TV Tuesday: The Flame Is Love 1979
Forty years ago, today, the television film The Flame Is Love aired on NBC. Based on the Barbara Cartland novel of the same name, it starred Linda Purl, Shane Briant, Timothy Dalton, Richard Johnson and Joan Greenwood. Directed and co-produced by Michael O’Herlihy, it was written by Hindi Brooks (teleplay) and filmed in Ireland.
Synopsis from The Movie Database:
This sudsy made-for-TV melodrama is based on a Barbara Cartland novel and follows the romantic exploits of an American heiress who sets sail for exciting Paris at the turn-of-the-century. She is traveling there to meet her fiance but, ends up falling in love with a French journalist.
Synopsis from the actual novel:
Reluctant to accept her arranged marriage to an English Duke she has never met, beautiful, young, American oil heiress, Emmeline Nevada Holtz, nicknamed “Vada” after the state, travels to Paris to buy her trousseau before meeting her husband-to-be. When her travelling companion, Nancy Sparling, has an accident and hurts her leg, Vada assumes her name to avoid unwelcome attention. [She] travels on with just her elderly maid, determined to make the most of her last chance to explore Bohemian Paris and, the wonders of the city that she had heard and read so much about. At her hotel she finds a handsome intruder in her suite, not a thief as she at first thinks but, a journalist looking to interview the famous heiress Emmeline. Smitten by this charismatic Frenchman and his talk of poetry, Vada finds herself agreeing to go with him to the Soleil d’Or, wellspring of the Symbolist movement. Soon, they are deeply and uncontrollably in love, a love that is surely doomed by her deception, her betrothal to the Duke and, now, a terrifying ordeal at a Satanist Black Mass on the dark side of the City of Light.
Timothy Dalton’s character Marquis de Guaita is based on Stanislas de Guaita, the founder of Kabbalistic Order of the Rose-Cross (Rosicrucians).
The Complete Movie
Cosmic-Observation 
October 16, 2019 at 2:57 AM
I don’t think I’ve ever heard of this one. I’m sure it’s the sort of show my mum would have watched.
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October 16, 2019 at 8:17 PM
I hadn’t heard of it, either. It’s got some creepy parts.
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October 16, 2019 at 11:37 PM
I don’t know this one but when I see Timothy Dalton I think of one thing…Bond….James Bond.
I remember Elizabeth Montgomery in some TV movies back in the 70s that were pretty good.
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October 17, 2019 at 1:17 AM
These days, when I see Dalton, I think Rassilon. Heh.
I remember Montgomery in TV movies. After Bewitched, I wasn’t that fond of her.
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October 17, 2019 at 9:36 AM
She was in one… where she said something…or someone said something like… every step you take ….is one less step you will take in life…a physical step…the character died not long after that. I want to find that one again. Your post which had NOTHING to do with it made me think of it.
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October 17, 2019 at 3:26 PM
Was it in one of the Edna Buchanan films?
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