Temptation Under the Sun (Vest Entertainment, Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After last night’s “premiere” Lifetime showed the previous Saturday night’s “premiere,” Temptation Under the Sun, in which the heroine is a Detroit police detective, Cassidy Cruz (Annika Foster), who in the opening scene runs afoul of a well-connected Detroit City Councilmember whom she’s convinced is a murderer. Only the Councilmember has enough political clout to get Detective Cruz not only off the case but o ut of the country; he orders the police chief totell her to use the vacation time she’s accrued. Accordingly she goes to the (presumably fictional) Caribbean island of St. Luke but takes her case files with her, intending to keep working her cases even while she’s ostensibly on vacation. On her first night at the island resort she goes to the bar and is accosted by two local (white) men, one good and one not-so-good. The good one is Travis King (Mike Markoff), an American expatriate who owns a boat he takes out on charter tours – though he tells his local (Black) friend Winston (Samuel Selman) that he’s tired of doing charters because he’s tired of leading around overly privileged middle-aged American one-percenters who are doing cocaine. The not-so-hot (at least in the eyes of the film's casting director, Thomas Sullivan; I thought he was also quite sexy and part of me hoped that he and Travis would get together!) one is Sean (Laith Wallschager), who makes a crude pass at Detective Cruz which attracts Travis’s ire.

The co-owner of the local bar is Minerva (Christina Gray), a local Black woman who once had an affair with the local constable, Chief Inspector Dexter (Scott Carpenter), only six years before the main action she dumped him and took up with Travis, only to move on from him, too, though Travis is still interested in getting back together with her and cruises her in a charming, boyish way. In fact, the script by Paul A. Birkett (a veteran Lifetime hand) depicts Travis as a kind of child-man, physically exciting but not all that mature and prone to making offhand passes at women, definitely including Cassidy Cruz. In fact, one morning she shows up at his boat thinking they have a breakfast date –only he’s just got out of the shower and literally has nothing on, though he grabs a cushion and holds it in front of his crotch so Cruz doesn’t get embarrassed by him. (We certainly get the impression from her reaction that he’s unusually well hung.) When Minerva is murdered mysteriously in her home, Chief Inspector Dexter announces that Travis is the prime suspect and even arrests him, and Travis offers a kind of what-can-you-do resignation at the prospect of spending the rest of his life in an island prison for a crime he didn’t do. Travis explains to Cruz that “island justice” isn’t at all like what sue’s used to in the States: on St. Luke an arrest is tantamount to a conviction and there aren’t any legal niceties like due process.

Between them, Winston and Cruz pool their money to pay Travis’s bail, and Cruz intends to use her professional skills to find Minerva’s real killer and thus get Travis off the hook. Only Chief Inspector Dexter turns out to be the real killer, and in order to eliminate those bothersome Americans he plants an explosive on Travis’s boat and sets it off with a remote-control detonator. Travis notices the bomb just in time and he and Cruz dive off the boat to safety, but while swimming in the sea they get lost and end up not back on St., Luke but in a truly deserted island, where Cruz tries to use her cell phone and Travis throws it away. The two of them end up trapped in a mysterious hole in the ground – and the film brought back memories of an odd Japanese film from 1964, Woman in the Dunes, in which, according to its imdb.com page, “An entomologist on vacation is trapped by local villagers into living with a woman whose life task is shoveling sand for them,” and eventually he resigns himself to his fate, accepts being trapped in the dunes, and becomes the woman’s lover. In Temptation Under the Sun Travis and Cruz strip down to as little as they can be wearing ans still remain within the censor rules of basic cable (he has a pair of grey indies and she has black panties and bra), ostensibly to make a rope so they can climb out of the hole, but the sight of each other in a nearly total state of undress ignites their lust and they end up in a very hot soft-core porn scene, effectively and lubriciously directed by Lane Shefter Bishop (a woman, by the way, though one of this film’s producers is Andrew Bishop, presumably her husband).

Once they are rescued off the island and taken back to St. Luke by Winston, they seek the aid of another police official, Detective Inspector Marley (David Carey Foster). I know what you’re thinking – you hear someone named “Marley” in a film set on a Caribbean island and you think you’re going to see someone Black with dreadlocks and a great voice for reggae, but this Marley is white and bald. Travis and Cruz are hoping Marley will have an interest in finding Minerva’s killer since he was Minerva’s godfather (not that sort of godfather!), but at least at first Marley is outraged that the two white people from the U.S. are saying nasty things about his lifelong friend and superior officer, Dexter. Travis also explains to Cruz that the reason he can’t return to the U.S. is he’s being hounded by the Internal Revenue Service over a $900,000 tax bill he ended up owing. The bill was actually run up by his former partner, an accountant who was really an embezzler, but the other guy somehow managed to stick Travis with the crime. (This part of the story reminded me of the Humphrey Bogart character in Casablanca, who also couldn’t return to the U.S. for some crime he was blamed for, though the writers of Casablanca rather more powerfully left Bogart’s crime unexplained, and in one of the film’s most remarkable lines the collaborationist police chief, played by Claude Rains, says, “I’d like to think you killed a man. It’s the romantic in me.”) Eventually Marley comes around when Travis and Cruz are able to sneak into Dexter’s office and find a letter that reveals why Dexter killed Minerva: he was putting together a big land deal for a condo development on the island and he needed the parcel of land on which Minerva’s bar sat. Dexter tried to get her to sell it, he killed her and then planned to buy the bar at her estate sale. The film ends with a bittersweet leave-taking between Travis and Cruz, only she returns to the island two months later for the grand reopening of Minerva’s bar, which he and Marley co-own now because Travis used the money he got from the insurance in his boat (ya remember the boat?) to buy her share of it. Though I found Bret Domrose’s musical score often irritating – if I hear another film set in the Caribbean scored with steel drums and slack-key guitars I think I shall choke myself on a dinner of poi (and slack-key guitars, like poi, are Hawai’ian, not Caribbean) – I quite liked Temptation Under the Sun. Like Big Lies in a Small Town, it was well done within the Lifetime formulae, and I especially liked the way Paul A. Birkett was able to make the affair between Travis and Cruz have some emotional weight instead of just being what Cruz calls a ‘meaningless vacation fling.” And I especially liked the fact that both leads, Annika Foster and Mike Markoff, pronounced the “t” in ‘often”!