When a milquetoast junior high science teacher is trapped in a life-threatening situation, he discovers he not only possesses the extranormal power of telekinesis, but that he is also half extra-terrestrial in the 1977 NBC Movie of the Week The Man with the Power.
This virtually forgotten telefilm aired May 24, 1977, kicking off NBC’s Tuesday night as a ‘movie of the week’ offering (Not a re-run! as proclaimed by the print ads.) The network had finished its regular season of Tuesday night shows Baa Baa Black Sheep and Police Woman and was airing some TV movies before going into summer reruns. The prior week, viewers had been treated to the second Man from Atlantis movie, The Death Scouts. This week, they were in for a cheesy treat written and produced by Allan Balter.
28-year-old Eric Smith is walking home from his teaching job and cuts across a railyard. Stopping to pick up a turtle struggling to climb over a train track, he gets stuck himself when his foot is wedged in the switching mechanism. With a train engine on its way to pick up rail cars bearing his direction; he screams at the engine to STOP and it does – even though the engineer had not thrown the brakes. He then passes out from the stress.
Eric is called to Washington by old family friend Walter Bloom (Tim O’Connor), who was head of a government agency for strategic research. He is told a three-decade-old story about an alien that had been assigned a five-year research mission on earth and fathered a child with a human woman while here. (I guess even aliens can’t be expected to remain celibate for five years.) The child, of course, was Eric who has evidently inherited some of his father’s powers. Initially incredulous, Eric allows Bloom to conduct tests on him and explain how his power works.
Eric progresses from barely able to move a marble to playing chess telekinetically in a matter of weeks. His power is visually represented by a close-up of his pupils contracting. When he happens by a construction site, he disintegrates a falling wall of concrete before it crushes some children below. Now afraid of his own power, he quits the research, not wanting to develop it further. When an alien from his father’s planet appears to him holographically, he is given a pep talk and is now gung ho to help the world with his gifts.
His first assignment is to protect Princess Siri, the daughter of a Sultan of a middle eastern island nation visiting the US. The two of course hit it off, but she is kidnapped. The second half of the movie deals with the ransom for ONE MILLION DOLLARS (cue Dr. Evil) in gold and the complicated ransom exchange scheme which turns out to be just a pretext for robbing all the gold from the Federal Reserve bank of L.A. out from under the government’s nose. If that sounds all ‘Mission: Impossible’ to you, keep reading.
The titular ‘man with the power’ was virtually unknown Texas actor Bob Neill. The former newspaper photographer had left Tyler, Texas for Hollywood and had gotten signed with Universal as a contract actor. They put him to work appearing on Baa Baa Black Sheep, episodes of The Six Million Dollar Man, and a couple of TV movies. This was his first lead role, which made the paper back home. Following Power, he wasn’t in many more roles in front of the camera. But when he appeared as the baseball announcer on 1988’s Everybody’s All-American, this marked a shift in his career. Neill now works as a voice actor and does a lot of ‘looping,’ where dialogue is replaced or recreated in post-production.
Tim O’Connor was his co-star, best known as either Elliott Carson on Peyton Place or Dr. Huer from Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, depending on your age. O’Connor also had genre appearances on Wonder Woman, Knight Rider, and Star Trek: The Next Generation. Speaking of Star Trek, Persis Khambatta also appears as Princess Siri in her US TV debut. Khambatta, known as the ‘Sophia Loren of India,’ was popular in her native country, but unknown to American audiences. Born in Bombay, she happened into a modeling career at age 13, held the 1968 Miss India title and had appeared in Bollywood films. At age 29, even though she was playing an Indian princess, she hoped the NBC TV movie role would help her break some of the Indian stereotypes, telling the press, “True, that’s the role I play opposite Bob Neill, but there are many scenes that allow me to get out of my sari as I visit America and fall in love with my bodyguard – the man with the power.” Khambatta is perhaps best known to American audiences for the role she would play in 1979’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture as Lieutenant Ilia. Rounding out the cast was veteran actor Vic Morrow as the heavy and a young John DeLancie (Star Trek’s ‘Q’) in one of his first acting roles.
The funky music score by the accomplished Pat Williams makes me wonder if it influenced Dana Kaproff when he did the music for the second season of CBS’s Amazing Spider-Man the following year, especially the background guitar riffs heard during episodes. Pat Williams has over 200 film and TV credits, and by this time had composed themes for Bill Bixby’s The Magician, The Streets of San Francisco, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and The Bob Newhart Show.
As I often say, here’s where it gets interesting. If you’re a classic genre TV fan, you might note this telefilm shares a title a 1963 episode of The Outer Limits in which a mild-mannered college professor gains the power of telekinesis following a brain operation-to the chagrin of his domineering wife. Although that particular Outer Limits episode was not written by him, Allan Balter had a connection to The Outer Limits.
Allan Balter, who had begun his entertainment industry career in the mailroom at 20th Century Fox, had been one of the ‘Six Bright Young Men’ of Leslie Stevens’ Daystar production company. As the head of publicity, he was involved with both Stoney Burke and The Outer Limits, credited with penning two episodes of that classic series. (The now-classic The Mutant, and The Hundred Days of the Dragon, for those keeping track.) Balter formed a writing partnership with William Woodfield in 1964 and the pair wrote episodes for all the Irwin Allen series as well as Mission: Impossible, being hired as script consultants for that show. Balter was offered the supervising producer role on the second season of Space: 1999 but turned it down. Instead, Balter came on as a producer on the fourth season of The Six Million Dollar Man, staying through the end of the series. During his time on that series, he wrote and produced The Man with the Power.
Watching this 1977 telefilm, you will see that Balter attempted to not only scientifically explain a mechanism for how telekinesis would work, but he also establishes real-world rules for its use. (Likely influenced by his stint on Six Million Dollar Man, where creator Kenneth Johnson set very specific limits on the bionic abilities of characters.) One ‘rule’ was that Eric must have visual contact with the object being manipulated or moved, which meant his power wouldn’t work in total darkness. These rules later showed up on the 1982 series The Powers of Matthew Star, whose (second) pilot episode was partially written by Balter, who also was intended to be the series supervising producer.
Matthew Star was an alien prince who had escaped to earth with his mentor (who took the name Walter Shepherd – a call-back to 1977’s Power) when their planet Quadris was attacked by an intergalactic armada. The series endured a long and troubled production history and was delayed an entire year by a writer’s strike followed by a stunt accident when star Peter Barton was badly burned during the filming of Balter’s pilot episode. Another factor contributing to the delay was when Allan Balter himself unexpectedly died from a heart attack during pre-production at age 56, causing executive producer Harve Bennett to scramble for a replacement. Matthew Star finally made it to NBC’s fall season in 1982 but didn’t last more than a season.
Asking Bob Neill for a comment about working with Mr. Balter, he responded, “In my experience, he was a very sweet and kind man. Incredibly likable, generous with his time, and very easy to work with. He was loyal to his ‘good luck charms’ which were character actors he used frequently, particularly if they had done successful pilots with him before. On a personal level, I was devastated to hear of his passing.”
Allan Balter’s other work included writing the 1971 TV movie Earth II and producing the 1979 CBS Captain America TV movies. Yes, it was the age of the TV movie pilot, and the late ‘70s were full of these efforts to kick-start a series. Had The Man with the Power gone to series, Eric would doubtless have gone on weekly missions for the government ala Steve Austin. Star Bob Neill told me cryptically “Our show was a victim of studio/network politics and never got off the ground.” Instead, NBC picked a different hero for that fall when Man from Atlantis was given a series. (“It’s the mudworm! And it’s headed straight for us!”)
NBC reran Power in October, and in 1980 it must have been released in a syndication package because it peppers local TV listings across the country for the next decade before it was picked up by cable networks in the 90s. It utterly disappeared in 1997, locked away in Universal’s vault, never to be seen again. I’m hoping it wasn’t burned up in their 2008 fire, which not only claimed half a million master recordings from music artists across multiple decades, but also an estimated 40-50,000 copies of their film and television catalog.
The Man with the Power has never been released on any form of home video in the US and was never picked up by any streaming service. The only video I’m able to find is of a French language broadcast with English subtitles, which is embedded here, so you can check out this ‘70s obscurity.
Forgotten TV Movies is a column that will regularly consider made-for-TV movies of the 70s/80s of various genres. Oh, the places we’ll go and the sights we’ll see.
