Portrait Of A Dead Girl (1970)

A New Mexico lawman (Dennis Weaver) is escorting a prisoner (Shelly Novack) from New Mexico to New York City. But in transferring the prisoner to the local authorities, the lawman is attacked and his prisoner kidnapped. Back in the day, the major networks would often do TV movies to check out the potential of turning them into weekly TV series or as a way of hooking viewers when it eventually became a TV series. An unofficial spin off of the 1968 Don Siegel film COOGAN'S BLUFF, this would be titled MCCLOUD and seven months later debut as a series on NBC. This is the usual "fish out of water" premise of a rural cowboy finding himself in an urban landscape with the typical problems of coping with a different environment. Dennis Weaver tends to overdo the country boy bit but audiences ate it up for seven years. The plot is dragged out to feature length but would be better served in a concise one hour episode. The cast includes Julie Newmar, Raul Julia, Diana Muldaur, Craig Stevens and Peter Mark Richman