Cranky Lesbian

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Tag: Based on a True Story Page 1 of 2

Firefighter: Nancy McKeon Turns a Hose on Sexism

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On April 6, 2024

In TV Movies

Nancy McKeon keeps her eye on the ball in Firefighter.

Somewhere in the annals of TV movie history, there’s probably a biopic with less dramatic frisson than Firefighter — maybe an early ’90s TNT original called Not Without My Dry Cleaning, starring Delta Burke as a desperate tourist who enlists the help of the American Embassy to liberate her captive chiffon blouses after misplacing the receipt. But I’m hard-pressed to think of one that takes as compelling a story as Cindy Fralick’s bid to become L.A. County’s first female firefighter and reduces it to yuk-yuk suspense over whether its heroine will ever learn to cook.

Nancy McKeon (Strange Voices), who plays Fralick, appeared in Afterschool Specials grittier than this (Please Don’t Hit Me, Mom and Schoolboy Father), but it’s easy to imagine that in 1986, only three years after its subject made history, a realistic depiction of the harassment faced by women in male-dominated fields was verboten. Instead, Mod Squad director Robert Michael Lewis and screenwriter Kathryn Montgomery (herself the co-author of two CBS Schoolbreak Specials) gave viewers and fire department spokespeople alike exactly they wanted: a kumbaya tale in which even the worst-behaved men aren’t that bad, and are handily outnumbered anyway by those who root for her success.

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Baby for Sale: Dana Delany Child-Shops on eBay

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On February 27, 2024

In TV Movies

Dana Delany’s a tough mother in Lifetime’s Baby for Sale.

The problems start when Nathalie Johnson (Dana Delany), desperate to adopt, goes online without parental supervision. It’s 2004, and while you could engage in human trafficking on Craigslist and Backpage then, Target didn’t yet offer BOGO sales on human infants.* Dejected after another fruitless meeting with an expectant mother, Nathalie searches for ‘adoption’ and clicks the first result. She impulsively submits an application that requires financial disclosure and is soon offered Gitta, a four-month-old from Budapest.

Surgeon husband Steve (Hart Bochner) and their adoption lawyer, Kathy (Ellen David, exuding Roma Maffia energy), urge caution. They’re based in Minnesota and the baby broker, Gábor Szabó (Bruce Ramsay) — not to be confused with the guitarist — is in New York. “I have no way to properly screen him,” Kathy warns. “This is a man we know nothing about. There’s a lot of risk here.” The red flags only multiply once the Johnsons travel to meet Gitta, but Nathalie, already a stepmother to Steve’s son, is blinded by her desire for a child to call her own.

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Deadly Whispers: Tony Danza’s Odd Turn as a Murderous Father

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On December 27, 2023

In TV Movies

Tony Danza and Pamela Reed in Deadly Whispers.

Imagine Tony Danza in a frilly dress and sun hat, clutching a parasol and drawling “Fiddle-dee-dee! Ashley Wilkes told me he likes to see a girl with a healthy appetite!” and you’ll have some idea of the absurdity of his casting in Deadly Whispers (1995). The extent to which he mangles an exaggerated Southern accent is hard to overstate; when he says “Yo missin’ The Waltons” (rather than “You’re missing”) only 10 minutes into the movie, you might laugh harder than you ever did at Who’s the Boss?

Unfortunately for Danza, Deadly Whispers isn’t supposed to be funny. In this thinly veiled dramatization of the 1987 murder of Kathy Bonney, he plays Virginia salvage yard owner Tom Acton, the last person to see his troubled teenage daughter Kathy (Heather Tom) alive before she disappears. A high school dropout who answers the phones at Tom’s business — he doesn’t need the help but refuses to let her out of his sight — she defiantly teases her hair and bares her midriff in pursuit of a married coworker.

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Second Serve: Vanessa Redgrave Plays Doubles in Richards Biopic

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On July 20, 2023

In TV Movies

Vanessa Redgrave in Second Serve.

There is initially something jarring about Vanessa Redgrave’s performance as Renée Richards, the pioneering transgender athlete, in Second Serve. Her unconvincing male appearance pre-transition conjures memories of Jean Arless as gawky Warren in William Castle’s Homicidal, a classic Psycho knockoff with a memorable gender gimmick, and you worry this 1986 CBS adaptation of Richards’s autobiography might cheapen a complex story. But it doesn’t take long for the magnetic Redgrave to draw you in, particularly when filmed in medium-closeups that remove her hips (which, like Shakira’s, don’t lie) from the equation.

We’re introduced to Renée first as Dr. Richard Raskind (changed to Radley for the film), and Redgrave exudes an Anthony Perkins quality—lanky, haunted, alternately reserved and impetuous—that suits the character well. You suspect she understands Richard, whose private struggles with gender dysphoria aren’t immediately revealed, more intuitively than director Anthony Page (I Never Promised You a Rose Garden) and screenwriters Gavin Lambert and Stephanie Liss. Yet there are limits to her powers of empathy. You’d never guess from Redgrave’s vaguely WASPy characterization (and sometimes thinly-suppressed British accent) that she’s playing a Queens-bred Jew.*

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Behold the Magic and Wonder of Tears and Laughter: The Joan and Melissa Rivers Story

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On July 11, 2023

In TV Movies

Joan and Melissa Rivers in Tears and Laughter.

You can keep your Mildred Pierce and Mermaids, your Steel Magnolias and Terms of Endearment—Tears and Laughter: The Joan and Melissa Rivers Story (1994) is the greatest mother-daughter movie of all-time. “But what about Mommie Dearest?” you might counter. “What about Volver, Imitation of Life, Freaky Friday or Postcards from the Edge?”

To which I can only reply that Tears and Laughter is a dramedy about producer Edgar Rosenberg’s suicide starring his actual widow, Joan Rivers, and their daughter Melissa, a non-actress whose performance is the made-for-TV equivalent of Sofia Coppola’s maligned turn in The Godfather Part III. If you love things that are terrible, it gets no better than this, a tearjerker that opens with liposuction jokes and excerpts from a typical Rivers routine: “I went to Las Vegas, I threw my hotel key up at Tom Jones. He took it and burglarized my room.”

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Forgotten Sins: A Real-Life American Horror Story

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On June 30, 2023

In TV Movies

Bess Armstrong and John Shea in Forgotten Sins.

Of the many horror stories to emerge from the recovered memory, satanic ritual abuse and multiple personality disorder crazes that swept the United States in the 1980s and early ’90s, you will find few more bizarre than that of the Ingram family of Olympia, Washington. Forgotten Sins (1996), a telefilm adaptation of Remembering Satan, journalist Lawrence Wright’s chronicle of that convoluted case*, attempts to condense their troubling tale into 90 minutes and largely succeeds, no small task for subject matter this complex and disturbing.

John Shea stars as Matthew Bradshaw, an upstanding sheriff and fanatical Christian—Paul Ingram, his real-life counterpart, spoke in tongues at church—who feels an inexplicable emotional estrangement from his daughters. “Why can’t I be affectionate with them? I want to be,” he tells wife Bobbie (Bess Armstrong, worlds away from the glamour of Lace), who runs an in-home daycare center. She earnestly suggests he discuss it with their pastor, Reverend Newton (Gary Grubbs), whose smarmy paternalism leaves traces of oil on the screen.

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With Murder in Mind Squanders a Bewitching Talent

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On June 19, 2023

In TV Movies

Elizabeth Montgomery in With Murder in Mind.

From The Legend of Lizzie Borden and A Case of Rape in the 1970s to Sins of the Mother and Black Widow Murders in the ’90s, Elizabeth Montgomery was the queen of the based-on-a-true-story TV movie. Sadly, though her bearing was regal as ever in 1992’s With Murder in Mind (also known as With Savage Intent), the film around her is every bit as soggy as her rain-drenched surroundings in The Victim.

Murder’s structural problems begin and end with its screenplay, credited to Daniel Freudenberger (A Strange Affair). In the 90 minutes we spend with Gayle Wolfer, a successful realtor in Western New York who survives a heinous shooting, we learn virtually nothing about her other than she’s a new grandma and, we’re repeatedly told, an inspiration. If the idea was that our affection for Montgomery would transfer seamlessly to her brusque character, Freudenberger and director Michael Tuchner (Summer of My German Soldier) were mistaken.

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Betrayal of Trust: Judith Light Confronts a Predatory Doctor

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On April 27, 2023

In TV Movies

Judith Light with Betty Buckley in Betrayal of Trust.

If you previously thought I was nuts for calling Judith Light the Maria Falconetti of American TV movies, wait until you hear my theory that her late ’70s arc on One Life to Live as housewife-turned-hooker-turned-murderer Karen Wolek is the soap equivalent to Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Light’s legendary courtroom breakdown scenes as Wolek (seen here in a 1997 ABC retrospective hosted by Reba McEntire) contain some of the finest acting in the history of television and prepare us for her telefilm work to come, including 1994’s Betrayal of Trust.

Based on a true story, Betrayal recounts singer Barbara Nöel’s years of abuse at the hands of Jules Masserman, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst played by Judd Hirsch with a nearly perpetual scowl. Nöel (Light) sought treatment for complaints including performance anxiety and Masserman suggested the “Amytal interview,” in which he administered the highly addictive barbiturate sodium amytal. “Your subconscious will reveal itself to you in new and exciting ways,” he assures her. “You know, Barbara, sometimes this world can seem like a very frightening place. But now you’ll begin to relax. To feel safe and happy. And all the bad feelings of the past will begin to melt, melt away.”

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House of Versace, Starring Cristal Connors

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On April 18, 2023

In TV Movies

“I’m doin’ some of the finest cocaine in the world, darlin’. You want some?”

The genius of Lifetime’s House of Versace (2013) is most evident in its casting: Gina Gershon, Cristal Connors herself, stars as Donatella Versace (or is that Versayce?). It’s a choice that instantly conjures memories of Showgirls, setting the mood for glorious camp to follow. Gershon more than delivers the goods as a grieving sister who is 80% cocaine and 20% synthetic hair, rasping lines like “A hooker wouldn’t even wear this shoe!” and “Giving up my heels was harder than giving up cocaine” as naturally as Carmen Maura interprets Almodóvar.

In the movie’s first act, Donatella and brother Gianni (Enrico Colantoni, of the unfortunately titled fashion sitcom Just Shoot Me) frequently squabble like children, to the irritation of their more placid brother Santo (Colm Feore). “You both exhaust me,” he tells Gianni after the pair stage another spectacular workplace meltdown. When they inevitably kiss and make up, he complains “You two deserve each other.” Gianni is a doting brother and uncle (you’ve not heard “principessa!” so many times in one film since Life is Beautiful), but he’s not above telling his sister “I’m the sun and you’re the moon and your job is to reflect my glow.” Nor is she above hurling homophobic insults at him.

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Park Overall Calculates The Price of a Broken Heart

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On April 5, 2023

In TV Movies

Park Overall in The Price of a Broken Heart.

Like Park Overall in The Price of a Broken Heart (1999), I would be stunned if my husband cheated—mostly because I don’t have one. But if you were to traffic in heterosexist stereotypes, as Lifetime movies do, my wife is essentially an old-school husband. Society views her as the more dominant and valuable partner because of her career; I’m the one who does her laundry.

How would I react if she ran off with her secretary? Well, I’d be surprised, mostly because she lacks the requisite immaturity, free time and organizational skills for such pursuits. (“Can you pls wash my lacy black bra and book a hotel room for my affair tomorrow? Thx,” she might text me before an assignation.) One thing I’m confident I wouldn’t do is sue her mistress, the course of action Overall’s Dot Hutelmyer charts in The Price of a Broken Heart, a sort of tawdry primetime domestic spin on The Price is Right.

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