Rehearsal for Murder, Free to Watch on OpenFlix

For the past two weeks we've featured free mystery movies available from Hulu. This week we're moving over to the OpenFlix channel on YouTube, which also has a large selection of free titles to watch … albeit with oddly placed ads, which you can skip through after a few seconds.

This week's title: Rehearsal for Murder.

We sometimes use the term "movie-of-the-week" in a rather less than flattering manner, but there really are some terrific made-for-television movies out there. With respect to mystery movies, one clue as to whether or not you should consider it is if Richard Levinson and William Link's names are associated with it. They co-created and/or co-produced some create mystery television: Columbo; Murder, She Wrote; Ellery Queen; Mannix; Blacke's Magic. In 1979, the Levinson and Link received a special Edgar Award in recognition of their work on Columbo and Ellery Queen … and that's in addition to the regular Edgars they received over the years for screenplays, one of which was for, you guessed it, Rehearsal for Murder (in 1983).

Playwright Alex Dennison (Robert Preston) is on the verge of marrying glamorous film star Monica Wells (Lynn Redgrave). But a scant few hours after her Broadway debut, Redgrave is found dead, an apparent suicide. Convinced that Redgrave was murdered, Preston contacts the most likely suspects and assembles them in an empty theatre, ostensibly to read through his latest play. But Preston locks the doors and uses his play as a means to, in the words of Hamlet, "catch the conscience" of the killer.

Rehearsal for Murder is not rated, but is comparable to TV-13. The film is also available on DVD.