Framed by My Husband (Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2021)

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

Last night my husband Charles and I ran two Lifetime movies in succession, both ones I hadn’t seen before even though one was marked as a “premiere.” It was called Framed by My Husband (though it had the working title My Husband’s Secret Life, which would have been just as big a giveaway) and it starred Christine Chatelain as June Lowe, whose husband Rick Lowe (Dan Payne, not as drop-dead gorgeous as some of Lifetime’s male villains but still easy enough on the eyes one can understand why so many women in the story are attracted to him) is a New York Times best-selling author while June is an aspiring novelist who can’t get past the first 20 pages of anything. (One wonders if this was how Zelda Fitzgerald felt as she tried to get her writing career going in the shadow of her legendary husband.) The story opens at a book-signing for Rick’s latest novel – at which she’s surrounded by lots of women admirers casting lustful glances at him and making clear they’d like to do more with him than just read his books – and June is there, she pulls him away from the adoring crowd but he soon returns to them. They go home and June discovers a letter a woman named Wendy Bach (Victoria Dunsmore) has written accusing him of sexual harassment and demanding $50,000 or she’ll go public and, in this #MeToo era, destroy his reputation and his book sales. June wants to report this to the police but Robert insists they have to pay her but he doesn’t want to take her the money himself. So June agrees to do it for her, only when she shows up at the deserted parking lot where she’s supposed to deliver the payment late at night, she finds Wendy and her husband Steve both stabbed to death in their car.

What’s more, the police suspect June of the murder, especially when they find her bloody clothes in the briefcase in which she’d packed the blackmail money (and presumably her husband had unpacked it again), and she can’t prove the threat was made because Rick burned Wendy’s letter. June collapses in her own home and injures her head as she falls, and when she comes to she’s in a hospital with a police guard on her door ready to arrest her and take her to jail as soon as she comes to. Only when she comes to she figures out a way to escape, waiting for the cop supposedly guarding her room to nod off and dressing in a nurse’s uniform to escape. While she’s enacting the progress of a typical Alfred Hitchcock character who’s wanted by the cops for a murder he (or, in this case, she) did not commit and figures the only way to get the cops off her case is to find the killer himself, Rick is up to some new-old tricks. He’s got an app on his phone called “PS” – though the logo is designed that the letters can flip and look like “SP” – they stand for “Private Seduction” and it seems to be a hookup site for married people of both genders. He uses this app to meet up with a woman named Ava (Jessie Liang) in a motel room, only when he shows up he unbuckles and assaults her. “A woman likes a little foreplay,” she protests, but he couldn’t be less interested in anything other than overpowering her and shoving his dick inside her, strangling her as he fucks her until I began to wonder if the payoff would be that he’d rack up another victim. Only June, who’s been tracking her husband, comes on Ava still alive, though shaken by the experience. June tries to get Ava to report being raped to the police, but Ava won’t; she explains that she’s married to a 60-something sugar daddy who would dump her in the proverbial heartbeat and leave her virtually penniless if he found out she’d been seeking extra-relational activity. “I’m his third wife; you do the math,” she says. Later Rick seeks out another woman named Evie (Ruth Dvorak Binder) and this time June tries to reach her beforehand, only Evie thinks she’s a cyber-stalker and threatens to call the police on her – only to find, when she and Rick actually hook up, that he goes through the same rape-and-strangulation number he did with Ava.

June’s only confidant is her sister, Maggie Porter (Rebecca Roberts), who’s being courted by Rick because June drove the car she’d stolen in the hospital parking lot into a river so the cops would stop looking for her because they’d think she was dead – a plot twist that reminded me of Humphrey Bogart’s weakest movies, Conflict (1945), in which he played an unhappily married man with the hots for his sister-in-law, so he kills his wife, pays court to her sister and ultimately gets caught by police inspector Sydney Greenstreet. (One can sense the wheels turning in the heads of the “sults” at Warner Bros. on that one: “We’ll have Bogie be the bad guy and Greenstreet be the good guy!”) Eventually the filmmakers, director Sam Fichtner and writer Paul A. Birkett (the director’s name meant nothing to me but I’d seen the writer’s name before, though usually as a collaborator rather than solo), have Rick kidnap both June and Maggie, lock them in the trunk of his car and prepare to dispose of them when the police, in the person of Detective Channing (Dallas Blake) and his partner Detective D’Angelo (Naiah Cummins) – it’s become customary for Lifetime to cast its police officers as a Black lead detective and a younger white or Asian woman sidekick, but this time both detectives are Black – finally figure out what’s going on and intervene. There are a few other plot wrinkles, including a set of posts that suddenly appears on the Internet via a local paper’s Web site accusing Rick Lowe of a history of sexually harassing women and thus freaking out his publishers, and at the end June – calling herself June Porter now that she’s dumped that murderous, rapist husband of hers – has finally published her first book about the experience and is making the usual rounds to publicize it.

Both Charles and I had been hoping for a Seven Keys to Baldpate-style ending in which the entire movie would turn out to be the plot of June’s novel – I even envisioned a scene in which, after she’d finished the manuscript, she’d show it to her husband and he’d say, “Honey, no one is going to believe this” – but, alas, Paul A. Birkett didn’t think of that, which would at least given this rather sordid tale a bit of human warmth. As it was, Charles took a strong dislike to the three main characters – June, Rick and Maggie – early on, and they didn’t do much in the course of the plot to make them more likable. That’s a common failing in modern movies – and not just at the Lifetime level, either! I’ve watched a number of recent features with major directors, writers and stars that have left me wondering, “Just whom are we supposed to like?” Aside from that, Framed by My Husband was a decent enough thriller – though if Sam Fichtner and Paul A. Birkett aren’t lighting candles to a shrine for St. Alfred, they should be – and one for which you can’t really write a “spoiler” because the title Lifetime slapped on it gave it away.