SWEET SWEET RACHEL (1971)
TV-Movie
Article 3436 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 12-2-2010
Posting Date: 1-20-2011
Directed by Sutton Roley
Featuring Alex Dreier, Pat Hingle, Louise Latham
Country: USA
What it is: Psychic investigator TV pilot

A psychic investigator helps a woman who wants to make sure she didn’t psychically cause the death of her husband. He discovers the death was caused psychically… but by whom?

Here’s a TV-Movie pilot that did eventually end up as a series; with some casting changes it emerged as the syndicated TV show “The Sixth Sense”. The story is quite interesting and is fairly suspenseful, and I liked Pat Dreier’s character enough that I regret that he didn’t make the final series. Nonetheless, I do have some problems with the movie. There are a few times where the movie gets strident and hysterical, and I can’t help but notice that the female characters all tend to overacting whereas all the male ones underplay. There are some very clever moments; my favorite is how the psychic investigator gets the police to exhume a body and perform an autopsy on it when he has no hard evidence that they should do so. Apparently, the TV show that arose from this would eventually re-enter syndication; it’s episodes were cut to thirty minutes and added to the syndicated runs of “Night Gallery”.