And the wacky housekeeper was busy putting booze in her bubbling brew while a dead woman was hidden in the basement. This is almost a single set movie, mainly the remote country home of the dead woman and her estranged husband, now the psychological prison of the woman's sister (Elizabeth Montgomery), unaware of what has happened, and frantically trying to find her. Boozy housekeeper Eileen Heckart has been fired and refuses to leave, and when the estranged husband (George Maharis) shows up, Montgomery begins to become more suspicious of what happened before she got there.

As Montgomery's first TV movie following the end of her eight year stint as Samantha on "Bewitched", this was a shocking twist for her fans to adjust to, a role without humor and her trademark twitch, exactly what she wanted to do with her career. She would go on to play mostly dark characters in her career, and as a basically nice person, she has to go to the dark side as she becomes embroiled with worry. Very young and extremely restless, a young Jess Walton shows promise in an early part as Montgomery's sister, hardly recognizable more than a decade before she went on to a lengthy daytime soap actress career. Maharis comes in late into the film, and ironically, it's never confirmed that he's the culprit, just highly assumed. Stealing every moment, Heckart adds grizzled humor as a witchy non-witch. She'd give an Oscar winning performance the same year in "Butterflies are Free", and easily could have gotten an Emmy for this. Spooky, intense fun, definitely a nail biting viewing experience.

I first saw The Victim (aka Out Of Contention) over 40 years ago when I was very young. Being a passionate fan of Bewitched since I was a child, I loved to watch anything that starred Elizabeth Montgomery. This movie was (and still is) a real treat - whether you are a fan of Miss Montgomery's work or not. Elizabeth always shines in her roles, such as her portrayal as the rape victim in A Case Of Rape and as the suspected murderess in The Legend Of Lizzie Borden. Her performance in The Victim as Kate, a terrified woman trapped in an isolated house during a storm with a killer after her, is brilliant. If you like exciting suspenseful thrillers than this is one movie that will keep you on the edge of your seat till the end. Another great performance well worth mentioning is that of Eileen Heckhart who plays the eerie and suspicious housekeeper. Unfortunately like most of Miss Montgomery's movies, The Victim is not available on DVD as far as I know and I believe that although it was released on VHS many years ago. I was lucky to have taped it when it was aired on television and so have a nice copy of this very good movie. A must see!

This relatively obscure "ABC movie of the Week" perhaps doesn't have the most groundbreaking or innovative plot ever penned down, and neither does it feature the most technologically advanced special effects, but Herschel Daugherty's "The Victim" does guarantee one majorly important thing, and that is good old-fashioned nail-biting suspense pretty much from the beginning until the very end! If I browse around and read the other user comments for this little gem, it seems as if many people originally saw the film on television when they were young, during its premiere in 1972 and still vividly remember how they were petrified. I can definitely relate to that, as "The Victim" features all the right ingredients to induce fear and disturbance: raging thunderstorms, power failures, cut off phone lines, unidentified footsteps upstairs, distressed damsels in remote countryside mansions, creepy old housekeepers and brief glimpses of dead bodies hidden in the basement! At home, in her luxurious apartment in San Francisco, Kate is terribly worried about her sister Susan. She lives far off in the country and announced that she was going to divorce her husband Ben. When she can't reach Susan on the phone, Kate decides to drive to her house even though there's a storm raging through the area. When she arrives at the house, Susan is missing and not even the nosy neighbor/housekeeper Mrs. Hawkes knows where she is. Now, the viewer already knows that Susan lies dead in the basement and that Kate is in great danger because her killer is still in the house. The storyline is thin and the climax is predictable, but that doesn't matter all that much because the atmosphere is non-stop unsettling and the acting performances are great. "The Victim" is basically a one-woman-show, with a stellar role for Elizabeth Montgomery in the lead. She's simultaneously strong and vulnerable, and her performance here is definitely on par with the terrific "The Legend of Lizzie Borden". There are also interesting supportive roles for the naturally creepy Eileen Heckart and Sue Ann Langdon (even though the latter only has two sequences and only has to talk into a phone).