Wonder Woman (1974)

Crosby, Steals and Bashed

Wonder Woman (1974)
Directed by Vincent McEveety
USA 1974
Warner Archive DVD Region 1

Wonder Woman, the 1974 TV movie (yeah, unsold pilot in sheep’s clothing), was not the first attempt at trying to put William Moulton Marston's iconic character on screen. Around the time of the hit 1960s Batman TV show, a short pilot had been made for executives to consider green lighting it, very much in the campy, comedy mode of the Adam West show. The general public never saw that attempt though, until it surfaced more than a couple of decades ago on YouTube but, this 1974 version starring Cathy Lee Crosby as the titular character was seen by the public, who largely ignored it, I think and, having now finally seen it for myself, I can fully understand why.

This was, however, the first time Warner Brothers had attempted to translate their newly acquired DC comics to the screen and, in the US, it aired as one of many weekly mystery movies on ABC television under the umbrella collective of The Wide World Of Mystery (I believe The Night Strangler, the second of the Carl Kolchak TV movies was ushered in on the same weekly show and was also part of this three year run... Kolchak reviews coming later this year).  In the UK, however, it just happened to air one Saturday afternoon when I, the writer of this blog was, alas, a six year old on holiday somewhere like Eastbourne or Bournemouth and, when we got to the flat we were staying in that week, we caught about ten minutes of it on the television there... I was very annoyed I’d missed it because we hadn’t bought the TV papers that week since, heck, we were away on holiday. Also, it’s not like I could’ve videotaped it then either. Home video recorders weren’t available on the commercial market as yet and certainly we’d never heard of them (and wouldn’t know about them for over another decade). So I’m glad to be finally catching up with what I missed all those years ago... it kind of feels like an outstanding box has been ticked. Which makes it even more of a shame that it’s really not very good.

Okay, so this was produced at a time when, in the comics, Wonder Woman had been revamped and had all her powers taken away so she was just an espionage agent. By the time this aired in the US, DC had cottoned on to how badly they’d treated their character and reinstated all her powers and original mythology. This pilot seems to be a compromise in that, apart from a special introduction to the character on Paradise Island, where she goes out into the world of men because mankind needs her, she also has no special powers... just gadgets and it makes you wonder why the world of men needed this blonde version of Wonder Woman at all.

The brief island scene acts as a kind of pointer to the character’s origins and also sets up a character called Ahnjayla (played by Anitra Ford), who is obviously going to be the heroine’s equally un-superpowered but combat skilled nemesis in the outside world. And then, quick as a flash, we cut to the fact that Wonder Woman, under the guise of Diana Prince, has somehow immediately landed a job under Steve Trevor (played by Kaz Garas, in a performance which is possibly memorable for all the wrong reasons), for a top government intelligence agency. He seems to half know Diana is Wonder Woman, looking the other way when she stays off work for the dentist to go out into the field, where she keeps him apprised of her progress on the case (obviously, this is what you always do with your secretaries). But that’s okay, because all the villains, even when she’s out of her unusual looking Wonder Woman jumpsuit, also know exactly who she is. I guess that’s why she doesn’t try to disguise herself in any way when she’s Diana... um, yeah, I was already ten minutes in and I didn’t know what the heck was going on.

The plot revolves around a villain, played quite charmingly by Ricardo Montalban... and his partner, played with no charm at all by Andrew Prine... who have stolen top secret books from five countries listing the identities of all their secret agencies, which he is trying to ransom back to the American government. Um... one has to wonder why the whole plot exists because, once somebody has those names, surely you can’t trust any villain to not tell anyone he likes. It’s a strange plot suited to more innocent times, I suspect... or at least innocent in TV land where such things made sense in the early 1970s, I guess.

And the rest of the film is just Cathy Lee Crosby using her espionage gadgets and cunning to foil the plan. She does mention her invisible plane so that was obviously, like Ahnjayla (whom she has a fight with later in this film), be something which was supposed to feature in future episodes. But her superpowers are definitely out of the running as she has to do things like get a waiter to bring a saucer of milk to her hotel room so that the deadly snake attached to her leg would be tempted to go for a drink... or try and shove her way out of a compressing room death trap (which at least looks good as it’s got red, beige and blue mud running down the walls and seems quite spectacular for a villainous device). Also, Wonder Woman does wear her bracelets but she can’t catch bullets with them... instead, they hold a wristwatch, can act as a tracker and also be set to explode as required. So, yeah, this is not Wonder Woman as she was in the 1940s, nor as she is today. The musical score is not nearly as brilliant as the 1975 TV show either... really quite unmemorable, it has to be said.

Now, Cathy Lee Crosby is actually quite good in this... or at least as charming as Ricardo Montalban and it’s a bad break for her, I think, that she was landed with such a bad script and, certainly in terms of the character’s super powers, a budget which would never do justice to them anyway. But she’s bright and efficient and has a nice smile. She looks the part, even though that part is a severely compromised ghost of the character she could have been. Apparently, a young hopeful actress called Lynda Carter auditioned for this part but was rejected... I guess she had better luck the second time round a year later, when the version of Wonder Woman which made her into a household name was set in motion (and you can read my review of the Lynda Carter show here).

And there’s really not much else to say about this one. All the logistics of the way the character interacts with those around her in this version of Wonder Woman seem hasty and ill thought out. Not too much of it holds up to any kind of scrutiny and there’s not much to offer from the show that you couldn’t see in any other espionage themed show of the 1970s, in vehicles such as Charlie’s Angels or A Man Called Sloane. If you are interested in the character of Wonder Woman and how she evolved in her TV and cinematic forms, then this is an important one to watch for sure... but you’ll probably be more than just a little disappointed in it. For everyone else, well, it’s really not got all that much going for it, it’s sad to say.