A View to Kill For (RNR Media, Almost Never Films, Lifetime. 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, June 18) I watched what turned out to be a surprisingly good Lifetime movie: A View to Kill For. It begins with a prologue in which a rich old guy named Lionel Fitzpatrick (John Fleischmann) is shown coming down the stairs of his palatial mansion in an ultra-exclusive community called “Bellanca Bay” (I Googled it and found only a listing for the Bellanca Hotel at Avalon on Catalina Island, and the long-defunct Bellanca aircraft company) clutching at his heart. He makes it down the stairs and into his study, opens his desk drawer and tries to retrieve the heart medication he’s supposed to take in case this happens to him – only the bottle is empty and we see a dimly lit figure of a woman (director Brittany Underwood lets her regrettably unidentified cinematographer get close enough to her we can see her gender) who essentially murdered Lionel by throwing out the med that could have saved his life. (Obviously, at some point in her life writer Rosy Deacon had seen The Little Foxes, in which Bette Davis murders her no-longer-convenient husband Herbert Marshall by withholding his heart med – though the film was directed by William Wyler and photographed by Gregg Toland, both of whom managed it quite a bit more powerfully than it is here.) The film then cuts to the not-too-tranquil lives of husband Charlie Nolan (Samuel Whitten, considerably hunkier and hotter than the usual actors Lifetime cast as good-guy husbands), wife Molly (Tiffany Montgomery, top-billed) and their two kids, high-school senior Heather (Demi Lehman) and pre-pubescent Finn (Bryson JonSteele). Charlie is a community-college professor and Molly put her ambitions to become an art photographer on hold when she started having children.

Molly was adopted at age two or three following the death of her natural mother and the disappearance of her father, and though she’s made a few desultory attempts to locate him she doesn’t learn who he was until he – Lionel Fitzpatrick – is already dead. The police in Bellanca Bay ruled it an “accident” and it turns out that, even though they hadn’t seen each other since she was a baby, Lionel willed Molly his entire multi-million dollar estate as well as his home in Bellanca Bay. Molly and Charlie eagerly grab Lionel’s legacy as their ticket out of a drab inner-city existence (Molly gets the word of her inheritance just as vandals have smashed into the side of her car and broken its window), and the kids are less thrilled – Heather in particular doesn’t like the idea of being uprooted and forced to finish high school in a new community where she doesn’t know anybody – but the Nolans still move. The house comes equipped with a housekeeper, Grace (Lynne Marie Triebold), whom writer Deacon makes a few stabs at turning into a Mrs. Danvers-like figure but ultimately turns out to be reasonably good-hearted. Molly decides to make a plate of white sugar cookies and pass them around to the neighbors – she even insists on baking them herself instead of letting Grace do it despite Heather’s whining, “But it’s her job” – only her first stop is a disaster. She brings the cookies in their glass container to imperious Justine Spencer (Libby Blake) – “of the New Jersey Spencers,” she insists – and Justine not only declines the gift (“too much gluten”), she makes it clear that the Nolans don’t belong in Bellanca Bay and she wants them to take their inner-city asses back there as soon as possible.

The only two people who seems to be sympathetic to the Nolans is their real-estate agent, Rebecca Jones (Brittany Goodwin), who wangles them an invitation to join the local country club and attend their annual gala dinner; and Theresa Diaz (Courtney Lana), who despite her Latina-sounding name is actually Black. Theresa was Lionel’s attorney and arranged the will that left Molly all his money and his house, and though she and Molly hardly get to know each other she ultimately fulfills the Lifetime cliché function of The Heroine’s African-American Best Friend Who Discovers the Villain’s Plot but Is Killed Before She Can Warn Her. Rosy Dawson is actually quite good at creating red herrings, including Darla Weaver (Kylie Delre), who was engaged to Lionel for the last year of his life but found out only after he died that he’d disinherited her. Naturally Darla is resentful of Molly for having breezed into Bellanca Bay and grabbed the multi-million dollar fortune Darla believed was hers by right. Darla also has a spoiled-brat son Heather’s age, Paul Weaver (Anthony Nathaniel Lee), whom she meets when she sees him swipe a piece of candy from the local coffeehouse. Naturally Heather gots all huffy about it – and is even more perturbed by Paul’s attitude towards it, that it’s no big deal and he’s entitled to take anything he wants no matter what the consequences are for anyone else. Heather starts dating Paul because he’s the only age-peer in Bellanca Bay who actually is nice to her. The rest of her new high-school classmates are thunderstruck when she tells them she’s never been skiing, and with a sudden realization of just where she came from they ask, “Were you poor?” Only mom Molly takes an instant dislike to Paul and orders her daughter not to see him again, especially once she catches them ditching class and Paul acts like it’s no big deal. Paul’s whole attitude towards the world has been conditioned by the sense of entitlement Bellanca Bay seems to instill in all its residents; at one point Heather asks him if he isn’t worried about the police, and Paul says, “The cops in town do whatever we tell them to do.” In fact, one of the main things that sets A View to Kill For apart from other Lifetime movies is Rosy Dawson’s brilliance in creating a set of such insufferable snobs we can readily believe any of them literally capable of murder.

Naturally, this being a Lifetime movie, tensions between the Nolans and the townspeople escalate, from the early scene in which someone sneaks into the Nolans’ home and paints in blood-red letters, “YOU DON’T BELONG HERE,” to a later attempt to asphyxiate them by leaving one of the burners on the gas stove on (for which Molly initially blames her daughter Heather and chews her out for being careless), a vandal attack on their living room, and a still later attempt to burn the place down by pouring gasoline over the garage floor and leaving a lit cigarette on the edge of something or other in hopes that the cigarette will fall to the floor and ignite the spilled gas. The Nolans keep calling the police, who keep saying that there’s no sign of forced entry and therefore there’s nothing they can do. All the Nolans’ repeated appeals to local law enforcement earn them are yet more put-downs from Justine Spencer, who says pregnantly that nothing like this ever happened in Bellanca Bay before the Nolans arrived. Molly Nolan also previously embarrassed herself at the country-club gala when she went up to the man Justine was with and assumed he was her husband Richard; he was actually Warren (Joe Komara), one of Justine’s extra-relational amours (something she was notorious for throughout Bellanca Bay), and an act or two later Molly has scouted out a location for a photographic arts gallery she wants to open in Bellanca Bay. Realtor Rebecca Jones has arranged the deal for Molly, and Molly loves the space and is ready to rent it until the owner turns out to be Warren, who flatly refuses to rent to her because she embarrassed him at the gala.

Eventually [spoiler alert!] Rebecca turns out to be the real villain – something I was already starting to suspect, not only because she boasted that she was the one person in Bellanca Bay who knew all its secrets but because in a previous Lifetime movie, Home, Not Alone, “premiered” last March and which they were re-running after this one, the villainess also turned out to be a psycho realtor. Rebecca’s motive turned out to be a bit of a surprise; she turned out to have been Lionel Fitzpatrick’s illegitimate daughter and therefore Molly’s half-sister (and though the relationship is supposed to be a big surprise, Tiffany Montgomery and Brittany Goodwin look enough alike they are fully believable as half-sisters). She traced Lionel to Bellanca Bay and established herself there in hopes that she’d get his estate after she killed him, then had to dispose of Theresa Diaz when she figured out from Lionel’s legal papers that he had another daughter besides Molly and who she was. A View to Kill For is an unusually good Lifetime movie, partly because of the class critique of Rosy Deacon’s direction and partly because Brittany Underwood directs it brilliantly, filling it full of Gothic imagery and making the rather stock class conflicts of Dawson’s script come alive as both dramatic and cinematic issues.