Pilot

I can easily understand how "Longstreet" could be made into an installment of "The ABC Movie of the Week", though how this could become a weekly TV series is beyond me...which might explain why the series wasn't successful and only lasted a season. It's sad because the pilot movie actually is pretty good.

When the movie begins, Mike Longstreet (James Franciscus) and his wife are blown up! She is killed and Mike is left permanently blinded. Much of the film consists of him coming to terms with his blindness and then learning to adapt to life. Most of this is very interesting. However, the show also included Mike investigating the explosion, as he's an insurance investigator. This was a HUGE weak point in the plot, as this blind man seemed to have almost magical powers...and the arrest of the culprits happened off camera--and they tell Mike about it after the fact. This is a seriously bad way to do it, as there's no suspense...none.

Overall, worth seeing but the notion of week after week of Mike investigating crimes blind...well, it just doesn't make a lot of sense.

Mike Longstreet is blinded and his wife killed by a bomb hidden in a champagne bottle. He goes to a luxurious sanitarium run by Dr. Dan Stockman for rehabilitation and training. Understandably, he becomes obsessed with finding who killed his wife and rightly assumes he was the real target. His boss Duke Paige tells Mike about a major jewel robbery and that other similar robberies occurred in other cities. In a very clever bit of detective work, Mike figures out the gimmick used by the thieves to gain access to the jewels. With assistance of his Braille teacher, Nikki Bell, Mike decides to continue his career as investigator for the Great Pacific Insurance Company. Particularly noteworthy in the cast is Jeannette Nolan as Mike's mother and John McIntyre as Dr. Stockman. Baynard Kendrick is acknowledged in the credits as the creator of the characters. Kendrick's blind detective Duncan Maclain (first appearing in the late 1930s) was portrayed by Edward Arnold in two wonderful movies. But the first famous blind detective was the English Max Carrados who was featured in a number of highly popular short stories written by Ernest Bramah starting in 1914.

This movie does double duty as a pilot, and right there might be its problem, because the mystery into which the blind detective is entwined starts off provocatively, and then gets dropped. In the end, it's just another pedestrian made-for-TV pilot, but the plot of the mystery should be resurrected for another movie, this time sticking with the intriguing premise. My vote for the movie they actually made: 5/10.