Murder 1, Dancer 0

All the Joe Dancer TV movies feature the titular rather dated detective. Some have overly serious characters (The Big Black Pill), others have goofy characters (The Monkey Mission) and even one with solid characters (Murder 1, Dancer O). The first and third plots are good, while the second film is merely fair. So with the outdated TV movie detective, characters and plots taken into account, each film gets incrementally better over all. That makes this one; Murder 1, Dancer O [aka: The Big Trade] the best of the bunch.

Joe Dancer (Robert Blake) literally has his next case fall into his lap (actually, his windshield) when a pizza delivery boy is thrown onto his car. Dancer kills the 17-year-old boy, but his gumshoe ways have him suspicious from the outset and he starts to dig deeper. What he discovers is a interweaving story involving a Hollywood studio, a top star, and the porn biz.

The third Joe Dancer film, this is actually a great improvement over the first, mainly because it drops the femme fatale cliché and deals with something more contemporary for the time period. Having Blake deal with the decrepit underbelly of Hollywood is a nice change of pace, even if it is creepy hearing Blake talk about a big Hollywood star who killed someone. The action quotient has also been upped and there is a great car-versus-helicopter chase that features some scary moments where the actors being chased on foot look like they are a few feet from being sliced up. Like THE BIG BLACK PILL, there are tons of recognizable faces on display here including Kenneth McMillan, William Prince, Sam Anderson, Royal Dano, Harry Caesar, and Sydney Lassick (as a porn kingpin!).

On a side note, the IMDb has a listing for this under this title and also (incorrectly I assume) MURDER ONE, DANCER ZERO.