Secrets of a Marine’s Wife (Front Street Pictures, Lifetime, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last Sunday, June 20 Lifetime re-ran their “premiere” from the night beflre and added a new “premiere” in the immediately following time slot. The one from the night before carried the provocative title Secrets of a Marine’s Wife, but though it had its appeal there weren’t any big “secrets” about it. It was based on a true-crime story written by the late Shanna Hogan – we know she’s deceased because the closing credits contained “In Memoriam” dedications both to her and the real-life murder victim, Erin Corwin (Sadie Calvano). It starts out in Tennessee, where Eris is getting restive and impatient with still living with her parents. She sees her way out when local boy John Corwin (Evan Roderick) – the name is spelled “Cornyn,” like the current Texas Senator, on the imdb.com page but “Corwin” is what we hear on the soundtrack – wants to marry her just before he ships out to the U.S. Marine Training Center in Twenty-Nine Palms, California. Her parents warn her that she’s way too young to be thinking of tying herself down to just one man for the rest of her life, but she insists that she’s “of age” – which she is, barely – and she knows what she’s doing. John says he’s in love with her but he also has a mercenary reason for wanting a wife: that way they can save money living in married couples’ housing on the base.

When they finally arrive, the base’s community for married Marines turns out to be a hotbed of gossip, largely because the women have nothing much to do: while their husbands are out marching around the countryside playing at being (and at least ostensibly training to become) soldiers, their wives have nothing much to do except housework, games and gossip. John turns out to be a dull young man and about the only thing he does that answers the call of usual husbandly duties is get his wife pregnant. They even talk about the baby’s name, which John insists should be “Sam” whether it’s a boy or girl – but the pregnancy ends in a miscarriage and that evaporates whatever lingering interest Erin still had in her husband. So she’s easy prey for the attentions of fellow married Marine Chris Lee (Tom Stevens) – both he and Evan Roderick are easy on the eyes (and director Manu Boyer gives us plenty of shots of both men with their shirts off – yum!), but John looks pretty bland while Chris smolders with that old-fashioned ever-reliable James Dean stare. He’s also got dispensation from the Marine Corps to wear his hair relatively long – at least over the ears – and all around I thought Tom Stevens was way sexier than Evan Roderick. So does Erin – she and Chris start an affair that progresses from kissing to heavy necking and ultimately full-out sex – and so, obviously, did the Lifetime casting directors, who went with their usual iconography of making the male villain considerably sexier than the male lead.

The most curious thing about the affair between Erin and Chris as it’s dramatized here is how little they even attempt to keep it secret: both director Boyer’s camera and the other residents on base are constantly discovering Chris and Erin in various stages of amorous passion. The whole story is told as a series of flashbacks framed by a police investigation of Erin’s mysterious disappearance – one day she drove into the Mojave Desert and never returned, and the cops quickly reject the idea that her disappearance was accidental and assumed someone encountered her in the desert and killed her. The “mystery” angle isn’t terribly mysterious given that there are only two real suspects – Erin’s husband John and her lover Chris – and in the end the police find Erin’s car, locate another set of tire tracks near it, and deduce from that and several other pieces of information that Chris followed her into the desert in his Jeep, caught up with her, killed her by strangling her with a garrotte the Marines had helpfully provided him with as a potential weapon of war, then dumped her body down an old, abandoned mineshaft (it was established earlier that Chris is particularly interested in exploring mineshafts). Then he dropped a tank of propane gas – the kind you connect to gas-fired grills – and intended to shoot it, thereby starting a gas explosion that would collapse the mineshaft and obliterate Erin’s body and all other evidence of his crime – but he wasn’t a good enough marksman to hit the tank at a range of 150 feet below.

His motive was that Chris had got Erin pregnant, and while Erin’s plan was not to tell anybody and pass the baby off as John’s, Chris got hyper-concerned that his wife Nichole (Emma Johnson), already ticked at him over his extra-marital activities, would go ballistic and leave him if she knew another woman was carrying his baby. After Erin’s disappearance Chris and Nichole take their kids on their long-planned trip to Alaska following his discharge, but they’re stopped on the way by police. Chris is put on trial – apparently in a civilian court (presumably since he’s just been discharged) rather than a court-martial – and convicted of the murder. There’s an odd tag scene in which John returns to Tennessee and shares his grief with Erin’s parents. Secrets of a Marine’s Wife gets a few things right – it dramatizes how rough it is to be a woman in this ultra-macho community where nobody seems to have heard of “the feminine mystique.” and the most interesting part of Chris’s character is how he lets everyone else at the base believe that he’s actually fought in a war, where it turns out (as he admits to Erin, but no one else) that though he was in a combat zone, he was a “glorified security guard” and never actually fired a gun at anybody. Otherwise, it’s just a pretty ordinary piece of entertaining Lifetime trash, decently if not spectacularly written by Richard Blaney from Hogan’s book – but I still had a lot of fun looking at hunky topless guys!