... I found this early TV miniseries to be tedious with an outrageous ending.
Production values wise it's an impressive achievement, with many stars of both the large and small screen appearing, many in almost cameo roles. It's the tale of a presidential advisor who seems troubled about something (Arthur Hill as Arnold Greer) who disappears one day. He went to play golf and never came back home. Presidential press secretary Gene Culligan (James Farentino) and his old college roommate FBI agent Larry Storm (Robert Hooks) go out to the golf course to investigate and find Greer's car still in the parking lot. An employee of the club says that Greer borrowed a golf cart when he went out on the green and never returned it. Thinking that maybe Greer had a heart attack or some other kind of medical emergency out on the course, Culligan and Storm take flashlight in hand and go looking for him. They find the cart, abandoned, and they find a piece of cloth from a suit that Culligan recognizes as Greer's, caught in the barbed wire topping the security fence around the course, as though Greer scaled that fence and disappeared on purpose - or was he forced to do so?
In a parallel story, at the beginning of the film, the body of a Chinese sailor has washed up on shore and it is believed to have come from a submarine belonging to the Communist Chinese that was parked inside American waters.
So the search begins. The film started out engaging but it just wanders all over the place and loses focus . It's insinuated - not too subtly - that Greer might have been secretly gay and has skipped town with his lover. In 1971, that would have been a huge scandal, especially with the president facing reelection in just a few months.
What makes this film interesting is the portrayal of the presidency as it existed a year before Watergate and about two years before that scandal began to make headlines. The president, portrayed by Richard Widmark, gives the role the intelligence and dignity people demanded of the Commander in Chief at the time. So nice to see a president actually speaking in complete coherent sentences like an intelligent adult who actually understands foreign affairs, the wheat proposal - whatever that is, and "the fighter budget". In support, his advisors are for the most part portrayed as honest and conscientious public servants. And notice no computers. The secretaries, as they were called at the time, are swimming in a sea of paper.
I give it a 5/10 for the nostalgia value and the fine performances. If only it was in service to a tighter and more believable script.
