Apologies to anyone mildly frustrated by the wait for new content. I’m working on several reviews, including one of our first holiday-themed telefilm of the season. Progress is a little slower now than usual due to a health hiccup, but I expect to have something for you by Monday.
Longtime readers might recall I had a hard knot in my underarm over a year ago, and underwent several tests over a period of months lasting into this year. Nothing new and exciting was revealed, though there was talk of ceasing the Humira that I take for Crohn’s and arthritis, in case it was causing a reaction. Now the discomfort has intensified and spread. My doctor felt around and wants to take another look at it next week.
Mink Stole saw something nasty in the woodshed voting both in Pecker.
Many years ago, when this blog and I were young and didn’t have to slather ourselves in retinol cream every night to look less like our grandmother, I wrote a lot about politics—enough that a gay magazine offered me a spot as a political columnist. One of the many reasons I fervently wanted Obama to win was so that I could, at least temporarily, think less about politics. I did a one-off piece about the 2008 presidential election and left it at that.
This morning I walked through piles of leaves to my polling station and thought, as I always do on election days, of the dark and miserable morning of my first-ever presidential election as a voter. It was 2004 and the wind whipped at my face and numbed my hands as I stood outside for 90 minutes, hoping to vanquish an illegitimate incumbent prone to using my sexuality (at the behest of a vile and shameless gay traitor) as a wedge issue to increase Republican voter turnout. When George W. Bush was reelected, I wasn’t sure how I’d make it through the next four years.
To be gay, to be a woman, to be a non-Christian in America, is always fraught with a danger made more insidious by its relative invisibility. You accept this as a fact of life if you belong to any of those or other minority groups and possess even the slightest self-preservation instinct. These days I live in a liberal enclave, surrounded by elite academics with earnest yard signs assuring passersby that they believe in science and civility; signs testifying to their conviction that racism is wrong. In casual conversation, they reveal gaping blind spots: “Trump doesn’t really believe what he says,” was a common refrain, right up to the day of the insurrection.
Valerie Harper and Wayne Rogers in Goodbye, Supermom.
A semi-earnest social commentary obscured by empty sitcom yuks, 1988’s Goodbye, Supermom (also known as Drop-Out Mother) is a television movie that hates television. “Know what the ‘M’ in MTV stands for? Moron,” a teenage character tells her little brother. An elderly woman later declares “I have no skills, I’m not talented. I read People and watch Entertainment Tonight. I take Robin Leach seriously. I live through other people’s lives.”
If that isn’t compelling enough on its surface, you ought to know who wrote it. Supermom’s credited screenwriter was Bob Shanks, a longtime producer of The Merv Griffin Show. As an ABC executive in the 1970s, Shanks helped birth infotainment-peddling programs like Good Morning America and 20/20, which permanently rearranged the American television landscape—and not necessarily for the better. In the ’80s, he wrote a handful of telefilms that were variations on the theme of corporate burnout: Supermom follows Drop-Out Father (1982, starring Dick Van Dyke) and He’s Fired, She’s Hired (1984).
Depending on how you look at Death Cruise, a 1974 made-for-TV movie produced by Aaron Spelling, it’s either about the horrors of matrimony or the nightmare of traveling with one’s spouse. Either way, it’s one of the more unexpectedly delightful entries in Kate Jackson’s oeuvre, with wardrobe changes galore and the revelation of an unexpected, and somewhat butch, talent—she plays a crack skeet-shooter.
A year removed from her devilishly amusing performance in Satan’s School for Girls, Jackson stars as Mary Frances Radney, the luminous bride of Jimmy (Edward Albert), a boyish attorney. They’re on a second honeymoon, having won an all-expense-paid Caribbean cruise vacation. They’re assigned to dinner table 24 with two other couples, also winners: staid suburbanites David and Elizabeth Mason (Tom Bosley and Celeste Holm) and the quarrelsome Carters, Jerry and Sylvia (Richard Long and Polly Bergen).
Something spooky, and rather Sheena Eastonesque, has happened on this very site just in time for Halloween. Until a few days ago, I used a plugin called WPForms on the Contact page. This weekend it came to my attention that a mischievous ghost or malevolent spirit caused something to go haywire with that.
If you sent a message through the Contact form any time since October 4th, I have no record of it. I’m not sure what’s more frightening, that my “Thanks for reaching out!” auto-response wasn’t shown to anyone who submitted a note this month, or that a reader might’ve felt ignored after not hearing back from me.
Sincerest apologies for that snafu. For now, you can leave a comment directly on the Contact page (no WPForms involved) if you want to get in touch. While I can’t travel back in time and save or respond to lost notes, I can share with you conciliatory photos of pumpkins.
“When something’s dead, the only decent thing to do is bury it,” Elizabeth Montgomery’s younger sister tells her in the made-for-TV thriller The Victim (1972). Susan Chappel (Jess Walton) is referring to her marriage to Ben (George Maharis); she recently retained a divorce lawyer. But in a macabre twist, she’s soon dead herself—and certainly not buried.
As Kate Wainwright (Montgomery) inches closer to that horrifying discovery, we’re treated to 75 minutes of thunder and lightning and close calls with a corpse. Hitchcock’s Rope it ain’t, but The Victim (adapted by Merwin Gerard from a story by McKnight Malmar) derives its more twisted suspense from a body in a trunk. And this time it’s wicker and not entirely closed, allowing viewers to notice what escapes Kate’s attention in Ben and Susan’s dark basement.
The roommates are feuding again—over a trophy this time, not a man—in “The Competition” (S1E07), the first of many contest-themed Golden Girls episodes. The B-plot’s exposition is lined up right out of the gate: Sophia is preparing what Dorothy calls her “special 14-hour sauce,” which suggests a special occasion. Rose contributes to the conversation in her typical childlike fashion, exclaiming “Oh, Sophia, that smells heavenly! Is it Chef Boyardee?”
Before any useful information can be extracted from Sophia, Blanche enters the kitchen, showing off her new bowling ball. “I bought it to help Rose and me win the bowling tournament this year,” she announces. The bowling tournament is as out of left field as Dorothy cramming for a French exam in the previous episode, but let’s not get bogged down by details.
Angie Dickinson with Ron Moody in Dial ‘M’ for Murder.
Onscreen adultery rarely looked more glamorous than when it was being committed by Angie Dickinson, who followed her turn as one of the more significant straying spouses in the history of cinema—in Brian De Palma’s 1980 classic, Dressed to Kill—with a TV remake of another notable tale of extramarital betrayal, Dial ‘M’ for Murder. In an intriguing departure from other adaptations of Frederick Knott’s stage play, Dickinson was 50 years old when she tackled the role of Margot Wendice—twice as old as Grace Kelly, who played Margot in Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial ‘M’ for Murder (1954).
That Dickinson’s Margot and Christopher Plummer’s Tony Wendice are an age-appropriate pairing subtly reconfigures their power dynamic. Grace Kelly’s youthfulness, contrasted with the Ray Milland’s cool, mature composure as a retired tennis player, enhanced her character’s vulnerability. In Andrew Davis’ A Perfect Murder, a 1998 remake, Gwyneth Paltrow would’ve been more believable as the daughter, not wife, of an embattled Michael Douglas. Dickinson, who held her own in westerns, exploitation flicks, police fare, and opposite the Rat Pack, was no ingénue by 1981, raising the domestic stakes.
Kate Jackson leads a campus recruitment effort in Satan’s School for Girls.
Nearly 50 years after its television debut, Satan’s School for Girls (1973) owes much of its timelessness to Kate Jackson’s devious smile. But it’s strikingly modern in other ways as well, containing portents of the #MeToo movement and alluding to the continued (and comically one-sided) political debate about the merits of a liberal arts education.
We join the action as Martha (Terry Lumley), paranoid in the manner of an Afterschool Special character lost in a bad trip, races to her sister Elizabeth’s place. There she encounters an offscreen menace and is soon found hanging from the rafters. Elizabeth (Pamela Franklin) knows it wasn’t a suicide, despite police labeling Martha “a melancholy girl,” and enrolls at Martha’s alma mater, the Salem Academy for Women, to conduct an undercover investigation.
As its theme song warns—or perhaps threatens—you’re never gonna be the same again after watching Teen Witch (1989). The phrase is emphatically repeated no fewer than 17 times in the track that accompanies the film’s baffling opening sequence, which plays like a ponderous perfume ad aimed at tweens. When that sonic nightmare is finally over, 15-year-old Louise Miller (Robyn Lively) awakens to find her little brother, Richie (Joshua John Miller), binge-eating junk food beneath her bed.
It is as difficult to convey Richie’s essential gayness as it is burdensome to adequately describe the many tortures of the Teen Witch soundtrack. Louise will soon learn, on the cusp of her sixteenth birthday, that she is a witch poised to assume control of her powers. But to focus solely on her supernatural gifts is to overlook the flaming young Richie’s demonic possession by the spirits of Paul Lynde and Alice Ghostley. Zelda Rubinstein plays Madame Serena, Louise’s mentor in mischievous magic, and I kept imagining her Poltergeist character spotting Richie and chanting “Cross over, homos. All are welcome!”
