TV REVIEW : ‘Love Can Be Murder’ a Ghostly Twist

TV movies have become so locked into social reality and docudramas that when an outright romantic fantasy comes along--even one as derivative as NBC’s “Love Can Be Murder” (at 9 tonight on Channels 4, 36 and 39)--it can be unexpectedly beguiling.

The opening scene in a fancy restaurant, with Jaclyn Smith in a rousing Walter Mitty dream sequence, perfectly sets the stage for her encounter with a hard-boiled private eye straight out of a Raymond Chandler novel. Giving up a law practice to become a private detective, Smith’s liberated woman rents a dump of a downtown L.A. office that turns out to be occupied by the ghost of an old murdered tenant, an invisible 1940s gumshoe (the humorously macho Corbin Bernsen) who won’t go away until she helps him solve his murder.

With a little of “Ghost” and a little of “Topper” as basic ingredients, writer Rob Gilmer manages to pull off a light romantic mystery in which the heroine and her ghost fall madly in love. Credit Smith, in a welcome comedic departure, and the affable Bernsen with giving this movie its kind of Nick-and-Nora flavor.

The murder plot is hopelessly entangled, which actually gives it a certain period savvy, and Anne Francis, looking great, pops up as the matron of a taxi dance hall. In fact, the movie, directed by Jack Bender, is a valentine to old Los Angeles, ‘40s style.

“L.A.,” Bernsen reminisces as he walks along Echo Park Lake with its quaint little bridge and boats, “was like a festering cesspool, but it had style like an exotic woman.”

The production is loaded with charming nostalgic touches--a full moon over Mulholland, the Griffith Park Observatory, the big band sound (notably Tommy Dorsey’s “Opus One”), the downtown Orpheum sign exploding into a galaxy of light--that old-time Angelenos will relish. There’s even the obligatory red light flashing “Hotel” outside our sleuths’ dingy tenement window.

But nobody can be trusted. As the crusty Bernsen tells Smith’s tenderfoot detective: “The first rule in the dick biz is never believe anything a client tells you.”

Finally, TV noir .