Amidst the glut of blaxploitation product that flooded the market in the mid-1970s, this made-for-TV movie stands out as extraordinarily dull and pedestrian.
A snitch informs Police Captain Casey Reardon (Harry Guardino) that heroin dealer Enzo Cortino (Paul Stevens) has listed the names of all his contacts in a ledger kept by his girlfriend, Helena Varga (Louise Sorel). Assigned by Reardon to find the ledger, Christie Love (Teresa Graves) discovers
that years ago Helena bore a child that she put up for adoption, hiding the fact from Cortino so that he wouldn't hold the child's welfare as leverage to keep her in line. Confronted with pictures of the boy, Helena admits that she herself is the ledger, storing information in her photographic
memory. When Love and Reardon threaten to tell Cortino about the boy, Helena reluctantly agrees to turn over the names to the police, but she is shot en route. She dies after reciting the information into a tape recorder while watching her son at football practice.
With her smart mouth ("You unda arrest, sugar") and hip-hugger bell-bottoms, Christie Love is sassy, tough, and, of course, beautiful. Also stupid, clumsy, and inept. To detain the criminals at one point, she rams their large car with her tiny VW bug. The criminals naturally back up and drive
away, leaving her in the crumpled wreckage. Another time, after breaking into Helena's home to look for the ledger, she hears an intruder and hides in the closet, only to bump around, make noise, and get caught. Luckily the intruder is her boss, also breaking into the apartment without a warrant.
Predictably, the relationship between the two of them consists of infantile sexual banter and stale, old cop cliches. The action is equally lame, the several car chases thoroughly lackluster, the fight scenes badly staged and miserably shot. Teresa Graves proves herself no fighter and worse yet,
at one point the criminals are watching what we are told is an exciting samurai film, but are instead shown a couple of Westerners in inappropriate costumes flailing about incompetently.
Only nominally a story of detection, the movie offers no false leads, no real clues, no significant surprises or discoveries (other than the photographic memory business) as the plot plods ever-so-slowly toward its mundane climax. In a brief postscript, Reardon congratulates Christie on a job well
done, notwithstanding that the two of them blackmailed Helena with the life of her innocent child, directly causing the woman's death.
With Pam Grier and Tamara Dobson packing theaters at the time, ABC-TV commissioned this adaptation of the novel The Ledger by Dorothy Uhnak as pilot for a series which ultimately ran only one season. Blaxploitation solely by virtue of its lead actress, the film never remotely addresses racial
issues with the exception of one throwaway epithet when we first meet Christie; similarly it's telegenically devoid of any undue violence or impropriety. Teresa Graves, a former singer in local groups who released a solo album in 1968 (Meet Teresa Graves), appeared in a handful of other films (OLD
DRACULA, THAT MAN BOLT, BLACK EYE) and numerous TV shows (including "Laugh In"). She later got religion and retired from acting. (Violence, profanity.) leave a comment