by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyrigh © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I watched a Lifetime movie called A Lover
Scorned — I’m not sure why it was called
that other than that its producers had to call it something — and I was forewarned by an imdb.com review which
called it “the worst movie in the history of the world (Lifetime edition).” I
suspect what put off the reviewer about A Lover Scorned is what put me off of it as well — the huge gulf
between the potential talents of the people involved and the paucity of their
achievement. The director was Roland Joffé, a major filmmaker with such
substantial credits on his résumé as The Killing Fields, The Mission, Fat Man and Little Boy, and the 1995 version of The Scarlet
Letter. The writers were Leslie Greif and
Nicholas Kazan, Elia Kazan’s son. What Joffé, Kazan fils and Greif came up with began as a stone ripoff of Double
Indemnity — Brooke Stevens (Emilie de
Ravin), a woman bored in her marriage because her husband Steve (Jeffrey
Vincent Parise), a real-estate developer who’s never home because he’s always
flying around the country to salvage his latest project, seems to have lost
interest in her, starts an affair with insurance agent Jake Walters (Leo
Howard) and ultimately plots with him to kill her husband so they can run off
together and split the $15 million life insurance policy the Stevenses have
just bought on each other. Only, where Double Indemnity author James M. Cain and the people who adapted his
book into a film, Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler, kept the plot manageably
simple, Messrs. Joffé, Greif and Kazan loaded the basic story with
complications. It seems that hubby Steve is having an affair of his own with a
mysterious woman named “Irene,” and Jake is Bisexual and has succeeded as an
insurance salesman by being able to seduce both female and male customers. We
see him in a Gay bar coming on, both personally and professionally, with a man
who left a wife and child to “come out” definitively four years earlier, and
later it turns out that Jake had also seduced Brooke’s husband Steve and
plotted with him to kill Brooke
for the insurance money.
And if that’s not enough plot complication for you,
the mysterious “Irene” whom Steve was also having sex with turns out to be
Brooke’s best friend Angie (Martha Hamilton), who demands half of the insurance
money after Jake kills Steve because she’s pregnant with Steve’s child and
therefore is going to give birth to the heir to Steve’s fortune, such as it is
— since we ultimately learn that Steve, despite his paramours of both genders,
was sufficiently in love with his wife that he planned to take out the big
insurance policy and then commit suicide, faking it to look like an accident, so she’d still have money instead
of losing it all through the impending bankruptcy of his real-estate
development company. The character of Paul Keyes, the intrepid insurance
investigator from the original story (played unforgettably in the movie by
Edward G. Robinson), is here split into two avuncular people of color,
African-American police detective Mike Wall (Tony Vaughn) and insurance
investigator Mr. Wong (Cary Hiroyugi-Tagawa — that mouthful of a last name
looks Japanese while “Wong” would mean Chinese, but it’s been common enough for
Chinese and Japanese to be cast as each other), both of whom are convinced that
Brooke had something to do with her husband’s death, but neither are able to
prove it. Even Brooke, who up until about two acts before the end is carefully
set up by Greif and Kazan, Jr. to seem like an innocent victim, goes bad
towards the end when she bakes cookies for Angie, who ends up in the hospital
and goes through a miscarriage (thereby eliminating Steve’s baby and, thus,
Angie’s claim on the insurance money) which, it turns out, was caused by Brooke
spiking the cookies with drugs. It all ends with Brooke getting the $15 million
(plus half of a $1 million settlement she got from the company owning the
resort where Steve’s “accident” happened — she gave the other half to Angie
before Brooke’s drugging Angie took effect) but with Wall and Wong still looking rather sourly at her.
Just where A
Lover Scorned goes wrong is obvious in some
respects — not only are Emilie de Ravin and Leo Howard hardly in the same
league as actors as Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray, but Howard is
decent-looking but hardly the babe magnet for both men and women the script tells us he is. Frankly,
Jeffrey Vincent Parise (I wondered if he was any relation to Vanessa Parise,
who’s directed some of the better recent Lifetime movies, but his imdb.com bio
doesn’t say and neither does hers) seemed sexier to me, and for a while I
thought Lifetime was breaking their usual tradition against casting genuine
hunks as the put-upon husbands until he did turn out to be part of the villain’s plot — or at
least part of one of the
villains’ plots. It’s not so obvious in others: updating Double
Indemnity wasn’t an inherently bad idea —
nor was updating it to include a Gay angle — but there’s a sense in which this
movie is just “off,” with no one in it we genuinely like (an all too typical
failing of modern movies) and without any of the acid-drenched wisecracks James
M. Cain provided in the original novel and Raymond Chandler added for Billy
Wilder’s 1944 classic film.
