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Friday, August 7, 2015

CERTAIN HONORABLE MEN: Alexandra Moltke's other TV credit


Alexandra Moltke's acting career wasn't limited to DARK SHADOWS, but it might as well have been.

A few months before she left the series, she appeared on a television movie titled CERTAIN HONORABLE MEN. The film launched Prudential's On Stage series of made-for-television movies, and starred Van Heflin and Peter Fonda. Better yet, it had a screenplay written by Rod Serling.

The movie aired Sept. 12, 1968, on NBC and promptly vanished from the cultural landscape. Despite its pedigree, CERTAIN HONORABLE MEN has essentially been lost to the sands of time. It doesn't appear to have ever been released on video, and what little information I was able to find about the movie was limited to newspaper ephemera and footnotes in books about Serling's career. I can tell you where to find original copies of Serling's drafts of his screenplay, but wasn't able to track down a single photo of it that didn't look like a Rorschach blot. (UPDATE: An OK promotional photo from the telefilm has surfaced. You can see it below.)

Prudential's On Stage is mostly a forgotten relic, as well. The title suggests it was either a live broadcast, or taped live, but online records cast little cast light on the nature of the series.

What's interesting, though, is that the one-time "Victoria Winters" was billed in CERTAIN HONORABLE MEN by her married name, Alexandra Isles. Meanwhile, over at DARK SHADOWS, she was still being credited as "Alexandra Moltke" as late as her final episode ... which was taped about two months after CERTAIN HONORABLE MEN was broadcast.

Below are a handful of 1968 newspaper clippings about the television movies, one of which features a nice caricature of Moltke/Isles in character as secretary "Betty Jo Daly." If you know anything else about the movie (or if you remember watching it) feel free to tell me about it in the comments section below.


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