In short: Out of Contention (1972)

aka The Victim (because there just aren’t enough movies going by that title in the world)

After a worrying phone call from her sister Susan (Jess Walton) about Susan’s decision to get a divorce from her husband Ben (George Maharis), Kate (Elizabeth Montgomery) decides to drive out to the spacious country home the soon to be ex-couple live in to be there for her in person. Little does she expect that somebody has murdered Susan and tucked her away in the cellar.

So Kate enters a surprisingly empty house, with no clue to Susan’s whereabouts. Of course, somewhat curious things start to happen: Mrs Hawkes (Eileen Heckart), the rude older housekeeper our heroine will soon discover has been fired by Susan, seems to pop in and out of the place at will, pretending Susan hasn’t been in for the day at all, despite evidence to the contrary. As a storm makes the lines of communications for Kate ever more difficult, she becomes convinced someone is sneaking around the house, cutting the electricity off and on, and may or may not be planning something violent towards her, for reasons she can’t quite understand.

To be fair, they are not terribly interesting reasons, and Herschel Daugherty’s ABC Movie of the Week Out of Contention neither seems terribly interested in the more straightforward mystery aspect of the tale, nor very good at constructing it.

The focus is solely on the ABC thriller standard of a lone, isolated woman in peril. There’s obviously a good reason why this set-up is such a genre and format stand-by, for it’s easily relatable to just about anyone, and, done right can deliver a suspenseful narrative on a budget.

The peculiar thing about this particular example of the form is how little effort the film puts into actually isolating Kate, while still having her act as if she were indeed locked up somewhere with no way out. The phone lines are working for most of the movie, the storm is dangerous but never so bad as to make it impossible to flee, and there are indeed other characters about, even non-suspicious characters. So much of Kate’s troubles could have been simply avoided by her getting into her car and driving away instead of repeatedly returning to a house she clearly believes to be dangerous.

Most of this must have been meant to make the mystery aspect easier to handle, to provide Kate with an easy opportunity to learn about what’s actually going on, but this also robs the film of much of the tension and suspense of other TV thrillers in the same vein. It’s never a terrible film, mind you, but rather a sort of professionally realized hand-waving made celluloid, never exciting enough to get actually interesting, yet not ropey enough to be actively bad.