Movie Review - Wonder Woman (1974)

Wonder Woman

1974

Production Companies:  Warner Bros. Television

So this was a different take on the Wonder Woman mythos, opting to go with a blonde version of the Amazonian Goddess.  This may have been because Cathy Lee Cosby might not have wanted to die her hair for the part or don a wig.  Whatever the case may be she does an amiable job as Diana Prince and I would've watched a series with her as Wonder Woman, it's a shame the script wasn't too brilliant, it was your average fair for '74.  Also, gone is the iconic and eye-popping costume to be replaced with a modified track suit. 

I like Warner's and McEveety's decision to use Crosby since she was a major athlete at the time she could easily cope with the action scenes... which reduced the need to bring in a stuntman in a wig.  She's also a pretty decent actor and fit this version of the character well.  It would have been nice to have the fight scenes choreographed a little better and speeded up a tad, a few special effects wouldn't have gone amiss to show her strength, as was the case with the later series.

As for the other actors, there wasn't anything too spectacular about them.  Even though I do like Montalban a lot, he is very underused here.  In fact, I think that can be said of most, though, Andrew Prime does have a bit more power behind his performance.  This could all be down to McEveety's direction, who doesn't give us anything particularly new here,

Though Black sticks to the origin pretty well, things start to get messy once we're off Paradise Island.  We see Diana Prince working as a Secretary for Steve Trevor, though secretly she's the one they send in to get the job done.  So she's undercover in her own business.  What I found really great and funny was the fact that EVERBODY else appeared to know Diana Prince was Wonder Woman; this says a lot for her company - the only spies who didn't know her secret.  Even with this unintentional humour, Black does add some intentional humour to the story by incorporating a burro to bring the top secret plans to Abner Smith.  This is one well-trained Ass...  The other thing wrong with the script is the villains' names.  I, for one, do not find either Abner Smith or George Calvin particularly frightening or awe inspiring.  Calvin is a psychotic and cold blooded killer so it would have been nice for him to be given a more fearsome name or nick-name.  This is based on a comic after all and in the 70's they were filled with evil doers with weird pseudonyms.  The Joker wouldn't have been the same if he was called Melvin Phillips...

I think that if this had a better writer and director then the end product could have been so much better than this.  It might even have made a decent television series; though I'm glad it didn't as it probably would have meant we would have missed Lynda Carter in the role that is so iconic to her.  Though, as it stands it's not too bad and is okay for kids though with what's available today it looks and feels really dated, so they might baulk at watching it.  This is worth a watch if you're looking at Wonder Woman throughout the ages, which I'm doing.  Or, if you were a kid in the 70's and you want a little nostalgia.  Apart from that, I wouldn't really recommend it to anyone.