Created by Rob Gilmer
The female P.I. in question is one ELIZABETH BENTLEY, a perfect little miss, an up-and- coming eager beaver partner in her daddy’s prestigious law firm who’s actually bored stiff with her perfect little life and her stuffed-shirt would-be fiancee. She’s even in therapy, troubled by these recurring disturbing daydreams of being something else, something more. So she buys a trenchcoat, rents a rundown office and decides to become a private eye.
Of course she does.
The catch (we knew there had to be one, right?) is that the office is haunted by a former tenant. The very late NICK PEYTON was also private investigator, but he was murdered back in 1948, the victim of a questionable automobile accident. Now he’s a ghost, still obsessed with cracking his last case. Of course, as always in these things, only Elizabeth can see Nick, and the merriment ensues and spectral sparks fly.
Jaclyn Smith (one of Charlie’s Angels) plays the squeaky-clean Marlowe wannabe, and Corbin Bensen plays the Marlowesque spook, and they both rise to the occasion in what was touted as “Ghost meets The Maltese Falcon.”
At best, it’s pleasant and even enjoyable fluff, with some nice winks to the past (Anne “Honey West” Francis!) and a little more wit than expected but for me, it was all handled much better in Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), a late-sixties British TV show known in North America as My Partner the Ghost, which also featured a PI team, one living, one not-so-much.
UNDER OATH
- “The production is loaded with charming nostalgic touches…” and sports a “kind of Nick-and-Nora flavor…”
— The Los Angeles Times
TELEVISION
- LOVE CAN BE MURDER | Buy the DVD
(aka “Kindred Spirits”)
(1992, NBC)
Premiere: December 14, 1992
2 hour made-for-TV movie
Written by Rob Gilmer
Directed by Jack Bender
Starring Jaclyn Smith as ELIZABETH BENTLEY
and Corbin Bensen as JAKE PEYTON
Also starring Cliff De Young, Tom Bower , Nicholas Pryor, Susan Brown, Elaine Kagan, John Carter, Anne Francis, Bruce Vilanch, Pamela Roberts, Doug Hale, Scott N. Stevens, Kimberley LaMarque, Cameron Watson
Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.
