To me, this movie is perfection.

It's Difficult NOT To Enjoy This Movie

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

Blistering performances.

This pilot for David Janssen's excellent and under-appreciated HARRY O series was surprisingly disappointing in light of the series that followed. The movie was enjoyable but not exceptional in an era where excellent detective dramas raised the bar high. Janssen's performance does elevate the otherwise standard-issue story and puts it over the top.Andrea Marcovicci, strikingly beautiful, plays Jenny English, only daughter of an aging police officer and longtime friend of Harry O's. She's a dingbat model who we learn is, in David Brock's iconic phrasing, a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty. Jenny is estranged from her father and is desperately seeking a daddy-figure to love. She left her stable marriage to shack up with a sexagenarian retired military man, The Colonel, whose outward bearing belies the rot within (it's revealed he was once court martialed in Vietnam for massacring a village of men, women, and children, which does make the charge of dirty old adulterer pale by comparison).The Colonel soon reaps the whirlwind he sowed. Despite the title, SMILE, JENNY, YOU'RE DEAD, Jenny isn't the target as much as every man the psychotic shutterbug Zalman King believes stands in his way to winning Jenny's heart. Charley English, Jenny's estranged husband whose confession of love is met with cruel callousness, is the first to fall.Torn from the COLUMBO playbook was the scene where the detective shows up while the person of interest is working. I know such scenes allow the viewer to gain some insight into the character, but in real life it would be very vexing for all involved. Harry O shows up and lingers on the sidelines while Harvey Jason as a British fashion photographer snaps a seemingly endless series of photos while Jenny "vogues" for the camera. This scene drags on for an uncomfortably long time. Finally a break, and a switch to some funky music, and while hapless Harvey is reloading his camera Harry slips over and tells Jenny her estranged husband has been murdered. Of course she runs crying to her dressing room. I sympathized with Harvey when he asked an unapologetic Harry, Couldn't you have waited till we were finished? Jenny is relatively unruffled by the deaths, thinking only of herself as only children are prone to do, and while the body of her husband cools in the morgue she flirtatiously suggests Harry O is hitting on her! In an unseemly and surprising turn, perhaps owing to Harry's knowing of her penchant for older men, Harry allows himself to be wooed and teased. I wonder what Harry's old friend and Jenny's father would have thought if he walked in while Harry was in bed holding Jenny, even if it's later stated the night was purely platonic. I also wondered what Harry saw in Jenny that made him fall in love with her. Jenny was self-obsessed, vapid, disloyal, unforgiving, and immoral. Oh, yeah, she was strikingly beautiful, which in Harry's world outweighs a multitude of sins.Perhaps to show Harry is a good guy despite his swingin' seventies amorality, there's the subplot of twelve-year-old Liberty, played with aplomb by a sassy Jodie Foster. Harry looks out for this homeless young urchin and helps gets her shoplifter Mom sprung from jail. Those few scenes underscored the movie's larger theme of fatherlessness and the perils that can befall wives and children when dads go MIA.Jenny wholly lacks the street smarts of Liberty. Her gullibility defies belief when Zalman King approaches Jenny and says he's a photographer who has been secretly taking photos of her. She's not alarmed by this creepy stalker, but instead is flattered and admires his work. Psychosis will out, however, and it isn't long before Zalman King has Jenny perilously perched atop a skyscraper under construction. Dad and Harry O rush to the rescue, King takes the fall, weepy father and daughter reunion with a promise of reconciliation, and the oft-heard "it would never work" speech from Jenny as she "friend zones" a heartbroken Harry. Roll end credits.May-December romances between middle-aged detectives and beautiful young women were a recurring theme on TV in early 1974. SMILE, JENNY, YOU'RE DEAD aired in February and in March the pilot movie for THE ROCKFORD FILES found James Garner and the lovely Lindsay Wagner in a similar entanglement.

I was interested in "Smile Jenny, You're Dead" because I saw that it featured a young Jodie Foster in a supporting role. I was surprised to learn that the movie was a pilot for a TV series. I thought that most of the movie seemed pretty routine, with David Janssen of "The Fugitive" playing a private detective trying to protect a model (Andrea Marcovicci) from a maniac. Jodie Foster plays a homeless girl whom the detective befriends.I really liked Zalman King's character. He brings a sort of coolness to the obsessive psychopath. His photography equipment looks primitive by today's standards. I sure didn't predict what he did at the end of the movie! Watching the movie, I could see that LA wasn't so built up back then. All in all, it's not any kind of great movie, but innocuous. I figure that I'll try to check out the TV series "The Fugitive" (I've only seen the movie) as well as "Harry O", which is based on this movie.

Man, do I miss "Harry O". I used to love seeing this detective series with David Janssen's gravelly charm as a cynical PI who has to take public transit to solve mysteries! It is completely antithetical to the "Magnum PI" slick cars, slick everything that now permeates the standard TV detective format. This is partially why I love the 1970's era of cop shows. They portrayed the heroes as overworked, underpaid, world-weary, blue-collar joes who are always swimming upstream. There are no super heroics here. In fact, the Harry Orwell character pushed the detective archetype back a rung or two. He shows us that being a PI isn't so bloody marvelous. It's been a long time since "Harry O" disappeared even from filling in a time slot on the late late show, and almost as long since this TV movie (the second pilot to the series, if you will) used to fill programming on lazy Saturday afternoons on my local bands.This time Harry O is after an obsessive nut job photographer played by Zalman King. Since BLUE SUNSHINE is one of my favourite cult movies, I have a soft spot for this interesting actor, even though he isn't the greatest thespian the world has known. Before he went behind the camera to produce the soft core fantasies of TWO MOON JUNCTION or the "Red Shoes Diaries" series, he nonetheless had his share of weird roles. Case in point, this psycho goes around with this huge bow-tie- he more resembles Bozo the clown than a stalker, but King's "edgy" acting gives the character the danger beneath the sheep's clothing.This TV-movie also features an early performance by Jodie Foster in her "tomboy" stage (think ALICE DOESN'T LIVE HERE ANYMORE) as an urchin who sets up home on Harry O's beach property. In all, SMILE JENNY YOU'RE DEAD is a satisfying thriller with an unusual climax. It is another nice memory of TV-films of the day. Video, please?

As a beach-front living private investigator with a bullet still lodged in his back, David Janssen made a terrific, hard-bitten crime-fighter of the Old School (not quite Bogie, maybe a latter-day Dana Andrews). This pilot for his very successful TV series "Harry O" is mostly memorable though for young Jodie Foster, playing a pre-teen street urchin waiting for her shoplifting mother to get out of jail (the movie opens with a beautiful shot of Foster asleep on Janssen's boat, The Answer). Foster has all the best lines in the movie, and she reads them straight--without a hint of precociousness. As a murder-mystery, the film lags a bit and as a film it certainly doesn't benefit from future-director Zalman King's unpleasant presence (he's like a second-rate Marjoe Gortner). But for Foster-philes it's a goldmine, and students of cinematography should study that amazing first shot. 'The Answer' indeed!