by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night Lifetime showed the “world premiere” of a
surprisingly good thriller called Hidden Truth, set in the small mountain community of Mammoth Lakes, California
(though despite the plural name it seems to have only one lake) and starting with one of Lifetime’s familiar
teaser scenes: a young woman is bound by an assailant who hits her on the
forehead with a large rock, then wraps her up and takes her out in a rowboat to
the middle of the lake, where he drops her overboard with an anchor chained to
her leg so even if she survived the clout from the rock, she’ll sink and drown.
Then there’s a title reading “Two Days Earlier,” and it turns out that two days
earlier Zoë Nevin (Diana Hopper) had just about saved up enough money to escape
Mammoth Lakes and move to Los Angeles. She’s got the money in the first place
by being in a sleazy relationship with the owner of the resort which seems to
give Mammoth Lakes whatever economy it has — we don’t even see a grocery store
or a gas station even though it’s obvious the Mammoth Lakians have to have some way of fueling both themselves and their vehicles.
The only other business we see is “Pace’s Auto and Boat Repair,” a sort of
outdoor garage run by Pace Nevin (Brendan McCarthy), Zoë’s father, a recovering
alcoholic who was still drinking a year earlier when his wife Layla (played by
Heidi Fialek in a flashback even though she’s been dead a year at the start of
the story) ran away from him at a bar and ended up, you guessed it, hit by a
rock and drowned in the middle of the lake. The local sheriff, Underwood (yet another seedy-law-enforcement-officer-in-a-small-town role
by former Hardy Boy Parker Stevenson), and his deputy, Simons (Evan Scott
Wood), are both convinced Pace Nevin murdered his wife, and when (after another
title, reading “Two Days Later, takes us back to the story’s present) Zoë’s
body is found in the lake, hit with a rock and then drowned just like her mom
was a year before. Bumbling cops Underwood and Simons, showing a degree of
stick-to-it-iveness towards the wrong conclusion that makes Inspectors Lestrade
and Gregson seem like models of open-mindedness by comparison, are so convinced Pace Nevin is guilty of this crime, too —
they assume Zoë caught him in the act of killing her mom and so he killed her to
shut her up (a year later?) — they utterly refuse to consider any other
possibilities.
The actual lead character is Zoë’s aunt Jamie (Sarah Lind), who
took over raising Zoë after Layla was murdered while Pace stepped back from the
family to sober up, and it doesn’t take her long before she turns up another
suspect: Michael Evans (Shawn Christian), the resort owner, who had paid Zoë
the money she’d been saving for her escape. As a 16-year-old she had worked at
the resort for a few months but Michael apparently decided he couldn’t resist
her sexually, so he paid her for sex and possibly some other, even sleazier
things as well — about two-thirds of the way through we learn that though
Michael’s resort is ostensibly a respectable establishment, there’s an ongoing
drug supermarket behind its back wall, and it’s hinted that among the foul
things Michael had Zoë doing for him is dealing drugs as well as letting him
fuck her. In the teaser we already learned that she was only going to have sex
with him one more time and then was going to take the money and get out of
town, and when he insists she’ll keep working for him, she points out it’s her
17th birthday and if he gives her any trouble she’ll report him to
the cops for having sex with an underage girl. That seems to be what drove him
off the deep end and led him to kill her after she tried to flee through the
woods surrounding the lake and he managed to catch her. Jamie collects more and
more evidence implicating Michael in the murder of her daughter, including
finding a wishbone-shaped charm from a bracelet Zoë was given for her birthday,
but the sheriffs refuse to consider it — though a third person in the sheriff’s
office helps her by supplying her a printout documenting that Michael owns the
land from which he rowed the boats to the middle of the lake to drown both
Layla and Zoë. Meanwhile, in order to make his frame complete, Michael steals a
coffee cup from Pace’s car (Pace is so easygoing he not only parks his car
outside his business but leaves it unlocked) and plants it in one of the
rowboats, thereby leading Underwood and Simons to arrest him — only Jamie knows the cup wasn’t there earlier because she had already
searched the rowboats herself. Eventually Michael decides he’s going to have to
eliminate Jamie as well, but the cops finally catch on and arrest him just in time, while his wife
Veronique (Jessica Morris), who was willing to lie for him earlier on, turns
state’s evidence against him.
Effectively and suspensefully directed by Steven
R. Monroe from a well-constructed script by Richard O. Lowry (even though I
think Lowry made a mistake by giving the two sets of characters such similar
last names — it took me a while to realize that the good guys were named
“Nevin” and the bad guy “Evans”), Hidden Truth isn’t a great film but it’s Lifetime at close to its
best: Lowry avoids the absurd melodramatics of other Lifetime writers and
Monroe trusts the script enough to tell it in a straightforward manner free of
visual or editing tricks. The cast is also quite fine: Sarah Lind is solid in
the role of the “sleuth” character, unable to believe her brother could have
committed such crimes and determined to avenge her niece by finding the real
killer; Brendan McCarthy is properly air-headed as the brother who seems more
overwhelmed than anything else by being falsely accused of murder and having
that accusation hang over his head for a year in a typical movie small town
where everybody knows everybody else’s business; and Shawn Christian nails both
the superficial charm of his character (one reason the sheriff and his deputy
are so sure he didn’t do it is he’s such a respected and influential citizens
in the town, the closest thing Mammoth Lakes has to a 1-percenter) and the
depravity beneath without resorting to the scenery-chewing other actors have
done as Lifetime villains. It also helps that he’s decent-looking but not
drop-dead gorgeous — one of the most monotonous Lifetime affectations is the
insistence of their casting directors that virtually every hot-looking male in their casts must be a
black-hearted villain!
Sunday, July 10, 2016
His Double Life (Hybrid LLC, Lifetime, 2016)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night Lifetime followed the quite impressive Hidden Truth with another suspense melodrama, His Double Life, which they’d run recently in the same 10 p.m. to midnight time slot but which I hadn’t watched at the time because a cursory look at my movie files told me I’d already seen it. I hadn’t; the previous His Double Life was a quite good independent film from 1933 about a famous painter who fakes his own death and then attempts a comeback. This His Double Life was far less interesting and nowhere near as good as Hidden Truth, mainly because writers Peter Sullivan (who also directed) and Jeffrey Schenck went whole-hog on precisely the sorts of melodramatic excesses the makers of Hidden Truth, director Steven R. Monroe and writer Richard O. Lowry, had wisely avoided. His Double Life begins with a chase scene at night on a mountain road that ends with a car crashing and the death of its owner, though it’s not until this film is about three-quarters over that we finally realize the significance of that sequence. Then we get a title reading “Five Years Later” and five years later Linda Thomas (Emmanuelle Vaugier), whose husband was killed in that opening scene, is about to remarry. Her new husband is Greg Davis (Brian Krause), who was her late husband’s business partner in a company called Digital Force that’s currently in the middle of a major new software project Greg is mum about even though it’s taking him away a lot of nights both from Linda and her teenage daughter Scarlett (Cristine Prosperi), who’s just returned from her freshman year at a prestigious East Coast university (I can’t recall which one) and who wants to spend as much time as possible over the summer break with her mom and the “new” man in her life. Brian Krause isn’t drop-dead gorgeous but he’s still pretty hot, and director Sullivan gives us a nice crotch shot showing his basket — and the moment we see how well-hung he is we know he must be a black-hearted villain.
Scarlett is suspicious of him because he keeps going out at night, and she breaks into his phone and notes that one of the addresses he’s been is a fancy restaurant called Été, which from their menu and logo hardly looks like the sort of place you’d take a business associate for a “working” meal. Scarlett traces Davis to the home of a woman named Mary Harlow, and the two of them greet each other with a hug at her door and an embrace before they pull the shades. Of course Scarlett assumes that Davis and Mary are having an affair, only in the next sequence she discovers that the truth is even worse than that: she’s out at a restaurant where her rather air-headed blonde friend Darcy (Kati Salowski) works as a waitress when the TV in the place shows a news report that Mary Harlow’s dead body has just been found. Through various clues — including seeing someone run into Davis at a restaurant and call him by another name (and Davis subsequently corners this person in the parking lot and kills her) and tracing him to a military museum where he runs into another person carrying an identical briefcase and the two exchange them for a dead drop — Scarlett realizes that “Davis” is actually a Russian spy. The film’s issue becomes whether she can get the goods on him before he realizes that she’s on to him and knocks her off — and also before he completes his secret plan and launches “Cerberus,” a software program that his company has created under contract to the National Security Agency (NSA) to keep their data (including, you’ll remember, records on every cell-phone call and e-mail made, sent or received in the U.S. —thank you once again, Edward Snowden, for blowing the whistle on the police-state extent of the NSA’s 24/7 spying on the entire American population!) more secure. Of course, he’s built in a back door to the program so he can download the NSA’s entire data archive and forward it to his Russian masters — and he’s stopped just in the nick of time after Scarlett leaks what she’s got on him to the local FBI office (the film is set in L.A.).
Only “Davis” manages to knock off Scarlett’s friend Darcy and overpower Scarlett, her mom Linda and her boyfriend August (Santiago Segura), a colorless nerd she knew in high school but thought she’d grown beyond until Darcy shoved them back together and Scarlett found August’s computer hacking skills useful. The big climax occurs when Scarlett shows up at her own home for what she thinks is going to be a meeting with Darcy, only when she gets there Davis has tied up both her mom and August — though eventually Scarlett and Davis have a fight and force Davis to drop his gun, and mom picks it up and plugs him just before the FBI arrives. The 2016 His Double Life is just one ridiculous plot contrivance after another, and it’s not terribly well acted either: Cristine Prosperi goes through the entire movie with one blank expression on her face, which apparently was her attempt to look “serious” but just makes her look dorky, and though he’s hot enough I could fantasize about him Brian Krause is also pretty blank as an actor, especially when he has to make a final speech in which he says the U.S. is too powerful and he needs to do what he’s doing to “restore the balance” by making Russia a rival superpower again — which sounds like the sorts of real-life rationalizations the Soviet spies in the 1930’s, 1940’s and 1950’s were making. Indeed, at least one of the agendas Sullivan and Schenck were pursuing in making this movie was heating up the Cold War again — a final title says that Russia has actually increased its number of espionage agents in the U.S. since the Soviet Union fell and “they could be your co-workers … your friends … your neighbors … your husbands.” I wouldn’t mind that so much if the show had at least stayed more or less within the bounds of credibility enough to be entertaining — Charles has been bothered by the neo-Cold War politics of the CBS-TV series Madam Secretary but at least their episodes have been well written and, within the conventions of TV drama, reasonably believable, which His Double Life was decidedly not.
Last night Lifetime followed the quite impressive Hidden Truth with another suspense melodrama, His Double Life, which they’d run recently in the same 10 p.m. to midnight time slot but which I hadn’t watched at the time because a cursory look at my movie files told me I’d already seen it. I hadn’t; the previous His Double Life was a quite good independent film from 1933 about a famous painter who fakes his own death and then attempts a comeback. This His Double Life was far less interesting and nowhere near as good as Hidden Truth, mainly because writers Peter Sullivan (who also directed) and Jeffrey Schenck went whole-hog on precisely the sorts of melodramatic excesses the makers of Hidden Truth, director Steven R. Monroe and writer Richard O. Lowry, had wisely avoided. His Double Life begins with a chase scene at night on a mountain road that ends with a car crashing and the death of its owner, though it’s not until this film is about three-quarters over that we finally realize the significance of that sequence. Then we get a title reading “Five Years Later” and five years later Linda Thomas (Emmanuelle Vaugier), whose husband was killed in that opening scene, is about to remarry. Her new husband is Greg Davis (Brian Krause), who was her late husband’s business partner in a company called Digital Force that’s currently in the middle of a major new software project Greg is mum about even though it’s taking him away a lot of nights both from Linda and her teenage daughter Scarlett (Cristine Prosperi), who’s just returned from her freshman year at a prestigious East Coast university (I can’t recall which one) and who wants to spend as much time as possible over the summer break with her mom and the “new” man in her life. Brian Krause isn’t drop-dead gorgeous but he’s still pretty hot, and director Sullivan gives us a nice crotch shot showing his basket — and the moment we see how well-hung he is we know he must be a black-hearted villain.
Scarlett is suspicious of him because he keeps going out at night, and she breaks into his phone and notes that one of the addresses he’s been is a fancy restaurant called Été, which from their menu and logo hardly looks like the sort of place you’d take a business associate for a “working” meal. Scarlett traces Davis to the home of a woman named Mary Harlow, and the two of them greet each other with a hug at her door and an embrace before they pull the shades. Of course Scarlett assumes that Davis and Mary are having an affair, only in the next sequence she discovers that the truth is even worse than that: she’s out at a restaurant where her rather air-headed blonde friend Darcy (Kati Salowski) works as a waitress when the TV in the place shows a news report that Mary Harlow’s dead body has just been found. Through various clues — including seeing someone run into Davis at a restaurant and call him by another name (and Davis subsequently corners this person in the parking lot and kills her) and tracing him to a military museum where he runs into another person carrying an identical briefcase and the two exchange them for a dead drop — Scarlett realizes that “Davis” is actually a Russian spy. The film’s issue becomes whether she can get the goods on him before he realizes that she’s on to him and knocks her off — and also before he completes his secret plan and launches “Cerberus,” a software program that his company has created under contract to the National Security Agency (NSA) to keep their data (including, you’ll remember, records on every cell-phone call and e-mail made, sent or received in the U.S. —thank you once again, Edward Snowden, for blowing the whistle on the police-state extent of the NSA’s 24/7 spying on the entire American population!) more secure. Of course, he’s built in a back door to the program so he can download the NSA’s entire data archive and forward it to his Russian masters — and he’s stopped just in the nick of time after Scarlett leaks what she’s got on him to the local FBI office (the film is set in L.A.).
Only “Davis” manages to knock off Scarlett’s friend Darcy and overpower Scarlett, her mom Linda and her boyfriend August (Santiago Segura), a colorless nerd she knew in high school but thought she’d grown beyond until Darcy shoved them back together and Scarlett found August’s computer hacking skills useful. The big climax occurs when Scarlett shows up at her own home for what she thinks is going to be a meeting with Darcy, only when she gets there Davis has tied up both her mom and August — though eventually Scarlett and Davis have a fight and force Davis to drop his gun, and mom picks it up and plugs him just before the FBI arrives. The 2016 His Double Life is just one ridiculous plot contrivance after another, and it’s not terribly well acted either: Cristine Prosperi goes through the entire movie with one blank expression on her face, which apparently was her attempt to look “serious” but just makes her look dorky, and though he’s hot enough I could fantasize about him Brian Krause is also pretty blank as an actor, especially when he has to make a final speech in which he says the U.S. is too powerful and he needs to do what he’s doing to “restore the balance” by making Russia a rival superpower again — which sounds like the sorts of real-life rationalizations the Soviet spies in the 1930’s, 1940’s and 1950’s were making. Indeed, at least one of the agendas Sullivan and Schenck were pursuing in making this movie was heating up the Cold War again — a final title says that Russia has actually increased its number of espionage agents in the U.S. since the Soviet Union fell and “they could be your co-workers … your friends … your neighbors … your husbands.” I wouldn’t mind that so much if the show had at least stayed more or less within the bounds of credibility enough to be entertaining — Charles has been bothered by the neo-Cold War politics of the CBS-TV series Madam Secretary but at least their episodes have been well written and, within the conventions of TV drama, reasonably believable, which His Double Life was decidedly not.
Thursday, July 7, 2016
Tales of Tomorrow: “The Enemy Within” (ABC-TV, May 1, 1953)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I got out the disc I’d recently burned of the seven episodes of the fascinating early-1950’s TV series Tales of Tomorrow that are available on archive.org and ran “The Enemy Within,” originally aired May 1, 1953 and one of at least two extant TV shows featuring James Dean that aren’t in the supposedly “complete” TCM boxed set of Dean’s TV appearances. Ironically, the show features two men who became legendary movie stars and had backgrounds in Method acting — Dean and Rod Steiger — but the top-billed performer is Margaret Phillips, an actress with a discernible British accent (she was born July 6, 1923 in Cwmgwrach, South Wales — that name is one of the many deplorable things Welsh people do to English, though sometimes they get some things right, like Carol Williams pronouncing the “t” in “often”) who has by far the juiciest part of the three. It’s basically a weird domestic offspring of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, in which scientist Peter (Rod Steiger) — if the script by David E. Durston and Manya Starr gave a last name for him, I missed it — has, after three years and with his grant funding about to run out, finally perfected a serum that can unleash the evil inside of an animal, or (presumably) a human, who takes it. Only he runs out of space in his lab refrigerator to store the latest and most efficacious sample, and so he takes home a rack of test tubes and puts it in his own refrigerator, then hastens back to the lab and his assistant Ralph (James Dean) but forgets the notebook containing the formula for the successful serum. Now that he’s developed the serum Peter is excited about working on the antidote and hopefully developing another drug that will bring out the good inside a person, but in the meantime one of his test tubes leaks onto a pie in their refrigerator and Peter’s wife Annie (Margaret Phillips) eats a slice of the contaminated pie. The serum takes effect on her and turns her into a coquettish bitch who lets out all her frustrations over the years Peter has ignored her because he’s been so obsessed with his work; she tears out the last two pages of his notebook and burns them, then takes the rack of test tubes with the serum and pours them down their kitchen sink. When Ralph calls from the lab with an important message about the formula Peter asked his wife to take down for him, Annie first vocally flirts with him and then hangs up.
The story is essentially a piece of sexist propaganda — it seems to be saying that if your wife starts interfering with your career and actually demands relationship equality, it can only be because she’s under the influence of some sinister force and you should ignore it and wait for her to snap out of it and revert to good little wifehood again. We only get to see James Dean in one scene — he’s in the lab and Peter returns, and the two try in vain to reconstruct the formula Annie has destroyed — though it’s an interesting Dean credit in that it’s one of the few times he actually got to act wearing glasses. Dean was incredibly near-sighted and wore glasses almost all the time off-screen, and when he made his movies he would rehearse with his glasses on so he could learn his blocking and he’d only take the glasses off for actual takes. Here, since he’s playing the classic nerdy scientist’s assistant, he gets to keep his glasses on virtually throughout the show — and though he isn’t seen again we do get to hear his phone voice at the end, as he calls Peter to tell him the effect of the serum is only temporary and it will wear off on its own. So the finale features Peter watching Annie threaten to kill herself with a kitchen knife — her ultimate revenge on him for ignoring her all those years — and hoping she’ll snap out of it and the serum will wear off before she does anything nasty either to herself or him. This episode is an effectively written and directed (by Don Medford) live show — it even contains an insert shot of the serum dripping onto the pie in the refrigerator, a tough effect to do with the crude early TV cameras in real time (and clearly the insert is part of the live show, not filmed separately and spliced in) — part of a series that if it had been done on film instead of live, would probably have a similar reputation to The Twilight Zone and be as rerun to death as The Twilight Zone has been. I first discovered Tales of Tomorrow — as well as NBC’s TV version of the radio series Lights Out — when the Sci-Fi Channel (well before it was rechristened with its current ridiculous name “Syfy”) started re-running them in the early 1990’s, and Charles and I watched a few of them together and were quite impressed.
I got out the disc I’d recently burned of the seven episodes of the fascinating early-1950’s TV series Tales of Tomorrow that are available on archive.org and ran “The Enemy Within,” originally aired May 1, 1953 and one of at least two extant TV shows featuring James Dean that aren’t in the supposedly “complete” TCM boxed set of Dean’s TV appearances. Ironically, the show features two men who became legendary movie stars and had backgrounds in Method acting — Dean and Rod Steiger — but the top-billed performer is Margaret Phillips, an actress with a discernible British accent (she was born July 6, 1923 in Cwmgwrach, South Wales — that name is one of the many deplorable things Welsh people do to English, though sometimes they get some things right, like Carol Williams pronouncing the “t” in “often”) who has by far the juiciest part of the three. It’s basically a weird domestic offspring of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, in which scientist Peter (Rod Steiger) — if the script by David E. Durston and Manya Starr gave a last name for him, I missed it — has, after three years and with his grant funding about to run out, finally perfected a serum that can unleash the evil inside of an animal, or (presumably) a human, who takes it. Only he runs out of space in his lab refrigerator to store the latest and most efficacious sample, and so he takes home a rack of test tubes and puts it in his own refrigerator, then hastens back to the lab and his assistant Ralph (James Dean) but forgets the notebook containing the formula for the successful serum. Now that he’s developed the serum Peter is excited about working on the antidote and hopefully developing another drug that will bring out the good inside a person, but in the meantime one of his test tubes leaks onto a pie in their refrigerator and Peter’s wife Annie (Margaret Phillips) eats a slice of the contaminated pie. The serum takes effect on her and turns her into a coquettish bitch who lets out all her frustrations over the years Peter has ignored her because he’s been so obsessed with his work; she tears out the last two pages of his notebook and burns them, then takes the rack of test tubes with the serum and pours them down their kitchen sink. When Ralph calls from the lab with an important message about the formula Peter asked his wife to take down for him, Annie first vocally flirts with him and then hangs up.
The story is essentially a piece of sexist propaganda — it seems to be saying that if your wife starts interfering with your career and actually demands relationship equality, it can only be because she’s under the influence of some sinister force and you should ignore it and wait for her to snap out of it and revert to good little wifehood again. We only get to see James Dean in one scene — he’s in the lab and Peter returns, and the two try in vain to reconstruct the formula Annie has destroyed — though it’s an interesting Dean credit in that it’s one of the few times he actually got to act wearing glasses. Dean was incredibly near-sighted and wore glasses almost all the time off-screen, and when he made his movies he would rehearse with his glasses on so he could learn his blocking and he’d only take the glasses off for actual takes. Here, since he’s playing the classic nerdy scientist’s assistant, he gets to keep his glasses on virtually throughout the show — and though he isn’t seen again we do get to hear his phone voice at the end, as he calls Peter to tell him the effect of the serum is only temporary and it will wear off on its own. So the finale features Peter watching Annie threaten to kill herself with a kitchen knife — her ultimate revenge on him for ignoring her all those years — and hoping she’ll snap out of it and the serum will wear off before she does anything nasty either to herself or him. This episode is an effectively written and directed (by Don Medford) live show — it even contains an insert shot of the serum dripping onto the pie in the refrigerator, a tough effect to do with the crude early TV cameras in real time (and clearly the insert is part of the live show, not filmed separately and spliced in) — part of a series that if it had been done on film instead of live, would probably have a similar reputation to The Twilight Zone and be as rerun to death as The Twilight Zone has been. I first discovered Tales of Tomorrow — as well as NBC’s TV version of the radio series Lights Out — when the Sci-Fi Channel (well before it was rechristened with its current ridiculous name “Syfy”) started re-running them in the early 1990’s, and Charles and I watched a few of them together and were quite impressed.
Monday, July 4, 2016
My Life as a Dead Girl (My Life Productions/Reel One Entertainment/Lifetime, 2015)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was My Life as a Dead Girl, an evocative title that reminded me of Ed Wood’s unfilmed script I Awoke Early the Day I Died, and it was directed by Penelope Buitenhuis (who also made the previous night’s Lifetime “world premiere,” Newlywed and Dead) from an “original” story by Adam Meyer which was turned into a screenplay by him and Lifetime’s best writer, Christine Conradt. Though she didn’t come up with the original story, enough of this script shows the Conradt touch — particularly the complexity of at least some of the characters and the way she plays with the audience’s sympathies — that she probably should be considered a Schreiber on this project. The story opens in Portland, Oregon, on whose mean streets works teenage prostitute Brittany (a first-rate performance by Cassandra Scerbo, who proves herself fully attuned to her character’s rich characterization in Conradt’s and Meyer’s script). She’s having run-ins with her scruffy but not entirely unattractive pimp Oscar Jackson (Chad Rook), who wants both money and sex from her — he shows up at her ratty apartment drunk, horny and convinced that she’s holding out on him. She is, of course; she’s trying to save money not only to keep paying the rent on the apartment but some day to flee and make it to Jamaica (yes, the one in the Caribbean) where she hopes she can find work as a bartender … well, it beats hooking. During the course of her work she meets panhandler Chelsea White (Kirsten Prout), and though at first they’re hostile to each other — Chelsea is begging for spare change on a corner Brittany thinks is “hers” — eventually they strike up a friendship. Chelsea wants to get enough money together for a bus ticket to Steveson, also in Oregon (though for a while I was a bit confused and thought she wanted to go to Houston), the small town where her aunt Kim (Keegan Connor Tracy, who looks enough like Kirsten Prout we can readily believe they’re part of the same family — kudos to casting directors Candice Elzinga and Aaron Griffith for avoiding the usual trap of so many movies in which people who don’t look at all alike are passed off as biological relations!) lives with her husband Donnie (Ken Tremblett). Brittany and Chelsea hatch a plot to steal back Brittany’s nest egg which Jackson (he’s referred to throughout by his last name) has stolen, and Brittany gets the money but Jackson catches them and gives chase. Brittany gets away with the money but Chelsea, whom Brittany had wear her red hoodie, gets shot in the back by Jackson and killed.
Brittany calls in an anonymous tip to the police but hangs up when asked to identify herself, and having been given Donnie’s and Kim’s address by Chelsea before she was killed Brittany uses some of the money to buy a bus ticket to Steveson and impersonate Chelsea (whom no one else in her family has seen since she was a little kid, so Brittany can get away with the impersonation even though she and Chelsea don’t look at all alike aside from both being teenage white women). “Chelsea” is welcomed into the family with open arms, and though Lifetime has done plenty of stories about people showing up on other people’s doorsteps claiming to be their long-lost relatives, fortunately Buitenhuis (whose direction here, obviously inspired by a stronger script, is considerably better than it was in Newlywed and Dead — can we hope she’ll get a shot at a feature film once that big glass ceiling in Hollywood finally cracks?), Meyer and Conradt avoid the phony suspense of is-she-or-isn’t-she. Instead they follow Alfred Hitchcock’s precept of letting the audience know in advance what’s going on and building suspense over when and how the characters will find out and what will happen when they do. Donnie and Kim enroll the supposed Chelsea in Steveson High — “Home of the Bobcats!” its signs proclaim — and Brittany a.k.a. Chelsea flees in horror from her first class, a history lesson, when the teacher gives a pop quiz and she knows none of the answers. Fortunately she attracts the attentions of fellow student Zach (Adam DiMarco), who offers to tutor her but whose interest in her obviously runs to far more than just her intellectual well-being. Meanwhile, Brittany also sticks up for nerd and bullying victim Shannon (Genevieve Buechner) against her tormentor, Kayla (Louriza Tronco), who not only has her posse tear up Shannon’s advanced placement chemistry notes just before the class final but literally forces her to act like her pet dog. (One wonders why, if Shannon is supposed to be so smart, she didn’t type up the notes on her computer — especially when, at Brittany’s urging, Zach offers to e-mail her his notes on the same class which he took the year before.) The tension mounts as Kim and Donnie, appalled by “Chelsea’s” tales of being abused by her various foster parents (a detail she learned from the real Chelsea during their brief friendship — she also received a present from Chelsea, a handmade butterfly pin Chelsea’s mom had made for her before dying in an accident when Chelsea was eight, thereby propelling Chelsea into the foster-care system since at the time Kim and Chelsea’s mom had been feuding and so Kim refused to take Chelsea in) and not being educated at all, either in school or at home, decide to research her background.
The film also periodically cuts back to Portland, where police detective Whalen (a nice no-nonsense performance by Kyra Zagorsky) is convinced Oscar Jackson murdered the mystery girl — unlike a lot of cops in thriller movies, she takes the anonymous tip seriously — but can’t establish a connection between them even once the girl is identified as Chelsea White. We also learn that Jackson — whom at first we assumed was just a skuzzy street pimp but turns out to have enough criminal irons in various fires he can afford a Mercedes-Benz (his friends all drive Porsches, I guess, but he’s not the kind of person who would make amends) and, once he figures out where Brittany has gone (from driving by her apartment right when the manager is throwing out her belongings), can take off long enough to drive to Steveson and hunt her down. Meanwhile, Zach is tutoring Brittany and pestering her to go on a date with him, and she finally agrees only if he’ll let her tell him her big secret when they’re out together. They go to a reasonably fancy Mexican restaurant and Brittany, still in “Chelsea” guise, tells Zach that she ran away from a particularly abusive foster home — and he’s cool with it until she tells him she was a teen prostitute, whereupon he gets angry and confused, bolts from the restaurant after leaving enough money to pay their bill, and totally upsets Brittany until he approaches her the next day at school and apologizes. They eventually make up, but at their next attempt to date they’re waylaid by Jackson, who still wants to kill Brittany — and, fortunately, by Detective Whelan, who’s pieced the whole thing together but not before Donnie, discovering an envelope from the Oregon Department of Social Services which Brittany had intercepted that contains a photo of the real Chelsea, realizes he’s been had and Brittany is not really his wife’s niece. (I had thought the big reveal would come from Donnie and Kim seeing one of the media reports identifying the dead girl as Chelsea White, showing her photo and asking people with information about her murder to come forward, but Meyer and Conradt didn’t do much with that plot thread.) Eventually it all ends more or less happily, with Jackson taken down and Brittany with both a family and a boyfriend — Donnie and Kim decide to adopt her legally and Zach is still very much in the picture.
My Life as a Dead Girl succeeds on nearly all counts, from the complex characterization of Brittany — and, wisely, Meyer and Conradt avoided a long, dull expository scene explaining just how Brittany ended up as a prostitute (we presume she was a runaway from her own bad foster situation and Jackson picked her up, seduced her and brought her out into “the life,” but we don’t have to have that spelled out for us) and let us see her as a decent girl at heart but one who had been forced by circumstances and her own survival needs into some horrible aspects of life. The film is glued together by Cassandra Scerbo’s marvelous performance as Brittany, beautifully balanced between giving the character the right “edge” and still keeping her sympathetic; especially when she tells Zach she feels responsible for someone else’s death, we know she’s right (she did dress the real Chelsea in her jacket, so Jackson mistook Chelsea for Brittany and shot her) but it doesn’t evaporate our sympathy for her, our desire to see her find a safe harbor in life and get beyond the terrible things she had to do to live in Portland. My Life as a Dead Girl is a good thriller and it’s also something more than that, a message movie about families and connections — remember that the real Chelsea met the fate she did because Kim wouldn’t take her in after her mom died because she was still feuding with her sister over the sister’s boyfriend — and the need for people to reach out and trust each other as well as the dangers of living a lie, even for the best of motives. My Life as a Dead Girl was utterly engrossing and I hope that Cassandra Scerbo gets the star parts she deserves based on her portrayal here, just as I can root for Penelope Buitenhuis to get some more substantial assignments if and when the glass ceiling against female directors finally crumbles!
The film was My Life as a Dead Girl, an evocative title that reminded me of Ed Wood’s unfilmed script I Awoke Early the Day I Died, and it was directed by Penelope Buitenhuis (who also made the previous night’s Lifetime “world premiere,” Newlywed and Dead) from an “original” story by Adam Meyer which was turned into a screenplay by him and Lifetime’s best writer, Christine Conradt. Though she didn’t come up with the original story, enough of this script shows the Conradt touch — particularly the complexity of at least some of the characters and the way she plays with the audience’s sympathies — that she probably should be considered a Schreiber on this project. The story opens in Portland, Oregon, on whose mean streets works teenage prostitute Brittany (a first-rate performance by Cassandra Scerbo, who proves herself fully attuned to her character’s rich characterization in Conradt’s and Meyer’s script). She’s having run-ins with her scruffy but not entirely unattractive pimp Oscar Jackson (Chad Rook), who wants both money and sex from her — he shows up at her ratty apartment drunk, horny and convinced that she’s holding out on him. She is, of course; she’s trying to save money not only to keep paying the rent on the apartment but some day to flee and make it to Jamaica (yes, the one in the Caribbean) where she hopes she can find work as a bartender … well, it beats hooking. During the course of her work she meets panhandler Chelsea White (Kirsten Prout), and though at first they’re hostile to each other — Chelsea is begging for spare change on a corner Brittany thinks is “hers” — eventually they strike up a friendship. Chelsea wants to get enough money together for a bus ticket to Steveson, also in Oregon (though for a while I was a bit confused and thought she wanted to go to Houston), the small town where her aunt Kim (Keegan Connor Tracy, who looks enough like Kirsten Prout we can readily believe they’re part of the same family — kudos to casting directors Candice Elzinga and Aaron Griffith for avoiding the usual trap of so many movies in which people who don’t look at all alike are passed off as biological relations!) lives with her husband Donnie (Ken Tremblett). Brittany and Chelsea hatch a plot to steal back Brittany’s nest egg which Jackson (he’s referred to throughout by his last name) has stolen, and Brittany gets the money but Jackson catches them and gives chase. Brittany gets away with the money but Chelsea, whom Brittany had wear her red hoodie, gets shot in the back by Jackson and killed.
Brittany calls in an anonymous tip to the police but hangs up when asked to identify herself, and having been given Donnie’s and Kim’s address by Chelsea before she was killed Brittany uses some of the money to buy a bus ticket to Steveson and impersonate Chelsea (whom no one else in her family has seen since she was a little kid, so Brittany can get away with the impersonation even though she and Chelsea don’t look at all alike aside from both being teenage white women). “Chelsea” is welcomed into the family with open arms, and though Lifetime has done plenty of stories about people showing up on other people’s doorsteps claiming to be their long-lost relatives, fortunately Buitenhuis (whose direction here, obviously inspired by a stronger script, is considerably better than it was in Newlywed and Dead — can we hope she’ll get a shot at a feature film once that big glass ceiling in Hollywood finally cracks?), Meyer and Conradt avoid the phony suspense of is-she-or-isn’t-she. Instead they follow Alfred Hitchcock’s precept of letting the audience know in advance what’s going on and building suspense over when and how the characters will find out and what will happen when they do. Donnie and Kim enroll the supposed Chelsea in Steveson High — “Home of the Bobcats!” its signs proclaim — and Brittany a.k.a. Chelsea flees in horror from her first class, a history lesson, when the teacher gives a pop quiz and she knows none of the answers. Fortunately she attracts the attentions of fellow student Zach (Adam DiMarco), who offers to tutor her but whose interest in her obviously runs to far more than just her intellectual well-being. Meanwhile, Brittany also sticks up for nerd and bullying victim Shannon (Genevieve Buechner) against her tormentor, Kayla (Louriza Tronco), who not only has her posse tear up Shannon’s advanced placement chemistry notes just before the class final but literally forces her to act like her pet dog. (One wonders why, if Shannon is supposed to be so smart, she didn’t type up the notes on her computer — especially when, at Brittany’s urging, Zach offers to e-mail her his notes on the same class which he took the year before.) The tension mounts as Kim and Donnie, appalled by “Chelsea’s” tales of being abused by her various foster parents (a detail she learned from the real Chelsea during their brief friendship — she also received a present from Chelsea, a handmade butterfly pin Chelsea’s mom had made for her before dying in an accident when Chelsea was eight, thereby propelling Chelsea into the foster-care system since at the time Kim and Chelsea’s mom had been feuding and so Kim refused to take Chelsea in) and not being educated at all, either in school or at home, decide to research her background.
The film also periodically cuts back to Portland, where police detective Whalen (a nice no-nonsense performance by Kyra Zagorsky) is convinced Oscar Jackson murdered the mystery girl — unlike a lot of cops in thriller movies, she takes the anonymous tip seriously — but can’t establish a connection between them even once the girl is identified as Chelsea White. We also learn that Jackson — whom at first we assumed was just a skuzzy street pimp but turns out to have enough criminal irons in various fires he can afford a Mercedes-Benz (his friends all drive Porsches, I guess, but he’s not the kind of person who would make amends) and, once he figures out where Brittany has gone (from driving by her apartment right when the manager is throwing out her belongings), can take off long enough to drive to Steveson and hunt her down. Meanwhile, Zach is tutoring Brittany and pestering her to go on a date with him, and she finally agrees only if he’ll let her tell him her big secret when they’re out together. They go to a reasonably fancy Mexican restaurant and Brittany, still in “Chelsea” guise, tells Zach that she ran away from a particularly abusive foster home — and he’s cool with it until she tells him she was a teen prostitute, whereupon he gets angry and confused, bolts from the restaurant after leaving enough money to pay their bill, and totally upsets Brittany until he approaches her the next day at school and apologizes. They eventually make up, but at their next attempt to date they’re waylaid by Jackson, who still wants to kill Brittany — and, fortunately, by Detective Whelan, who’s pieced the whole thing together but not before Donnie, discovering an envelope from the Oregon Department of Social Services which Brittany had intercepted that contains a photo of the real Chelsea, realizes he’s been had and Brittany is not really his wife’s niece. (I had thought the big reveal would come from Donnie and Kim seeing one of the media reports identifying the dead girl as Chelsea White, showing her photo and asking people with information about her murder to come forward, but Meyer and Conradt didn’t do much with that plot thread.) Eventually it all ends more or less happily, with Jackson taken down and Brittany with both a family and a boyfriend — Donnie and Kim decide to adopt her legally and Zach is still very much in the picture.
My Life as a Dead Girl succeeds on nearly all counts, from the complex characterization of Brittany — and, wisely, Meyer and Conradt avoided a long, dull expository scene explaining just how Brittany ended up as a prostitute (we presume she was a runaway from her own bad foster situation and Jackson picked her up, seduced her and brought her out into “the life,” but we don’t have to have that spelled out for us) and let us see her as a decent girl at heart but one who had been forced by circumstances and her own survival needs into some horrible aspects of life. The film is glued together by Cassandra Scerbo’s marvelous performance as Brittany, beautifully balanced between giving the character the right “edge” and still keeping her sympathetic; especially when she tells Zach she feels responsible for someone else’s death, we know she’s right (she did dress the real Chelsea in her jacket, so Jackson mistook Chelsea for Brittany and shot her) but it doesn’t evaporate our sympathy for her, our desire to see her find a safe harbor in life and get beyond the terrible things she had to do to live in Portland. My Life as a Dead Girl is a good thriller and it’s also something more than that, a message movie about families and connections — remember that the real Chelsea met the fate she did because Kim wouldn’t take her in after her mom died because she was still feuding with her sister over the sister’s boyfriend — and the need for people to reach out and trust each other as well as the dangers of living a lie, even for the best of motives. My Life as a Dead Girl was utterly engrossing and I hope that Cassandra Scerbo gets the star parts she deserves based on her portrayal here, just as I can root for Penelope Buitenhuis to get some more substantial assignments if and when the glass ceiling against female directors finally crumbles!
Sunday, July 3, 2016
Newlywed and Dead (Reel One Entertainment/Young Rich Productions/Lifetime, 2016)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I did my usual Saturday night ritual (when I don’t have anything better to do) and watched the two movies being shown on Lifetime, including the much-ballyhooed “world premiere” of something called Newlywed and Dead. (This time the working title, Young, Rich and Desperate, was even worse.) It begins with a title reading, “Eleven Years Ago,” and eleven years ago young rich kid Jay Morgan (William Dickinson, a cute tow-headed blond who doesn’t look at all like he’d grow up to be Christopher Russell, the actor who plays the adult Jay in the contemporary portions of the film) confronts his mom on the staircase of their palatial manor home in Paradise Valley, Oregon — which, we later learn, the Morgan family owns outright. He threatens her with a baseball bat. She says, “Give me the bat,” and he gives it to her. Oh, boy, does he give it to her: he wields it like a pool cue and knocks her down the stairs, killing her, though for his and the family’s sake her sister Barbara (Venus Terzo) pulls strings and uses the family’s influence to get it officially ruled an accident. Then the film flashes forward 11 years and Jay Morgan is a strapping, dark-haired young man whom we first see shirtless, with a smooth chest and pecs to die for; of course, being the leading man in a Lifetime movie and given the network’s usual iconography that sexy male = villain, he turns out to be a no-good rotter and a psycho besides.
He manages the Paradise Mountain Resort on his family’s property, an O.K. ski lodge which he wants to remodel into a year-round vacation spot, including an 18-hole golf course. He’s corralled a group of investors to back the project but he’s also aroused community opposition, and while his family so totally owns both the community of Paradise and its local law enforcement, represented by Sheriff Williamson (Forbes Angus), that he really doesn’t have to worry about grass-roots protesters, he does have to worry about Aunt Barbara’s opposition because she’s part of the family trust that holds the deed and she’s succeeded in getting an injunction against the wide access road he needs to build for his project. In the middle of all this Jay manages to charm, get to fall in love with and ultimately marry Kristen Ward (Shenae Grimes-Beech, top-billed), a woman he’s attracted to because her facial structure resembles that of his late mother. Indeed, he’s so determined to marry “a girl just like the girl that married dear old dad” (who apparently divorced mom and bailed on the family after Jay killed mom) that he goes full Vertigo on Kristen, demanding that she tie her hair back behind her head the way his mom did and wear similar clothes, including a shirt with a ruffled collar that seems incredibly weird for a woman to wear in a film set in modern times. Like so many movie husbands (and quite a few real-life ones as well), Jay goes into total-control mode once he’s got the ring on her finger and the license on his wall: he not only orders her about, he makes it clear that what he wants from her is just to be a wife and not butt into his business affairs. When she meets privately with Barbara and negotiates a compromise with her to allow Jay’s big development to go forward — or at least part of it; Barbara’s conditions including leaving part of the land wild forest instead of putting in the golf course (Kristen tries to point out to her husband that the forest itself would be a tourist attraction) and that Jay tell Kristen exactly how his mom died — Jay goes ballistic.
From doing online searches and looking at pages of the local newspaper’s archives (the paper looks more like a crudely produced apartment-building newsletter than an actual newspaper) Kristen learns that Jay was previously engaged to a woman named Ashley Brown (Laci J. Mailey), who supposedly was crippled in a skiing accident on the Paradise Valley slopes. Only, as Kristen learns when she traces Ashley to San Francisco — where she’s living in a studio apartment and eking out a living as an artist — Jay actually assaulted her and then he and Barbara once again used their contacts with local law enforcement to have it ruled an “accident.” Meanwhile, Kristen’s own mom Annie (Samantha Ferris) just happens to be Sheriff Williamson’s deputy, and she’s suspicious enough of Jay to be doing her own online research about him and the intriguing penchant people he doesn’t like have of dying in “accidents.” Aunt Barbara becomes the victim of Jay’s latest “accident” when he confronts her in her home, he slaps her and she falls, though the person who actually does her in is Jay’s henchman Mark Adams (Christian Sloan), who flips on the gas in her house so in case the cops don’t buy the “accident” story, their next level of defense will be to claim Barbara committed suicide. But Kristen, who saw Barbara in good spirits the day before she died, doesn’t believe the suicide story — and neither do her mom Annie or her sister Caitlyn (Lindsay Navarro). It all comes to a head when the Morgan family’s lawyer reads Barbara’s will and Jay learns that Barbara changed it so her interest in the Morgan trust would pass not to Jay but to his wife Kristen. Jay accordingly has Mark kidnap Kristen and hold her hostage to force her to sign papers transferring the inheritance to him, and when he can’t do that directly he decides to take her mom hostage and threaten to kill her if he doesn’t sign. Mom tries to get a rifle out of the back of the sheriff’s SUV and bring down Jay, but he catches her in time and it’s up to Kristen to recover Mark’s gun (Jay was setting Mark up to be the fall guy for all this and then shot Mark when he caught on and objected) and bring down Jay herself.
A tag scene shows Kristen inheriting Paradise Valley and promising to follow Barbara’s vision for its future as relatively unspoiled open space, presumably with the help of Gus Hoffman (James Kirk), a Gay man who’s on Jay’s staff but is totally clueless about what’s going on — and who, like most movie Gay men, drops a hint that he’s Gay but is never shown actually romantically or sexually involved with a man. Also the sheriff who covered up Jay’s “accidents” is himself arrested and Annie Ward takes over. Newlywed and Dead is an O.K. thriller that delivers the Lifetime goods, though it’s such slow going at first it seemed more like a romance drama than a crime story. As usual, the actor playing the bad guy stands out; not only is Christopher Russell drop-dead gorgeous, he manages the character’s hairpin turns and frequent resort to violent threats (as when he literally shoves down a community organizer opposed to Jay’s plan for the valley) vividly. It also occurred to me that the character’s tactics as a would-be developer seem so much like Donald Trump’s famously bullying style it’s likely writers Linda J. Cowgill and Rhys Davies intended Jay as a parody of Trump — only with a hotter bod and normal-looking hair. Certainly Russell conveys not only the character’s psychotic side but also his sense of entitlement, stretching up to and including the idea that he can get away with murder any time he wants to (after all, he already has!), and while it’s wish-fulfillment in real life I like stories in which rich people are finally held accountable and made to suffer for their crimes (though I’d liked it even better if Jay had been arrested and tried instead of killed). It’s also directed by a woman, Penelope Bultenhuis, and while there’s nothing that special about her work on it, it’s still nice to see women getting directorial credits on Lifetime and we can always hope — even if usually forlornly — they can rise out of the Lifetime ghetto and get some assignments to do theatrical features.
Last night I did my usual Saturday night ritual (when I don’t have anything better to do) and watched the two movies being shown on Lifetime, including the much-ballyhooed “world premiere” of something called Newlywed and Dead. (This time the working title, Young, Rich and Desperate, was even worse.) It begins with a title reading, “Eleven Years Ago,” and eleven years ago young rich kid Jay Morgan (William Dickinson, a cute tow-headed blond who doesn’t look at all like he’d grow up to be Christopher Russell, the actor who plays the adult Jay in the contemporary portions of the film) confronts his mom on the staircase of their palatial manor home in Paradise Valley, Oregon — which, we later learn, the Morgan family owns outright. He threatens her with a baseball bat. She says, “Give me the bat,” and he gives it to her. Oh, boy, does he give it to her: he wields it like a pool cue and knocks her down the stairs, killing her, though for his and the family’s sake her sister Barbara (Venus Terzo) pulls strings and uses the family’s influence to get it officially ruled an accident. Then the film flashes forward 11 years and Jay Morgan is a strapping, dark-haired young man whom we first see shirtless, with a smooth chest and pecs to die for; of course, being the leading man in a Lifetime movie and given the network’s usual iconography that sexy male = villain, he turns out to be a no-good rotter and a psycho besides.
He manages the Paradise Mountain Resort on his family’s property, an O.K. ski lodge which he wants to remodel into a year-round vacation spot, including an 18-hole golf course. He’s corralled a group of investors to back the project but he’s also aroused community opposition, and while his family so totally owns both the community of Paradise and its local law enforcement, represented by Sheriff Williamson (Forbes Angus), that he really doesn’t have to worry about grass-roots protesters, he does have to worry about Aunt Barbara’s opposition because she’s part of the family trust that holds the deed and she’s succeeded in getting an injunction against the wide access road he needs to build for his project. In the middle of all this Jay manages to charm, get to fall in love with and ultimately marry Kristen Ward (Shenae Grimes-Beech, top-billed), a woman he’s attracted to because her facial structure resembles that of his late mother. Indeed, he’s so determined to marry “a girl just like the girl that married dear old dad” (who apparently divorced mom and bailed on the family after Jay killed mom) that he goes full Vertigo on Kristen, demanding that she tie her hair back behind her head the way his mom did and wear similar clothes, including a shirt with a ruffled collar that seems incredibly weird for a woman to wear in a film set in modern times. Like so many movie husbands (and quite a few real-life ones as well), Jay goes into total-control mode once he’s got the ring on her finger and the license on his wall: he not only orders her about, he makes it clear that what he wants from her is just to be a wife and not butt into his business affairs. When she meets privately with Barbara and negotiates a compromise with her to allow Jay’s big development to go forward — or at least part of it; Barbara’s conditions including leaving part of the land wild forest instead of putting in the golf course (Kristen tries to point out to her husband that the forest itself would be a tourist attraction) and that Jay tell Kristen exactly how his mom died — Jay goes ballistic.
From doing online searches and looking at pages of the local newspaper’s archives (the paper looks more like a crudely produced apartment-building newsletter than an actual newspaper) Kristen learns that Jay was previously engaged to a woman named Ashley Brown (Laci J. Mailey), who supposedly was crippled in a skiing accident on the Paradise Valley slopes. Only, as Kristen learns when she traces Ashley to San Francisco — where she’s living in a studio apartment and eking out a living as an artist — Jay actually assaulted her and then he and Barbara once again used their contacts with local law enforcement to have it ruled an “accident.” Meanwhile, Kristen’s own mom Annie (Samantha Ferris) just happens to be Sheriff Williamson’s deputy, and she’s suspicious enough of Jay to be doing her own online research about him and the intriguing penchant people he doesn’t like have of dying in “accidents.” Aunt Barbara becomes the victim of Jay’s latest “accident” when he confronts her in her home, he slaps her and she falls, though the person who actually does her in is Jay’s henchman Mark Adams (Christian Sloan), who flips on the gas in her house so in case the cops don’t buy the “accident” story, their next level of defense will be to claim Barbara committed suicide. But Kristen, who saw Barbara in good spirits the day before she died, doesn’t believe the suicide story — and neither do her mom Annie or her sister Caitlyn (Lindsay Navarro). It all comes to a head when the Morgan family’s lawyer reads Barbara’s will and Jay learns that Barbara changed it so her interest in the Morgan trust would pass not to Jay but to his wife Kristen. Jay accordingly has Mark kidnap Kristen and hold her hostage to force her to sign papers transferring the inheritance to him, and when he can’t do that directly he decides to take her mom hostage and threaten to kill her if he doesn’t sign. Mom tries to get a rifle out of the back of the sheriff’s SUV and bring down Jay, but he catches her in time and it’s up to Kristen to recover Mark’s gun (Jay was setting Mark up to be the fall guy for all this and then shot Mark when he caught on and objected) and bring down Jay herself.
A tag scene shows Kristen inheriting Paradise Valley and promising to follow Barbara’s vision for its future as relatively unspoiled open space, presumably with the help of Gus Hoffman (James Kirk), a Gay man who’s on Jay’s staff but is totally clueless about what’s going on — and who, like most movie Gay men, drops a hint that he’s Gay but is never shown actually romantically or sexually involved with a man. Also the sheriff who covered up Jay’s “accidents” is himself arrested and Annie Ward takes over. Newlywed and Dead is an O.K. thriller that delivers the Lifetime goods, though it’s such slow going at first it seemed more like a romance drama than a crime story. As usual, the actor playing the bad guy stands out; not only is Christopher Russell drop-dead gorgeous, he manages the character’s hairpin turns and frequent resort to violent threats (as when he literally shoves down a community organizer opposed to Jay’s plan for the valley) vividly. It also occurred to me that the character’s tactics as a would-be developer seem so much like Donald Trump’s famously bullying style it’s likely writers Linda J. Cowgill and Rhys Davies intended Jay as a parody of Trump — only with a hotter bod and normal-looking hair. Certainly Russell conveys not only the character’s psychotic side but also his sense of entitlement, stretching up to and including the idea that he can get away with murder any time he wants to (after all, he already has!), and while it’s wish-fulfillment in real life I like stories in which rich people are finally held accountable and made to suffer for their crimes (though I’d liked it even better if Jay had been arrested and tried instead of killed). It’s also directed by a woman, Penelope Bultenhuis, and while there’s nothing that special about her work on it, it’s still nice to see women getting directorial credits on Lifetime and we can always hope — even if usually forlornly — they can rise out of the Lifetime ghetto and get some assignments to do theatrical features.
The Wrong Child (Hybrid/Rapid Heart, 2016)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Often on Saturday nights Lifetime shows movies back-to-back with similar themes and plot premises — and often that’s a mistake because the similarities take some of the edge away from both films. That happened last night when they followed up Newlywed and Dead with The Wrong Child, which judging from the original air date of June 26, 2016 given on the imdb.com page for it would appear to have been last week’s “Lifetime world premiere.” The Wrong Child is yet another Lifetime drama about a couple who suddenly find themselves confronted by a person who claims to be their long-lost kid, and while this one isn’t a patch on the genuinely moving and beautiful Lost Boy (in which we definitely learned the “long-lost son” was an impostor but his motives were kept powerfully ambiguous throughout), at least the first two-thirds of it were quite good, maintaining the suspense and powered by a gnomic performance by Robbie Davidson as Andrew Haight. (So far all this fascinating actor has done is this, a short and a single episode of the TV series Jane the Virgin. He deserves more; indeed, he deserves a real chance at stardom!) The couple who suddenly find their lives upended by this young man are Charles Callahan (Gary Daniels), a white guy with a British accent who’s supposedly a sensationally successful architect working on a $6 million project to redevelop the city (this is taking place in Malibu, and at least in some establishing second-unit shots Malibu is “playing” itself), and his wife Renée (Vivica A. Fox, top-billed), a voluptuous Rubens-esque Black woman who, in a neat switcheroo on what we expect from the stereotypes, is the member of the couple who comes from a family with money.
They have a daughter, Amy (played by someone billed simply as “Stevena” but listed on imdb.com as Stevanna Jackson (I presume from the one-word name that she’s a singer — I still remember the time years ago TV Guide ran an article on the then-popular singer Brandy, which said that she had just recorded a duet with Monica, broken up with Maxwell and was now dating Mase and Usher, and I wondered, “Isn’t this woman allowed to know anybody with more than one name?”), though it’s clearly established that Amy is Renée’s daughter by a previous husband who died. (This seems odd since Stevena is light-skinned enough we could readily believe her as the Obama-esque offspring of a racially mixed couple.) Renée runs a bookstore (though it also sells CD’s — mislabeled DVD’s on the set — and clothes) with a white partner named Joyce (Tracy Nelson), and it functions both for her and for us as a place of refuge from the melodramatics that ensue when Andrew shows up and announces that he’s Charles’ long-lost son from a casual sexual encounter that took place 20 years ago in Florida before Charles and Renée met. (One thing that was nice about this movie was the actors playing Charles and Renée both pronounced the “t” in “often.”) Things start going awry almost immediately and reach a head when, just before he’s about to make the big presentation to the city officials who are is clients, Charles’ office is vandalized and spray-painted in blue paint with the graffito, “Time to Play.” Renée’s daughter Amy covers for Andrew, saying that they were just playing paintball and that’s why he has traces of blue paint on him, but we’re going, “Yeah, right.” About two-thirds of the way through the movie, though, what has previously been a subtle, suspenseful thriller, deliberately kept powerfully ambiguous by director David DeCoteau and writer Matthew Jason Walsh, takes a hard right turn into the usual Lifetime absurdity and melodramatic excess. We’ve already been suspicious of Andrew because he was shown much younger in a prologue in which he witnessed his mom stab his abusive father to death, and we first were introduced to him from an apartment across the street from the Callahan home spying on them and photographing them with a long-lensed camera. Later we saw him putting bugs all over their house — singularly obvious ones one would think the Callahans would notice — so we’ve already been conditioned to think he’s up to no good but precisely what no-good he’s up to remains a mystery.
The turning point at which this movie goes from effective suspense drama to typical Lifetime sleaze is when Andrew — whose real name, we later learn, is Owen, though “Haight” does appear to be his legal last name — goes to Renée’s bookstore and badgers Joyce over her insistence on researching his background on the Internet, then kills her and for good measure torches the store so her body will be consumed and it’ll look like she was killed in an accidental fire. Then we get a tense scene between Owen and Charles Callahan in which writer Walsh throws us the typical Lifetime surprise-twist curveball: Charles hired Owen in the first place as part of a plot for him to impersonate an alleged long-lost son. The idea was to get Renée’s family to give Owen $500,000 to study medicine at UC Berkeley, only instead of going to school Owen would simply disappear; he’d get $50,000 as a cut and the rest would go to Charles, who it turns out isn’t a successful architect at all but a lousy investor who has already lost all his wife’s own money and fallen so far behind on the mortgage they’re about to lose that spectacular Malibu home. Only Owen has other ideas; we’re not all that sure what they are and we get the impression he isn’t all that clear either, but they seem to involve taking over the Callahan family, killing Charles and Renée and ending up with Amy, who he has the hots for (what a surprise!). Robbie Davidson’s performance is incredible, bringing more to Walsh’s silly script than it deserves and making us believe in the character even though when we think about it later, we’re wondering, “Why the hell was he doing that?” Vivica Fox and Stevena are also quite good, but Gary Daniels is at sea in a role several sizes too big for him; unlike Davidson, he can’t make his good-guy-to-bad-guy transition even remotely convincing, though in one way he’s right for the part: he’s so good at conveying ineptitude we can readily believe he’ll do no better as a crook than he did as an architect. Still, The Wrong Child — the first two-thirds of it, anyway — is chillingly effective suspense melodrama and well worth seeing even after it takes that hard right turn into typical Lifetime unbelievability!
Often on Saturday nights Lifetime shows movies back-to-back with similar themes and plot premises — and often that’s a mistake because the similarities take some of the edge away from both films. That happened last night when they followed up Newlywed and Dead with The Wrong Child, which judging from the original air date of June 26, 2016 given on the imdb.com page for it would appear to have been last week’s “Lifetime world premiere.” The Wrong Child is yet another Lifetime drama about a couple who suddenly find themselves confronted by a person who claims to be their long-lost kid, and while this one isn’t a patch on the genuinely moving and beautiful Lost Boy (in which we definitely learned the “long-lost son” was an impostor but his motives were kept powerfully ambiguous throughout), at least the first two-thirds of it were quite good, maintaining the suspense and powered by a gnomic performance by Robbie Davidson as Andrew Haight. (So far all this fascinating actor has done is this, a short and a single episode of the TV series Jane the Virgin. He deserves more; indeed, he deserves a real chance at stardom!) The couple who suddenly find their lives upended by this young man are Charles Callahan (Gary Daniels), a white guy with a British accent who’s supposedly a sensationally successful architect working on a $6 million project to redevelop the city (this is taking place in Malibu, and at least in some establishing second-unit shots Malibu is “playing” itself), and his wife Renée (Vivica A. Fox, top-billed), a voluptuous Rubens-esque Black woman who, in a neat switcheroo on what we expect from the stereotypes, is the member of the couple who comes from a family with money.
They have a daughter, Amy (played by someone billed simply as “Stevena” but listed on imdb.com as Stevanna Jackson (I presume from the one-word name that she’s a singer — I still remember the time years ago TV Guide ran an article on the then-popular singer Brandy, which said that she had just recorded a duet with Monica, broken up with Maxwell and was now dating Mase and Usher, and I wondered, “Isn’t this woman allowed to know anybody with more than one name?”), though it’s clearly established that Amy is Renée’s daughter by a previous husband who died. (This seems odd since Stevena is light-skinned enough we could readily believe her as the Obama-esque offspring of a racially mixed couple.) Renée runs a bookstore (though it also sells CD’s — mislabeled DVD’s on the set — and clothes) with a white partner named Joyce (Tracy Nelson), and it functions both for her and for us as a place of refuge from the melodramatics that ensue when Andrew shows up and announces that he’s Charles’ long-lost son from a casual sexual encounter that took place 20 years ago in Florida before Charles and Renée met. (One thing that was nice about this movie was the actors playing Charles and Renée both pronounced the “t” in “often.”) Things start going awry almost immediately and reach a head when, just before he’s about to make the big presentation to the city officials who are is clients, Charles’ office is vandalized and spray-painted in blue paint with the graffito, “Time to Play.” Renée’s daughter Amy covers for Andrew, saying that they were just playing paintball and that’s why he has traces of blue paint on him, but we’re going, “Yeah, right.” About two-thirds of the way through the movie, though, what has previously been a subtle, suspenseful thriller, deliberately kept powerfully ambiguous by director David DeCoteau and writer Matthew Jason Walsh, takes a hard right turn into the usual Lifetime absurdity and melodramatic excess. We’ve already been suspicious of Andrew because he was shown much younger in a prologue in which he witnessed his mom stab his abusive father to death, and we first were introduced to him from an apartment across the street from the Callahan home spying on them and photographing them with a long-lensed camera. Later we saw him putting bugs all over their house — singularly obvious ones one would think the Callahans would notice — so we’ve already been conditioned to think he’s up to no good but precisely what no-good he’s up to remains a mystery.
The turning point at which this movie goes from effective suspense drama to typical Lifetime sleaze is when Andrew — whose real name, we later learn, is Owen, though “Haight” does appear to be his legal last name — goes to Renée’s bookstore and badgers Joyce over her insistence on researching his background on the Internet, then kills her and for good measure torches the store so her body will be consumed and it’ll look like she was killed in an accidental fire. Then we get a tense scene between Owen and Charles Callahan in which writer Walsh throws us the typical Lifetime surprise-twist curveball: Charles hired Owen in the first place as part of a plot for him to impersonate an alleged long-lost son. The idea was to get Renée’s family to give Owen $500,000 to study medicine at UC Berkeley, only instead of going to school Owen would simply disappear; he’d get $50,000 as a cut and the rest would go to Charles, who it turns out isn’t a successful architect at all but a lousy investor who has already lost all his wife’s own money and fallen so far behind on the mortgage they’re about to lose that spectacular Malibu home. Only Owen has other ideas; we’re not all that sure what they are and we get the impression he isn’t all that clear either, but they seem to involve taking over the Callahan family, killing Charles and Renée and ending up with Amy, who he has the hots for (what a surprise!). Robbie Davidson’s performance is incredible, bringing more to Walsh’s silly script than it deserves and making us believe in the character even though when we think about it later, we’re wondering, “Why the hell was he doing that?” Vivica Fox and Stevena are also quite good, but Gary Daniels is at sea in a role several sizes too big for him; unlike Davidson, he can’t make his good-guy-to-bad-guy transition even remotely convincing, though in one way he’s right for the part: he’s so good at conveying ineptitude we can readily believe he’ll do no better as a crook than he did as an architect. Still, The Wrong Child — the first two-thirds of it, anyway — is chillingly effective suspense melodrama and well worth seeing even after it takes that hard right turn into typical Lifetime unbelievability!
Friday, July 1, 2016
Kate Smith Hour: "The Hound of Heaven" (NBC, 1/15/53) & Westinghouse Studio One Summer Theatre: "Sentence of Death" (CBS, 8/17/53)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran a couple of excerpts from the James Dean TV boxed set. One was a 12-minute “dramatic” segment from something called the Kate Smith Hour, “The Hound of Heaven,” written by Earl Hamner, Jr., who’s best known today as the creator of The Waltons. It featured John Carradine, looking even older and more grizzled than nature had made him by 1953 (the show’s original air date was January 15), playing a sort-of Southern ethnic character called “Hyder Simpson.” He’s wearing a scraggly growth of beard on his cheeks and affecting a ludicrous mishmash of an accent, and it’s one of those Outward Bound-style stories in which the central character goes to sleep one night and wakes up the next morning only to learn that he is dead. For some reason he’s been able to bring his dog with him to the afterworld (or are we supposed to believe the dog died during the night, too?), and he ends up in front of the gates of heaven with a white-haired gatekeeper (Edgar Staley) saying that he’s welcome to come in but his dog Rusty is not. The gatekeeper tells him that heaven is only for humans but there’s another heaven for dogs just down the eternal road a few blocks, and instead of going through the gate he decides to keep walking until he meets up with an angel (James Dean, wearing a crude set of wings on his back that would have embarrassed a 10-year-old trick-or-treater) who, in Earl Hamner, Jr.’s big switcheroo, explains that the gatekeeper is keeping the gates not of heaven but of hell (though they still couldn’t say “hell” on TV in the early 1950’s!) because, after all, what sort of heaven would it be if people weren’t allowed to bring their dogs? Ironically, Charles and I had been mentioning a few of James Dean’s even earlier credits, including his tiny supporting role as a sailor in the Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis film Sailor Beware, and it seemed to me like Dean had learned something from Jerry Lewis, because in playing what was basically a comedy role he sure seemed to be copying a lot of Lewis’s moves, notably the fluttery hand gestures and the high-pitched, almost infantile whiny voice.
Then we bypassed the next item on the disc — the Campbell’s SoundStage broadcast from July 17, 1953 called Something for an Empty Briefcase, which Charles and I had screened from a download (and which I commented on at http://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2012/08/something-for-empty-briefcase-nbc-71753.html) and which was the first entry in the Dean box that actually featured him instead of having him just in the background — and instead screened the next show in sequence: an episode of the Westinghouse Studio One Summer Theatre (a mouthful of a show title!) called “Sentence of Death.” It’s basically one of the attempts by live TV anthology show producers to do film noir in the unforgiving environs of live TV — including cameras so primitive you were lucky to get an image at all, let alone one with the deep chiaroscuro blacks and whites of classic noir. Written by Adrian Spies based on a story by Thomas Walsh (though the credits don’t say whether Walsh wrote the story especially for the show or it was a previously published magazine story Spies adapted), it begins with a woman named Ellen Morrison (Betsy Palmer), dressed in a nice gown and a fur jacket (the company that provided the fur, Frederika, is even credited, and the whole idea of a fur jacket as a symbol of affluent glamour instead of animal abuse dates this show — as does the fact that Ellen smokes at the food counter), slumming at a downtown pharmacy that also has a sandwich counter.
The place is run by Harry Sawyer (Fred Scollay) and his wife (Virginia Vincent, delivering a strongly etched performance that “preps” us for the surprise at the end of the show), and when Ellen announces that she wants a turkey sandwich on special bread the wife makes a sneering remark and tells her husband to go serve her ham or liverwurst on white. Then a robber comes into the store and holds it up, in the process shooting Harry Sawyer dead. A young man named Joe Palica (James Dean), an ex-convict recently released after serving two years for joy-riding in a stolen car, is seen in the drugstore and is immediately arrested as the robber. He’s identified as such by Mrs. Sawyer and an old Jewish couple, Eugene (Henry Sharpe) and Sylvia (Eda Heineman) Krantz, who weren’t in the drugstore when the robbery went down but were standing outside of it. They hear Mrs. Sawyer identify Joe as the man who shot her husband and go along with it — while Ellen Morrison has her doubts and refuses to say Joe was the man she saw commit the crime. Her doubts intensify when she’s out with one of her many boyfriends and sees a man she recognizes as the actual criminal. She asks her boyfriend to “keep an eye” on him — she wants him to follow the guy when he leaves, but her boyfriend couldn’t be less interested and lets the guy go — but in the meantime Joe Palica has been convicted of the murder and sentenced to death. The two cops assigned to the case are divided; the older one, Sgt. MacReynolds (Ralph Dunn), is convinced Joe is guilty, but his younger partner, Sgt. Paul Cochran (Gene Lyons, top-billed), has his doubts and wonders if maybe, just maybe, Ellen Morrison is on to something. MacReynolds outright accuses Ellen of waffling on the ID just to play games with the police and do something that will impress her shallow society “friends.” Eventually the big switcheroo turns out to be that the crime wasn’t random at all: the real killer was having an affair with Mrs. Sawyer and concocted this scheme to kill him, make it look like a robbery and frame whoever was the next person who walked into the drugstore, which luckily for him turned out to be a young guy with a criminal record whom the cops would readily believe would commit an armed robbery.
“Sentence of Death” is a remarkable story but one the exigencies (and budgets) of live TV couldn’t do justice to, and it’s particularly weakly cast in the female lead. Betsy Palmer is a decent actress but she’s unable to capture the character’s superficial exterior or the change she goes through as proving Joe Palica’s innocence and bringing the real killer to justice becomes a cause with her — and while the all-time mistress of this sort of part, Barbara Stanwyck, was still too big a movie star to be available to TV, there are plenty of other lesser femmes fatales from 1940’s noirs — Mary Beth Hughes from The Great Flamarion, Ann Savage from Detour, Martha Vickers from The Big Sleep and The Big Bluff — who could have done it better. Not surprisingly, James Dean steals the show — even though we only see him in two scenes and we don’t get the wrap-up we’re expecting of someone actually telling him he’s been exonerated. By this time he’d been studying at Lee Strasberg’s Actors’ Studio long enough he was beginning to put some of its lessons to work, and while the other actors in the piece pretty much stand still while delivering their lines and move only when the blocking tells them they have to, Dean’s body is in almost quivering motion. When Charles and I watched “Something for an Empty Briefcase” I noted that “though it’s Susan Douglas that’s supposed to be playing a dancer, it’s Dean, with his extraordinarily fluid movements (his body language gives more of his performance than either his voice or his gestures), that looks more like one.” It’s through his body, and especially his arms, that he registers his horror that, even though he once made a mistake and paid for it, anyone would think him capable of killing somebody in cold blood. His voice is pitched midway between the straightforward one he used in his earlier roles and the Brando-esque mumble with which he’d speak in East of Eden (and, albeit less extremely, in his two later films), but it’s his whole quivering intensity that makes him leap out from the background. He’d be the actor you’d notice from this show even if he hadn’t become first a major movie star and then, at least partly through the tragedy of his way-too-early death, a legend.
I ran a couple of excerpts from the James Dean TV boxed set. One was a 12-minute “dramatic” segment from something called the Kate Smith Hour, “The Hound of Heaven,” written by Earl Hamner, Jr., who’s best known today as the creator of The Waltons. It featured John Carradine, looking even older and more grizzled than nature had made him by 1953 (the show’s original air date was January 15), playing a sort-of Southern ethnic character called “Hyder Simpson.” He’s wearing a scraggly growth of beard on his cheeks and affecting a ludicrous mishmash of an accent, and it’s one of those Outward Bound-style stories in which the central character goes to sleep one night and wakes up the next morning only to learn that he is dead. For some reason he’s been able to bring his dog with him to the afterworld (or are we supposed to believe the dog died during the night, too?), and he ends up in front of the gates of heaven with a white-haired gatekeeper (Edgar Staley) saying that he’s welcome to come in but his dog Rusty is not. The gatekeeper tells him that heaven is only for humans but there’s another heaven for dogs just down the eternal road a few blocks, and instead of going through the gate he decides to keep walking until he meets up with an angel (James Dean, wearing a crude set of wings on his back that would have embarrassed a 10-year-old trick-or-treater) who, in Earl Hamner, Jr.’s big switcheroo, explains that the gatekeeper is keeping the gates not of heaven but of hell (though they still couldn’t say “hell” on TV in the early 1950’s!) because, after all, what sort of heaven would it be if people weren’t allowed to bring their dogs? Ironically, Charles and I had been mentioning a few of James Dean’s even earlier credits, including his tiny supporting role as a sailor in the Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis film Sailor Beware, and it seemed to me like Dean had learned something from Jerry Lewis, because in playing what was basically a comedy role he sure seemed to be copying a lot of Lewis’s moves, notably the fluttery hand gestures and the high-pitched, almost infantile whiny voice.
Then we bypassed the next item on the disc — the Campbell’s SoundStage broadcast from July 17, 1953 called Something for an Empty Briefcase, which Charles and I had screened from a download (and which I commented on at http://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2012/08/something-for-empty-briefcase-nbc-71753.html) and which was the first entry in the Dean box that actually featured him instead of having him just in the background — and instead screened the next show in sequence: an episode of the Westinghouse Studio One Summer Theatre (a mouthful of a show title!) called “Sentence of Death.” It’s basically one of the attempts by live TV anthology show producers to do film noir in the unforgiving environs of live TV — including cameras so primitive you were lucky to get an image at all, let alone one with the deep chiaroscuro blacks and whites of classic noir. Written by Adrian Spies based on a story by Thomas Walsh (though the credits don’t say whether Walsh wrote the story especially for the show or it was a previously published magazine story Spies adapted), it begins with a woman named Ellen Morrison (Betsy Palmer), dressed in a nice gown and a fur jacket (the company that provided the fur, Frederika, is even credited, and the whole idea of a fur jacket as a symbol of affluent glamour instead of animal abuse dates this show — as does the fact that Ellen smokes at the food counter), slumming at a downtown pharmacy that also has a sandwich counter.
The place is run by Harry Sawyer (Fred Scollay) and his wife (Virginia Vincent, delivering a strongly etched performance that “preps” us for the surprise at the end of the show), and when Ellen announces that she wants a turkey sandwich on special bread the wife makes a sneering remark and tells her husband to go serve her ham or liverwurst on white. Then a robber comes into the store and holds it up, in the process shooting Harry Sawyer dead. A young man named Joe Palica (James Dean), an ex-convict recently released after serving two years for joy-riding in a stolen car, is seen in the drugstore and is immediately arrested as the robber. He’s identified as such by Mrs. Sawyer and an old Jewish couple, Eugene (Henry Sharpe) and Sylvia (Eda Heineman) Krantz, who weren’t in the drugstore when the robbery went down but were standing outside of it. They hear Mrs. Sawyer identify Joe as the man who shot her husband and go along with it — while Ellen Morrison has her doubts and refuses to say Joe was the man she saw commit the crime. Her doubts intensify when she’s out with one of her many boyfriends and sees a man she recognizes as the actual criminal. She asks her boyfriend to “keep an eye” on him — she wants him to follow the guy when he leaves, but her boyfriend couldn’t be less interested and lets the guy go — but in the meantime Joe Palica has been convicted of the murder and sentenced to death. The two cops assigned to the case are divided; the older one, Sgt. MacReynolds (Ralph Dunn), is convinced Joe is guilty, but his younger partner, Sgt. Paul Cochran (Gene Lyons, top-billed), has his doubts and wonders if maybe, just maybe, Ellen Morrison is on to something. MacReynolds outright accuses Ellen of waffling on the ID just to play games with the police and do something that will impress her shallow society “friends.” Eventually the big switcheroo turns out to be that the crime wasn’t random at all: the real killer was having an affair with Mrs. Sawyer and concocted this scheme to kill him, make it look like a robbery and frame whoever was the next person who walked into the drugstore, which luckily for him turned out to be a young guy with a criminal record whom the cops would readily believe would commit an armed robbery.
“Sentence of Death” is a remarkable story but one the exigencies (and budgets) of live TV couldn’t do justice to, and it’s particularly weakly cast in the female lead. Betsy Palmer is a decent actress but she’s unable to capture the character’s superficial exterior or the change she goes through as proving Joe Palica’s innocence and bringing the real killer to justice becomes a cause with her — and while the all-time mistress of this sort of part, Barbara Stanwyck, was still too big a movie star to be available to TV, there are plenty of other lesser femmes fatales from 1940’s noirs — Mary Beth Hughes from The Great Flamarion, Ann Savage from Detour, Martha Vickers from The Big Sleep and The Big Bluff — who could have done it better. Not surprisingly, James Dean steals the show — even though we only see him in two scenes and we don’t get the wrap-up we’re expecting of someone actually telling him he’s been exonerated. By this time he’d been studying at Lee Strasberg’s Actors’ Studio long enough he was beginning to put some of its lessons to work, and while the other actors in the piece pretty much stand still while delivering their lines and move only when the blocking tells them they have to, Dean’s body is in almost quivering motion. When Charles and I watched “Something for an Empty Briefcase” I noted that “though it’s Susan Douglas that’s supposed to be playing a dancer, it’s Dean, with his extraordinarily fluid movements (his body language gives more of his performance than either his voice or his gestures), that looks more like one.” It’s through his body, and especially his arms, that he registers his horror that, even though he once made a mistake and paid for it, anyone would think him capable of killing somebody in cold blood. His voice is pitched midway between the straightforward one he used in his earlier roles and the Brando-esque mumble with which he’d speak in East of Eden (and, albeit less extremely, in his two later films), but it’s his whole quivering intensity that makes him leap out from the background. He’d be the actor you’d notice from this show even if he hadn’t become first a major movie star and then, at least partly through the tragedy of his way-too-early death, a legend.
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