Posted in: ABC, streaming, TV | Tagged: Jack Klugman, One of My Wives is Missing, prime video, tv movie

One of My Wives Is Missing: TV's Forgotten Gem Begins with Great Title

One of My Wives is Missing is a forgotten TV movie gem from the '70s with a cult following whose thriller plot is endlessly remade even today.

One of My Wives is Missing is a relic from a forgotten era of the 1970s: the network TV movie. Back in the day, ABC, NBC, and CBS made movies for television every week, and some of them were actually very good. This one is a Hitchcockian thriller that still holds up and has a cult following amongst the people who saw it.

The late James Franciscus, a TV mainstay of the 1960s and 1980s, plays a man in a resort town who reports his wife missing after she stormed out from a fight they had. He goes home to discover a woman (Elizabeth Ashley) waiting for him, claiming to be his wife. Now he has to convince the increasingly annoyed cop (Jack Klugman from Quincy) that not only is she an imposter, but she and some shady guys are plotting something bad against him, like maybe murdering him for his money. What follows is a twisty, turny thriller as he tries to escape them and convince the police he's in danger. One of My Wives is Missing is the best "funny title" that sums up the plot of its story. It's also one of the archetypal twist-driven mystery plots ever written. It's no wonder there's a minor cult around it.

"One of My Wives is Missing" is the Mystery Plot That Wouldn't Die

One of My Wives is Missing is adapted from a popular 1960 French stage play called Trap for a Solitary Man by Robert Thomas that's largely forgotten but whose plot seems to endure even now. It was even a heavily rewritten 1969 TV movie called Honeymoon with a Stranger that starred Janet Leigh, star of Hitchcock's Psycho and Jamie Lee Curtis' mom.  One of My Wives is Missing, co-written by the playwright, hues closer to the play and was remade into another TV movie in 1986 called Vanishing Act starring Elliot Gould, and into a recent Russian feature film that has been remade into a major Chinese mystery thriller called Lost in the Stars that has opened this July in China to a $100 million opening weekend, which is more than can be said for either The Flash or Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. If you watch One of My Wives is Missing, you'll know what the answer to the mystery is, but compared to the later remakes, that original 1976 TV movie is still the best and most fun version of the story. It wouldn't be surprising if Netflix remade a version of it, but knowing Netflix, they probably wouldn't acknowledge the original version, so they don't have to pay for the rights.

One of My Wives is Missing is streaming on Prime.

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