Crawlspace (CBS, Titan Productions, 1972)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night, when my husband Charles and I got home from the organ concert in Balboa Park, we watched a YouTube post of the 1972 film Crawlspace, the third of three TV movies Jerry Goldsmith wrote scores for between 1968 and 1972 that are represented on a new Intrada Records CD I’ve been assigned to review for Fanfare magazine. The other two are Pursuit (1972), a dull wanna-be “thriller” directed by Michael Crichton from a novel called Binary he wrote as “John Lange”; and The People Next Door (1968), a marvelous melodrama about a suburban family who discovers that their seemingly innocent 16-year-old daughter is into drugs and casual sex. Crawlspace is a horror-tinged thriller whose central characters are senior-citizen couple Albert and Alice Graves (Arthur Kennedy and Teresa Wright), who have retired to a small town in upstate New York and bought a house there. Unbeknownst to them, a troubled young man named Richard Roy Adley (Tom Happer) is secretly living in the crawlspace under their house. The Graveses hear tell-tale noises that alert them to the fact that the crawlspace is occupied by an uninvited house guest. When they finally discover Richard, they actually invite him in, largely because though they’ve been together for decades they never had children of their own and therefore their parental instincts, unfulfilled all this time, have kicked into high gear. Richard is mostly taciturn, though occasionally the Graveses are able to get him talking at least in monosyllables. He explains that before he moved into their crawlspace, he was living in a literal cave about a mile or so away.

Crawlspace wasn’t especially good at first – the Graveses’ Good Samaritan act was just too unbelievable – but the film, directed by John Newland and an uncredited Buzz Kulik from a script by Ernest Kinoy (best known for having adapted Alex Haley’s Roots into the classic TV miniseries) based on a novel by Herbert Lieberman, got better as it progressed. Richard is shown chopping firewood for the Graveses’ home, thereby establishing that he’s a mean man with an ax, and he gradually builds enough trust with the Graveses that they send him to the local general store (this town isn’t big enough for a supermarket and the store is in a building so seedy-looking that at first Charles thought Richard was ripping off the Graveses and using their money to buy drugs) with a $20 bill and a long shopping list which Richard has memorized. (Charles, who works at a grocery store, was amazed at how much $20 could buy in 1972 – and people thought inflation was a bitch then.) Unfortunately, Harlow (Dan Morgan) lets his two young assistants, Dave Freeman (Matthew Cowles) and Wheeler (Fleet Emerson), wait on Richard – which they refuse to do. Instead they ignore him, wait on customers who arrived after he did, steal his $20 and then claim they never got it. Richard tells all this to the Graveses, and Albert responds by reporting the incident to the local sheriff, Emil Birge (Eugene Roche). But Birge, who’s known Dave and Wheeler all their lives, treats the incident with a boys-will-be-boys dismissal. Albert confronts Harlow, who takes Dave’s and Wheeler’s side and blows off the incident. Richard is upset enough that he sneaks out in the dead of night, breaks into Harlow’s store, and vandalizes it. Albert lies for Richard and tells Sheriff Birge he was home all night, later rationalizing it to his wife by saying Birge would have killed Richard if Albert had let the sheriff know where Richard was.

Dave and Wheeler target Richard for further harassment – we’re never told why they’re so down on Richard, though we got a clue earlier when Sheriff Birge complained to Albert about all the kids who came to town to attend the nearby college, then dropped out, stayed in town, hung out and gave the town a drug problem. Richard is out driving the Graveses’ car when Dave, Wheeler, and a third friend of theirs identified in the cast list only as “Blond Hoodlum” (Dean Tait), bash into the rear end repeatedly and try to drive him off the road. Once again Albert tries to report the damage, and Sheriff Birge covers for the kids and tells Albert there’s no harm done since his insurance will pay for the repairs. Ultimately Dave, Wheeler and “Blond Hoodlum” show up at the Graveses’ home and, at least to me, lt looked like they intended to burn it down with Richard and the Graveses all inside. Richard confronts Dave with the ax and kills him, and in a final scene that was set up when Richard told the Graveses that even people who pretended to be his friends ultimately turned against him and betrayed him, Richard attacks Alice Graves. To save his wife, Albert pulls out a small gun he’s kept in storage and shoots him dead, but the stress of the whole situation triggers Albert’s bad heart (it was because he had a heart condition that he and his wife moved to the country in the first place) and he dies, too.

Charles remembered a TV-movie he’d seen called Bad Ronald (1974), in which the crazed teen protagonist was a young man named Ronald Wilby (Scott Jacoby) who one night accidentally killed his girlfriend’s sister, and his mom Elaine (Kim Hunter) covered for him by helping him build a secret entrance to one room in their house where he could live without fear of being discovered and arrested. Then mom died and her heirs, having no idea that someone was still living there, sold the house and the new couple who moved in started getting evidence that someone else was inhabiting the place. There’s a direct connection between Crawlspace and Bad Ronald in that Buzz Kulik, the uncredited “ghost director” on Crawlspace, got the full-out directorial credit for Bad Ronald from the get-go. Crawlspace seemed to me to be a prototype for all the Lifetime movies, especially the ones with the title, “Girl in the … .” One could readily imagine a Lifetime producer remaking it today, though Lifetime’s writers would probably change the person living in the crawlspace from a man to a woman, make her the kidnap victim of a long-forgotten man who stuck her in the crawlspace and let her out only to get food, and made the couple who owned the house at least middle-aged instead of senior citizens. Jerry Goldsmith supplied quite a good score for Crawlspace, though it’s a functional score used to build up the emotion of already intense scenes rather than to stand out on its own.