Sister Boniface Mysteries: "Lights, Camera, Murder!" (Britbox, BBC, PBS, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night KPBS showed an interesting episode of the quirky TV series Sister Boniface Mysteries – a spinoff created by Jude Tindall based on the Father Brown stories by G. K. Chesterton – called “Lights, Camera, Murder!” This was actually the second snow of the series, originally aired February 8, 2022, but I suspect the local PBS outlet, KPBS, aired it now because it’s become unexpectedly timely. State authorities in New Mexico have nust announced that they’re going to put actor Alec Baldwin on trial for involuntary manslaughter in the shooting death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on the set of a Western film called Rust which he was shooting there on October 21, 2021. Most people at the time (including myself) originally assumed the death would be ruled accidental – one of those regrettable incidents in which an actor was given a supposedly blank-loaded gun that turned out to have real bullets in it. But according to a dispatch from CNN on January 19 (https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/19/entertainment/rust-movie-shooting-alec-baldwin-charges-decision/index.html), Baldwin and the film’s armorer, Hannah Gutierrez Reed, will be tried and the film’;s assistant director, David Halls, already pleaded guilty to one count of “negligent use of a deadly weapon,” which suggests that when the case comes to trial he will be a witness for the prosecution.

The “Lights, Camera, Murder!” episode of Sister Boniface Mysteries also begins with the discharge of a gun that turns out to have real bullets instead of blanks on a movie set; the location is the convent where Sister Boniface and her fellow nuns live and work, and by odd coincidence the fatal shooting on Rust also involved a church (albeit the set of one rather than the real deal). For some strange reason, a lot of the nons on this episode of Sister Boniface Mysteries have male first names – the overall person in charge of the order (or at least this branch of it in the English countryside) is Canoness Basil (Felicity Montagu) and among the other nuns are Sister Peter (Tina Chiang), Sister Reginald (Virginia Fiot), and Reverend Mother Adrian (Carolyn Pickles). The producer of the TV show-within-the-show,, Dick Lansky (Michael Higgs), has booked the convent as a location for a spy drama, Operation Q-T, in which two heroes, Hugo Steele (Andrew Schrborough) and Debra Diamond (Stephanie Booth), are British MI-5 agents on the trail of a Russian baddie named Ivan. (Remember this show is set in the early 1950’s, when the Cold War was still very much a “thing.”) The real-life producers of Sister Boniface Mysteries clearly had fun re-creating the cheesy spy series, including appropriately stupid and banal “action” music by the show’s real-life composer, Michael Price.

Unlike the bullet fired on the Rust set, this one doesn’t kill anybody, but Sister Boniface deduces from the fact that a week before, while the show was shooting interiors at a London studio, a big light fell down and nearly brained an actor that someone has a vendetta against the show in general and Lansky in particular. The case reaches a head when Lansky himself is found dead in a locked room in the convent, and he’s been killed by an electric shock administered by a device similar to the one the actor playing Ivan was supposed to use in the show’s script. This reminded me of an old movie which Charles and I watched years ago in which a murder took place on a film set, several other murders followed, and the detectives deduced that the film’s screenwriter was the killer because the murders followed the plot in his script. In this case, however, the writer is not only innocent but is given a spiked bottle of booze to ensure that he can’t do a last-minute rewrite and avoid a scene in which the real killer has planted a live bomb in a suitcase that was supposed to contain a fake one.

He turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Bruno Milton (Ian Drysdale), who was in the very first episode of Operation Q-T and was given a highly dangerous stunt to do involving a deliberate motorcycle crash. He protested to Lansky that the stunt was too risky, but Lansky gave him a drink to steady his nerves before the take. Alas, Bruno’s premonitions turned out to be all too real; he crashed the motorcycle and his face burned so badly it cost him his potential career as a leading man. Instead he was reduced to playing a clown at children’s parties because the clown makeup would disguise the facial scars. After several operations he once again had a presentable face, though nowhere nearly as handsome as he had once been, but good enough he was able to land the role of Ivan, the villain, and write himself a torture scene which incorporated the same device he used to off Lansky for real. The cops arrest him and he confesses that he’s planted a real bomb in the suitcase thet’s supposed to contain a fake one, and there’s an exciting race against time in which Sister Boniface manages to disarm the bomb with just one second to spare. I’ve quite liked the Sister Boniface Mysteries episodes I’ve seen so far – it seems more interesting and sympathetic than the Father Brown series from which it sprung – and I liked the whole idea of a nun being a huge devotée of a TV series all about espionage and sex.