by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I settled in to watch Lifetime’s latest “premiere,” a
new TV movie from the same people (ThinkFactory Media and Swirl Films) who just
gave us Terror in the Woods — actually a
pretty good Lifetime movie despite the dorky title. Lifetime is going through a
phase of doing movies more or less based on true stories, and this one, called The
Lover in the Attic, is one — though they
made some annoying changes in the real tale. One thing I hadn’t realized going into The Lover in the Attic is that it’s a period piece, set in the 1920’s and
1930’s (the real story began in 1913 and ended in 1930, but writers Richard
Kletter and Michelle Sanit moved it up about a decade so they could have it
take place against the backdrop of Prohibition and the Depression), which
immediately got my dander up because I’ve seen enough movies actually made in the
1920’s and 1930’s to notice the inevitable anachronisms creeping into how the
period is represented. The story is basically Double Indemnity meets Sunset Boulevard with a bit of a more modern tale, V. C. Andrews’ Flowers
in the Attic, thrown in for seasoning:
Dolly Korschel (Molly Burnett) is a hot-looking young blonde who’s stuck in
Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She dreams of Hollywood stardom but also wants to secure
her personal security by marrying a rich man, and the one she lands is Fred
Oesterreich (David Fierro) — by coincidence “Oesterreich” is also the German
name for Austria (the country) — a textile magnate with a rapidly expanding
waistline (courtesy of his increasing consumption of Prohibition-era booze) and
a rapidly shrinking imagination. When Dolly tries to persuade him to modernize
his line by ripping off the latest styles from Paris, he unsurprisingly rejects
the whole idea. One day the personal sewing machine she uses at home to make
prototypes of the hot new designs her husband keeps turning down breaks, and
Fred dispatches the one male seamster in his shop, Otto Sanhuber (Kevin
Fonteyne), to fix it. (The plethora of German names in the dramatis
personae reflects the reality that
Milwaukee has long had the largest community of German-Americans anywhere in
the U.S.)
Otto turns out to be a scared, shy virgin whose only avocation is
reading and attempting to write crime stories for the pulps, and Dolly falls in
lust at first sight with him but also becomes his dominatrix, specifying in
detail precisely what he can do with her when. After he makes a few clandestine
visits to her house, on one of which he gets noticed by her nosy neighbor and
Dolly is worried the neighbor will tell her husband what’s going on, she
conceives the idea that she’ll hide Otto in her attic — permanently. She’ll
provide him with food, a restroom and a typewriter with which he can write his
pulp stories (naturally she wants him to model all his female characters on
her!), and she’ll come up regularly and they can make love whenever the coast
is clear. This bizarre relationship lasts for years until Fred’s fortunes
nosedive during the Depression and he responds by becoming physically abusive
to Dolly and also by drinking more. The climax occurs when Otto finally gets
tired of helplessly hearing the sounds of Fred attacking Dolly; he comes out of
the attic, tells Fred who he is, pulls a gun on him and the two wrestle and both
reach for the gun (Maurine Watkins, you’d have your plagiarism attorney on
speed dial if speed dial had been invented yet), with the result that Fred ends
up fatally wounded. Otto concocts a plot to have Dolly say Fred was shot by a
would-be burglar who escaped; the Milwaukee cops assigned to investigate the
case are suspicious of this but can’t prove it didn’t happen. Dolly was aware that Fred had taken out life
insurance on her but doesn’t know the amount — $20,000, which even in 1930
wasn’t going to last long the way Dolly burns through money — until her late
husband’s insurance agent, Roy Klumb (Alex Ball, who interestingly looks more
convincing as a 1930 character than anyone else in the film), tells her,
whereupon she seduces him and hints that she’ll run away with him if he gets
her the claim paid pronto. Instead she puts up the Milwaukee house for sale and
escapes to Hollywood with Otto without telling Roy — and she buys a big house
(adorned, among other things, with a poster for Puccini’s last opera, Turandot, about a murderous Chinese princess who has all her
would-be suitors killed if they can’t answer her three riddles) and installs
Otto in it.
She throws a big party and tells Otto she’s giving it to invite all
the Hollywood bigwigs so she can get him work as a screenwriter, but she’s really after another sugar daddy, and she finds him in
high-powered attorney Herman Shapiro (David Alexander). Only Herman has a
vastly inflated idea of Dolly’s level of virtues and makes the mistake of
proposing marriage to her — which brings Otto out of the woodwork. He threatens
to ruin Dolly by turning her in to the Milwaukee police for Fred’s murder, and
ultimately the two of them are tried for manslaughter: thanks to Shapiro’s
brilliant representation of her, Dolly is acquitted but Otto is convicted,
though the conviction is later overturned because the statute of limitations
for manslaughter had already expired when he was tried. A postscript mentions
that Dolly lived until 1961 and had a long succession of subsequent lovers —
she didn’t marry again until two years before she died — though it doesn’t
mention what became of Otto, which might have been a more interesting story.
Like a lot of other Lifetime movies, The Lover in the Attic is a potentially fascinating story that could have
made into a much better film than the one we have. Though the basic plot is the
classic stuff of film noir — and
Otto’s aspiration to write crime stories for pulp magazines links him directly
to the birth of the noir
tradition — director Melora Walters doesn’t direct it as one. The film is in
color, and while that’s probably obligatory for modern-day TV Walters and her
cinematographer, John Ferguson, totally ignore the lesson director Allan Dwan
and cinematographer John Alton taught in the 1956 film Slightly
Scarlet of how to do the classic noir look in color. Instead the whole movie is shot in
the dirty greens and browns that seem to be the default setting for every modern director of photography, no matter what the
film is about or when and where it is set, and their only concession to
“Twentiesicity” is to overexpose the film so the dirty greens and browns look
pastel instead of dark. It’s as if they saw a few badly faded color photographs
from the period and decided from them that that’s what the 1920’s and 1930’s really looked like.
The
period-piece aspects of the show also perch it on the thin film of risibility —
I suspect that had they gone farther than a one-decade time jump and had this
story take place in modern times the film would have been stronger and more
powerful — and though they get the physical “look” of the period mostly right, there are lapses (the first pulp magazine
Otto is shown reading has a cover typical of the 1960’s, not the 1920’s). One
thing that particularly irritated me about the film was that instead of using
the dark, sultry vocal tones of Barbara Stanwyck, Mary Astor, Claire Trevor,
Veronica Lake and the other actresses who played femmes fatales in the classic noirs, director Walters had Molly Burnett deliver Dolly’s
lines in the breathless whisper of Marilyn Monroe. This really doesn’t work for
the villainess of the piece (and it’s a vocal style Monroe herself abandoned on
the rare occasions she got to play a serious character) and it got more annoying
as the film progressed. The acting in general is O.K. but nothing special;
David Fierro plays Fred as a total boor (as a “type” he’s sort of a modern-day
Eugene Pallette, but even Pallette managed a bit more pathos in this sort of
role); Kevin Fonteyne is a bit too twink-ish for my taste (though we do get a lot of delectable shots of his hairless chest
and his nice nipples), though someone more butch would probably have not been
believable as the ridiculously naïve character he’s playing; and aside from Alex
Ball, none of the actors really convince me they’re living in a past era.
Certainly The Lover in the Attic
had ambitions beyond the usual run of Lifetime fare — but sometimes a movie
that aims high (or at least the middle-ground this one was aiming for) and
misses can be more frustrating than one that aims low and gives the audience
the kind of sleazy fare it wants, and that’s what happened here.
