Cast: Martha Byrne, Mark Patton, Dina Merrill, Donna Mitchell, Jack Ryland, Jack Gilford, Loretta Devine, Gail Weed, Virginia Stevens, Marilyn Rockafellow, John Wardwell, Susan Lowden, Warren Watson, James Louis Fleming
Anna Hart (Byrne) is a difficult child, gifted, but lacking discipline and given to strange dreams. She chafes under the strict tutelage of her piano teacher, new neighbor Michaela Dupont (Mitchell). Anna’s mother (Merrill) does her best to keep her out of trouble, but Anna instinctively resists authority. Anna is intrigued when she sees a girl uncannily resembling her on a televised news broadcast. With the help of her brother she investigates the girl on the news broadcast, Anna Smithson. Persisting in her inquiries, Anna Hart learns of another Anna, dead for many years, a woman named Anna Zimmerman, a pianist and child prodigy that became a brilliant geneticist. Anna’s mother, Sarah, is really her stepmother, since unknown to Anna, she was adopted. Sarah is persuaded to take Anna to Albacore Island for a medical checkup. Anna is left in the care of Dr. Henry Jelliff (Gilford). The Albacore research facility is heavily guarded and equipped with surveillance cameras and room locks controlled by watchful nurses. When not being tested, Anna is confined to her room, but she manages to look around and sees other girls, her exact replicas, in other rooms. The girls are all clones of Anna Zimmerman, placed as babies in homes selected to resemble Zimmerman’s environment. Dr. Jelliff needs one of the girls to mature like Anna Zimmerman, into a geneticist able to duplicate the human cloning technique that Zimmerman developed. But the girls are not developing as planned. Dr. Jelliff finds out why when the woman sent to survey the girls’ development reveals herself as Anna Parkhurst, the original product of Zimmerman’s cloning experiment. She wants to free the young Annas and put an end to the experiment, but Dr. Jelliff does not intend to cooperate. Based on the Mildred Ames novel of the same name.
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