The President's Mistress

Plot synopsis:
Donna Morton has been having an affair with the President of the United States for several months, regularly meeting with him for assignations in a safe house in Washington, D.C. She is always picked up in a car by a Secret Service agent.
In Moscow, an agent in the Kremlin manages to get hold of a secret document identifying Donna Morton as a KGB agent sent to spy on the president. This document is passed back to Washington, where it comes into the possession of the CSA (a thinly disguised version of the CIA). They begin to put Donna Morton under surveillance.
The same day, her brother Ben Morton – a Washington businessman and occasional courier for the CSA – arrived back in the city. On the plane he meets and romances Mugsy Evans. When Donna Morton suddenly turns up dead in her apartment moments before she was due to be picked up by her Secret Service driver, he begins to investigate.
He discovers her affair with the president, and through his contacts with the Secret Service, he discovers a CSA agent was seen leaving her apartment building around the time of his death. The Secret Service agent who regularly drove Donna, informs him that the CSA were there, but before any more information can be passed on, she is killed.
Realising now that the CSA had played a large role in her death, Ben Morton confronts the head of the CSA, who tells him it was the Soviets who killed her, and that she was a Soviet agent. He explains that the man who probably performed the deed was the head KGB agent in Washington, Anatoly.
Anatoly is the Soviet Naval Attaché who he interrogates at gunpoint in the car. He tells him everything he knows – that the classified document identifying Donna Morton as a Soviet agent was a fake, designed to throw the CSA off balance, which had always been intended to fall into American hands. The KGB had thus hoped to destabilise the White House during crucial talks with China.

Tags: murder

Review:
Where a lame script meets bad casting. THE PRESIDENT'S MISTRESS is a very dull American TV movie from 1978 focusing on a murder mystery involving the White House and the various security agencies (particularly the now-defunct CSA) as well as Russian spies. Unfortunately it takes an age to get going and the murder itself doesn't take place until at least halfway through which makes it a real slow to sit through, and the poor script means that it's often laughable rather than compelling.I was hoping for something exciting and suspenseful, along the lines of a Columbo story from the era perhaps, but what I got was mere nonsense. The best thing about this is the presence of director John Llewellyn Moxey, best known for the atmospheric Christopher Lee horror film CITY OF THE DEAD in 1960 and who worked extensively in American TV after that point. Beau Bridges is the indifferent lead and very boring in the part too; rather hilariously he's made out to be a heart-throb in one scene which makes me wonder if the role wasn't intended for his brother Jeff. Larry Hagman is here too, but sadly gets only a very minor and inconsequential role. There's a little bit of action in the second part of the tale, but too much of the screen time is occupied by a lame and cheesy romance in which Bridges comes off as a creepy stalker rather than endearing suitor.