet. The boy does not know that his father is gay and committed to Gary McClain, his life partner of several years.

After receiving word about a mysterious carcass/skeleton unearthed in the Arizona desert, a father and his daughter decide to remove it from the burial grounds for further study. Once they do so, they, as well as the town, are besieged by a colony of gargoyles living in some nearby caverns.

The daughter of a wealthy family is kidnapped and imprisoned underground in a custom-built, ventilated coffin while her family and the police search for her. But the battery that powers the ventilation is running out of juice and the ransom drop has been botched. This movie was originally shown as an ABC Movie of the Week on September 12, 1972. The story is based on the 1968 kidnapping of Barbara Mackle by Gary Krist.

A surreal, half-fiction, half real life footage of a day in the life of John lennon and Yoko Ono, composed to music from John's historic 'Imagine' album and Yoko's 'Fly'.

A charming but somewhat larcenous widow attempts to snare a rich bachelor through a lonely hearts club, but her scheme boomerangs into a deadly cat-and-mouse game. This marked the TV-movie debut of both Rosalind Russell and Douglas Fairbanks Jr., and was sadly also Russell's last film role.

The Master, in the guise of Professor Thascalos, has constructed at the Newton Institute in Wootton a device known as TOMTIT - Transmission Of Matter Through Interstitial Time - to gain control over Kronos, a creature from outside time. The creature is summoned but proves to be uncontrollable.

A Protestant and a Catholic family's friendship is threatened by the sectarian violence in Belfast. When the daughter of the Catholic family falls in love a British soldier the situation worsens ...

Kinkaid is a rugged, hard-driving bounty hunter, determined to find outlaw Billy Riddle. He tracks Billy, takes him captive, and starts the long trek to justice. However, this journey may lead him to dire consequences... a gang of cut-throats headed by Angus Keough is pursuing them, after the bounty for themselves.

A government agent, out to destroy a crime ring, finds himself in the middle of a mob war.

A parole officer goes undercover to investigate prison brutality but is trapped when the only person on the outside who knows why she's there is killed.

Drama based on the life of Joyce Duco, with Joanna Pettet as a young nun torn between the reality of her secular job as a daytime juvenile probation officer and the vows she has taken with the church.

The name Michael O'Hara has become synonymous with law enforcement. There have been three generations of Michael O'Haras and all have been exemplary policemen. When Michael O'Hara III's child was born he was told that they would not be able to have any more children, and there has always been a Michael O'Hara, so he named his child Michael O'Hara IV despite the fact that she is a girl. Now Mike has a tendency to get involved with police matters and not always with good results, which annoys her father. And despite being told repeatedly to stay out of it, she continues her amateurish detective activities.

By going to the Philippines, Imamura comes to meet people living in an extreme poverty. He discovers very quickly that some communities are under the control of cruel & armed pirates. Imamura will come to meet those men in order to understand their position.

Three new officers in a large metropolitan police department adjust to their new jobs and way of life. This is another TV-pilot that was first aired as an ABC Movie of the Week before becoming a TV-series.

Adapted from a story by Truman Capote ("In Cold Blood"), the world of the prison convict is open to the viewer. As the story develops, one thing becomes clear. As in the outside world, there is a "system"; and just as on the outside, there is accommodation, honesty, cynicism, violence and all the other factors that make up our society. The film follows the three newcomers, it records the grim, terrifying, sometimes fascinating events that occur.

A wealthy former mental patient goes home to her estate to rest and recuperate. While walking the grounds one day she hears the screams of a woman coming from underneath the ground. Her family, however, refuses to believe her story, and sees the incident as an opportunity to prove the woman's mind has snapped so they can take control of her money.

Yogi, Boo Boo and many of his friends including Huckleberry Hound, Snagglepuss, Magilla Gorilla among others decide to build an ark to look for the mythical Perfect Place which is peaceful and hasn't been affected by man and pollution. They hire the Jellystone's janitor Noah Smith to act as captain and travel throughout the world looking for such a place. Even though they think every place they land is a "Perfect place", they soon find out that there is definitely no place like home.

An elaborate deception emerges when an American astronaut is lost on a mission to Mars. Space agency officials fearful of losing public support and government funding decide to cover up the accident by employing an exact double for the lost astronaut. The ruse begins to unravel when the wife of the lost astronaut realizes she is living with a different man. Although angered by the deception, the woman has fallen in love with the replacement and plans to keep the secret. They both have a change of heart and decide to reveal the secret when they discover a new Mars mission is underway.

A young couple moves into a farmhouse in rural Pennsylvania. What they don't know is that there is an unseen presence in the house, and that it wants to take possession of the wife.

Eight people have to find their way out of a New York subway after being trapped following an earthquake.

A savage storm wreaks havoc on a small Irish fishing village.

Due to a home-steading law, a fur trapper schemes to keep his land by hiring a hooker, a pickpocket and a thief to pose as his family.

A judge has to deal with his four daughters, his four future sons-in-law and four weddings all on the same day.

A group of wealthy but secretly very troubled people travel to an island resort. After experiencing a brush with death, they find themselves wondering about their existences.

A doctor trying to fight a diphtheria epidemic comes into conflict with a police captain who is using all his resources to track down a cop-killer.

A rich stockbroker buys a Nevada ghost town as a community for people who need a second chance in life.

A childless middle-age couple adopt a troubled youth they find living in their crawlspace and attempt to get him to rejoin society with tragic results.

Set in Yorkshire, diabetic Horace is mentally disabled and works in the back of a joke shop.

Pilot for sci-fi detective series "Search." Hugh O'Brian as Lockwood, a high-tech private eye, was outfitted with two electronic implants (one to hear what was said at HQ and a dental contact he could bite to communicate with HQ--one bite for yes and two bites for no) and a button-sized "scanner" that combined a micro-miniaturized television camera that could also see in infrared spectrum, microphone, medical sensors, and transmitter, putting him in constant contact with a room full of experts monitoring his actions and vital signs and supplying him with encyclopedic information.

A hired killer hunts down a schoolteacher to get something she has. She doesn't know what it is, but he's already killed twice to get it.

A woman is trapped during a storm in a house with no electricity or phone. A killer has murdered her sister, stuffed the body in the basement, and is now after her.