I had no idea this series was on Prime. Thanks, OP.
I watched an episode regarded in some quarters as a priceless camp artifact: season 1 episode 20, "I Will Be Remembered." I'd always heard about it but never seen it.
Ida Lupino plays a half-forgotten, somewhat eccentric golden-age movie star named Gloria (GET IT?) who is planning a comeback. One of her movies is being remade, and she is up for the role of the mother, having originally played the daughter. She really needs the work, because she's close to losing her Hollywood mansion. Her husband, a gambler named Nicky (smaller "Get it?"), died a year ago and left her in debt. Now Gloria is seeing terrifying visions that correspond to scenes in her movies, such as a dead body hanging from a tree in the garden, another corpse in the bathtub, a child's severed hand. (If that last one was a scene from a movie in this universe's Hollywood golden age, someone at the Breen office must have been napping.)
Gloria calls on her friend Charlie, who sends Sabrina, Kelly, and Jill to investigate. Is Gloria going insane, or is she being terrorized by someone who wants her to think she's insane?
Seemingly everyone in the episode is familiar with Gloria's entire filmography. We keep hearing titles and plot summaries. (Kelly, her face lighting up at a mention of "The Sodbusters": "I remember seeing that, too! She played a rancher's wife. She survived cholera, a gunshot wound, a cattle stampede -- she's a very heavy lady!").
There are all the expected scenes. Gloria returns to the studio in a Rolls, and the old guy at the gate is delighted to see her. Disreputable-looking guys on the movie set get all twitchy when they see these beautiful broads asking questions, and start whispering to each other right out in the open like amateurs. There's an attempt to kill someone with a falling stage-light. Kelly works as an extra on the movie, which is a good way of getting the T&A into an episode with no bikini scenes.
Even though she lived for almost 20 years more, this was Lupino's penultimate acting appearance. Angels producer Barney Rosenzweig later claimed she was having memory problems and that it was a struggle even getting enough from her to patch together a satisfactory performance. I can believe Rosenzweig's account, as there is an uneven, effortful quality to Lupino's performance, but she is endearing. Kate Jackson has a nice rapport with her.
Lupino was 58-59 when she shot this episode, and the character seems in that ballpark too, judging from the biographical data we hear. But pushing-60 comes across as much older here, in television from 1977, than is usually the case today. Ida/Gloria is younger than present-day actresses such as Michelle Yeoh, Julianne Moore, Frances McDormand, and Tilda Swinton, but the Angels interact with her more as if she's 85-90.
I hadn't seen any Charlie's Angels in years, and while I remembered that Sabrina was the smart one, I'm trying to recall if Jill was always "the dumb one." There's a scene here in which she snoops around the studio lot and asks questions of an employee, and she's way behind the viewer in her reactions to his answers. Did Fawcett/Jill always get the stereotypical writing for gorgeous blondes, and did this carry over to Cheryl Ladd's Kris when she filled that spot?
