by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Guilty Conscience is
a 1985 TV-movie produced by Robert Papazian, directed by David Greene and
written by Richard Levinson and William Link. Papazian’s and Greene’s names
meant nothing to me before but Levinson’s and Link’s certainly did; in the
1970’s they were in charge of Universal’s long-form TV mystery series (the shows
ran in 90-minute time slots and rotated each week) and were particularly famous
for having created the character of Columbo, the raincoat-clad, Peugeot-driving
detective played by Peter Falk whose whole strategy seemed to be annoying the
murderers into confessing. Though neither Columbo nor any other official police
officers appear in this one, the plot is certainly the sort of crime he might
have investigated. Guilty Conscience
is basically a blend of Diabolique
and Sleuth: famous criminal
defense attorney Arthur Jamison (Anthony Hopkins) wants to dump his wife Louise
(Blythe Danner) but doesn’t want to divorce her because her alimony demands
would impoverish him instantly. He’s been having an ongoing affair with a
mistress, Jackie Willis (Swoosie Kurtz — I joked to Charles, “In the 1930’s and
1940’s that was the sort of name that got changed,” and he joked back, “And in
the 1970’s and 1980’s that was the sort of name people changed to!”), but he’s cheating on her, too, with an art
dealer and Canadian immigrant we never actually see.
All this takes place in
San Francisco, with an opening scene at the Fairmont Hotel where we see Arthur
lecturing to a legal conference and giving a highly jaundiced view of the court
system and a defense attorney’s role in it — though we later learn this is just
a fantasy sequence envisioning a way Arthur is thinking of killing his wife. Supposedly he arranged for this
conference to take place within a 15-minute drive from his home so he could
slip out of it, kill his wife, fake it to look like a burglary (we see him
jimmying the lock and breaking into his own home) and slip back into the
conference without anyone there having noticed he was gone. Arthur also has an
imaginary alter ego (Donegan
Smith) who questions him about his various schemes for killing his wife and
pokes holes in each of them. Meanwhile, Louise and Jackie have met each other
and, realizing that they’re both being screwed (literally and figuratively) by Arthur, have hatched a plot to kill
him, and we see fantasy
flash-forwards about how they might kill him and how their plans to cover for
themselves might get undone by a hot-shot attorney like … Arthur Jamison. Guilty
Conscience isn’t much plot-wise (I suppose
I should add the original version of Unfaithfully Yours as an influence because it, too, is about a rich man
fantasizing various ways of killing his wife) but it’s saved by the deliciously
perverse writing of Levinson and Link, some surprisingly creative direction by
Greene — in a film that’s so talky, and that never leaves the living room of
Jamison’s home after that opening scene at the conference (which made me wonder
if Levinson and Link had originally written it as a stage play and only later
decided to convert it to a film) Greene’s offbeat angling and heavy use of the
camera crane keep the film flowing and make it cinematically interesting
instead of just “canned theatre” — and, above all, the first-rate cast.
Hopkins
is utterly marvelous in his role even though he seems to be channeling Richard
Burton more than usual (is it just coincidence that his performance is so
Burton-esque when this was filmed one year after the real Burton died?); Danner
and Kurtz are equally good (and well differentiated) as the two women (at least
the two we actually see) in his life; and though part of me wishes they would
have cast Hopkins himself as his alter ego (they probably didn’t because the trick photography needed to show
Anthony Hopkins cross-examining Anthony Hopkins would have blown the TV-movie
budget), Donegan Smith is excellent in the role, appropriately hectoring as he
picks apart every flaw in every elaborate murder scenario Arthur concocts,
including the attempts to cover it up after he actually does kill his wife in a struggle in which They Both Reach for the Gun (Maurine
Watkins, your plagiarism attorney is calling from Aruba to thank you for
financing his trip) — or does he?
This film is probably more full of sequences that we think are real events in the story but which turn out
later to be the fantasies of the various characters than just about anything
ever made, but Levinson and Link are good enough writers that they play fair
with this device (a lot of other people who’ve used it haven’t), and though
it’s a minor work Guilty Conscience
is a delightful 90 minutes (imdb.com gives the running time as 105 minutes but
the version we watched was considerably shorter, mastered on a rather tacky DVD
that started immediately on insertion into the player and might be a bootleg
copy rather than the official release) spent with four fine actors and a script
that gives them quite a lot to chew on and is fully worthy of them.
