by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
At 8 p.m. last night
Charles and I watched a Lifetime movie called All My Husband’s Wives which, while nowhere near Their Killer Affair in quality, had its appeal even though it lost me
in a bewildering series of reversal upon reversal at the ending that made me
wonder if the credited screenwriter, James Phillips, had had uncredited help
from Michael Clayton and Duplicity writer-director Tony Gilroy. The director was
Caroline Labrèche (as you can guess from her French name, this was one of
Lifetime’s and production company Incendo Media’s Canadian productions) and,
though it begins with a murder, All My Husband’s Wives was really more of a comedy than anything else. It
starts with Alison Whitford (Erin Karpluk) sending off her husband Dominick
(Trevor Hayes) on what she thinks is an out-of-town business trip to Panama,
where he supposedly works for a platinum mining company. Only on his way to the
airport he’s struck by a speeding car and killed in a hit-and-run accident. At
least the police, led by detective Gabriel Strickland (Joris Jarsky), think it’s an accident — until a witness comes forward
and tells Strickland that the car sped up just before it struck Dominick,
therefore indicating it was a deliberate attack and he was murdered.
Investigating the case as a homicide, the police naturally suspect Alison — so
Alison starts her own investigation, not only to clear her name but to find out
who actually did kill Dominick. Only she’s
waylaid by a gun-toting woman named Marla Mitchell (Kate Corbett) who claims
that Dominick was her husband
— and they’d been married for five years whereas Alison had been married to him
only one year.
On realizing that their late husband was a bigamist, the two
women join forces in an uncertain alliance to get to the bottom of Dominick’s
murder and find out how he actually made his money, since an official of the
mining company for which he worked told Alison no one of that name was ever employed there. Ultimately the two women find keys
to a lavish apartment — considerably nicer than either of the places they lived with Dominick in — and they let themselves
in, only to be confronted by another wife, Cheryl Volberg (they all have different last names because
Dominick used a different identity for each marriage), who says she married
Dominick nine years before and therefore she’s his only legal wife and entitled
to all his estate. The movie
works best when the three women — sometimes friends, sometimes allies,
sometimes antagonists — are front and center on screen, and when they’re not
getting angry with each other and pulling guns on each other they’re quite
charming and Phillips’ writing and Labrèche’s direction achieve something of
the camp appeal of the Thin Man movies and other 1930’s films that combined screwball comedy and mystery
elements. One interesting irony is that Alison’s career is as a marriage and
family counselor, and she’s petrified that the information that she was in a
bigamous (strictly speaking a trigasmous) marriage will leak out to the press and kill her career — and
when it does leak she suspects Cheryl,
the bitchiest and most imperious of the three, but later finds out it was
really Marla. Writer Phillips drops us a big hint when Marla says she was
married before to a boy who knocked her up when they were in high school
together — only he got run over by a car
shortly before she was supposed to give birth but actually lost the baby in a
miscarriage.
I thought, “Either he’s dropped us a big clue or he’s dropped us a
big red herring,” and it turned out to be the latter when Detective Strickland
announces that of the three women, Marla is the only one who has an alibi (it’s
not specified but she’s been working as a waitress and apparently she was on
duty when Dominick was killed). Midway through the movie Alison is assaulted in
her home by a large, bald-headed man we assume is a hit man hired by whoever did kill Dominick — whom we presume was part of some
large-scale white-collar crime ring, since though he had no visible legal
employment he’d amassed a fortune of over $4 million and stashed it in a Swiss
bank account — only the man turns out to be a cook at the restaurant where
Marla works and she put him
up to the assault. There’s also a former boyfriend of Alison’s, Graham (Brett
Donahue), whom sbe caught in flagrante delicto with her best friend and responded to by clonging
him over the head with one of his tennis rackets — one of the elements in
Alison’s past record that briefly has Detective Sunderland convinced that she’s
Dominick’s killer — and Graham is now married, though writer Phillips doesn’t
specify whether his wife is Alison’s former best friend whom they fought over
years before. At one point Marla and Alison let themselves into Cheryl’s
apartment and film her in the shower having sex with a paramour (Simon Alain)
she was apparently dating while Dominick was still alive, and when Cheryl
threatens to prosecute them for blackmail Alison sees Graham asking for legal
advice — on which he begs off, pointing out that she’ll need an experienced
criminal lawyer (which he is not) if the police seriously press charges against
her.
The climax occurs when Marla confronts both Alison and Cheryl with a gun and says she’ll shoot
them both unless one of them confesses to the crime — which Alison does, only
just before Marla is about to kill either her or herself Detective Sunderland
(ya remember Detective Sunderland?) interrupts the proceedings by firing a warning shot through the
window and announcing that they’ve traced the real killer: a fourth woman Dominick was apparently involved with, using
the last name “Passmore” (also an alias on a passport they found for him in a
safe-deposit box which Alison and Marla were able to talk a bank official into
letting them access), who visited that Swiss bank and withdrew just under $1
million from the account (keeping it below seven figures to avoid police and
security-guard scrutiny). They haven’t caught her yet but they have her image
on security video, and with the finger of suspicion definitively removed from
them the three women give Domenick a burial and buy him a huge tombstone
spelling out his three names, his three wives and denouncing him as a cheater.
Then the three women walk off into the sunset — and had James Phillips and
Caroline Lebrèche stopped there, this would have been a much more satisfying movie than it turned out
to be with all the fake endings the
filmmakers stuck on it. I had visions of the three of them moving in together
and starting a Lesbian commune for women who’ve been so mistreated by their
male mates they’ve decided to give up men altogether and try out the Queer side
— but instead Phillips has Detective Sunderland drive up to Alison’s home to
ask her for a date, which she turns down without bothering to explain why
either to him or us.
[Spoiler alert:] Then, in what Phillips obviously intended as a serious
shocker but which seemed just gratuitous and cruel to me, the mystery woman who
grabbed the money from that Swiss bank account, who may or may not be the wife
of Graham the attorney (Alison’s ex), shows up and Phillips asks us to believe
that she and Alison have been in league throughout the movie. When the other
woman asks Alison if she killed Dominick, Alison responds with the old joke, “I
could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you” — in other words, yes, even though the scenes we’ve seen of Alison
responding first to her husband’s murder and then to the other two wives he had
indicate that either she’s innocent or she’s a far better actress than Erin
Karpluk, who’s playing her, could ever hope to be. When the producer of Fritz Lang’s final
U.S. film, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, inflicted a similar “surprise” ending on him — throughout the film
Dana Andrews has been playing a journalist who wants to expose the evil of
capital punishment by showing how easily an innocent man could be convicted of
murder and sentenced to death, only at the end he turns out to have actually
killed the supposed victim — Lang tried unsuccessfully to talk him out of it.
“I cannot, I said, make an audience love Dana Andrews for one hour and 38
minutes and then in the last two minutes reveal that he’s really a
son-of-a-bitch and that the whole thing is really a joke,” Lang told
interviewers Charles Higham snd Joel Greenberg in The Celluloid Muse. Unfortunately, the producers of All My
Husband’s Wives didn’t get Lang’s memo and
inflicted the same mistake on Labrèche and Phillips — either that, or it was
their own idea. Either way, the ending left a bad taste in my mouth and largely
spoiled what until then had been a deliciously funny romp through good-bad
girlishness and the women’s attempts to get both revenge and money out of their
no-good dead trigamist husband!
