timlucero I watched In a Stranger's Hand before Shakma on Christmas eve and enjoyed it. I remember when I first watched this on Lifetime and Shakma on either Showtime, HBO, or Cinamax after I graduated from highschool. This was the first movie that I became familiar with Brett Cullen and then was Prehysteria, Complex of Fear, and Apollo 13. Plus, I like watching Megan Gallagher and others too.

hnt_dnl I've commented on a lot of big-screen films, but this is the first TV movie I've commented on and there's a reason. It's one of the few that I still take time to watch when it comes on today. They usually show it on Lifetime nowadays b/c I guess it is seen as some sort of 'female' movie. I saw it when it first came out in the late 80s and have always liked it. It contains IMHO the best performance of the late Robert Urich's career. And I liked him in just about everything he did.Urich plays Jack Bauer (that's right!) a successful, normal, rather average computer executive who seemingly has the quintessential life: a great job, a woman he loves, money, and a group of co-workers and employees who adore him. But there's a kind of emptiness and loneliness about him. Bauer used to be a promising football player in college, but he blew his knee out and it killed his dream of playing pro. Bauer is big and burly-looking on the surface, but he's really a pussycat (he wears glasses, is very polite and professional, and rather nerdy). It's amazing that the man who played tough guys Dan Tanna on Vegas and Spenser (what the hell was his first name?) on Spenser for Hire can be so utterly convincing as a nerdy computer geek, but he pulls it off.The movie is about a poor, working-class waitress whose little girl has been kidnapped and she has been posting flyers of her daughter's photo around town. The woman is played by Megan Gallagher, an actress I remember quite well from the 80s who had always played more sexpot type characters. But here she is cast against type and is very effective as an ordinary (but still quite attractive) single mom.Bauer sees the girl on subway (with another woman that he mistakes for her mother) and notices the flyer also after she disappears and when girl leaves her doll, he tries to get it to her. Social services makes him think the girl has been found, so when he tries to return it, the real mother has him arrested thinking he knows about the kidnapping. Everything is straightened out immediately, but b/c Bauer is the only one who has seen her daughter, she enlists his help to find her. After a series of confrontations, he reluctantly agrees.This movie is just one that I like to watch whenever it comes on. It is primarily a mystery, but also it has elements of social class divisions (Bauer is successful, the waitress is not), the opposites-attract theory between Bauer and the waitress, and 2 characters that the viewer really likes, gets to know, and root for. Mainly, I liked the fact that they never forgot about the prime mission of these 2 people: to find the little girl before it was too late. But I still wanted them to get together in the end. Yet I think the ending was well done and appropriate. I know that Robert Urich was not some big shot Hollywood A-lister or even the biggest TV actor, but I always remember liking him in virtually everything he did. And this is the best thing he ever did for me.REST IN PEACE MR. URICH.

sol1218 ***SPOILERS*** After having a spat with his girlfriend Kate, Isabella Hofmann, over a trip that they planned to go on to Antigua computer whiz and software specialist Jack Bauer's, Robert Urich,bad luck continues to follow him when he can't get to his car, because it's locked up in a local garage,and takes the subway home. Watching a woman and her daughter on the train Jack, after they both exit the subway car, spots a poster for a missing four year-old child right in back of him and it's the little girl that he just saw. Like in an Alfred Hitchcock thriller Jack Bauer becomes an innocent bystander who get's caught up with something that he at first doesn't understand and later almost costs him his life. Trying to report the missing girl to the Child Recovery Foundation, that issued the poster, Jack at first finds out that the girl Carla McKillin, Erica Dill,is no longer missing and when he goes to her mom's Laura, Megen Gallagher, apartment to return Cala's doll, that she dropped on the subway, he's attacked by the mother and her neighbors thinking that he kidnapped little Carla and was trying to get a ransom in return for her.Jack at the police station, with Laura, gets in touch with the Child Recovery Foundation and is told that Carla is indeed still missing and that her name was somehow removed from their computer. At first hesitant but then working together with Laura Jack tracks down the woman who he saw with Carla on the subway Amanda Johnson, Christine Danford, at a local bar outside the sixth street station that she got off at with Carla. On dope and terrified of what she knew about not only Carla but scores of other young children, who disappeared over the years, the same way that little Carla did Amanda is later found dead in her hotel room from an overdose that her drug supplier forced on her. As Jack starts to check out, by computer, the movements of Amanda during the time that she had Carla with her he finds out that she was being treated for drug addiction at the local St. James Hosiptal. Amanda scrawled the name St. James on a mirror with lipstick as she was dying. Putting all the evidence together Jack soon realizes that Carla was the victim of a major child and baby selling racket that was using as a front the very agency that was supposed to track down and find missing children; non other then the Child Recovery Foundation.Though guy Robert Urich really gets a worker-over in "And Then She Was Gone" as he gets belted and beaten, what a shiner he got early in the film, at least three different times in three different scenes as he's chased and then chases the kidnapper of Carla through the subway system and the airport on a plane headed for the UK. Tense stand off on the plane as Jack and Laura force themselves on trying to rescue little Carla from her kidnapper before the aircraft goes airborne. A bit overdone ending didn't take away any of the suspense and excitement from the rest of the film and the final scene was truly uplifting with Jack and Kate reunited and back together again after she came back home from her vacation, minus Jack, in Antigua. After all the dangers thrills and excitement that Jack went through in the movie there's nothing on the trip and vacation with Kate that he passed up, and almost destroyed their relationship,that could equal what he went through back at home.

rsoonsa In a film made for television, Robert Urich portrays Jack Bauer, a comfortable corporate executive in the field of computer software manufacturing who unwillingly finds himself amidst an attempt to locate a missing girl whose photograph upon a poster he viewed in a subway, along with the child herself and her apparent kidnapper, after Jack is excluded from access to his automobile that is locked inside of a parking garage following a late work meeting, requiring him to use a public mode of transport. When he returns a doll dropped by the little girl, Carla, to her distressed mother Laura (Megan Gallagher), the latter pleads for his assistance with such fervour that, alien as such altruistic activity is to him, he reluctantly joins with her in a persistent attempt to find Carla, whereupon the pair discover that a rash of similar kidnappings is occurring throughout their city and soon Jack and Laura are privy to knowledge of a conspiracy involving selling of children. Despite reliance in the screenplay upon melodrama, continuity issues are few and a great deal of the dialogue is quite realistic and made even more so by skillful performances from cast members, notably the talented Gallagher, as well as from Urich, Isabella Hofmann, and Christine Dunford who contributes a topflight turn as a lady of the evening coerced into a child vending operation. Production values are pleasingly strong for the piece that is ably directed by David Greene to create an atmosphere of suspense with a dash of humour and a delightfully ambiguous ending, and the work also profits from an appropriate score from Peter Manning Robinson, burnished cinematography of Stevan Larner, and adroit set design by Steve Legner, all to the end of creating a film wherein attention to details generally counters well any clichés.