Review of The Screaming Woman

For some reason I kept seeing Helen Hayes in the role played here by Olivia de Havilland. She is a wealthy woman who claims to have heard screams from a body buried in the grounds of her estate. When she reports this to her family, they seize on the chance to have the old girl certified and to take control of her fortune. Can she get to the truth before she ends up in a padded cell? I liked her performance here. For a star of this calibre to play a scatty, and frankly unglamorous, elderly woman showed a skill and a courage that few of her peers would ever have tried to do. Joseph Cotton also joined in the mystery and, along with the imperious Walter Pidgeon, helped generate a frequently amusing and engaging thriller. The writing is a bit ropey and the ending is shocking - it really lets the whole thing down - but as television movies go, this moves along well for just over the hour and is quite entertaining.