Cranky Lesbian

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Tag: Meredith Baxter

A Mother’s Justice: Meredith Baxter Goes Charles Bronson

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On November 26, 2023

In TV Movies

Meredith Baxter and G.W. Bailey in A Mother’s Justice.

There are worse tales of maternal vigilantism than Meredith Baxter’s A Mother’s Justice: John Schlesinger’s notorious Eye for an Eye, starring Sally Field, springs immediately to mind. But don’t take that as an endorsement of Baxter’s film, which premiered on NBC in 1991 and found a second home on Lifetime. It’s still quite bad, just not as grotesque as Field’s revenge fantasy. The closest it comes is a misguided scene at an Italian restaurant that brings new meaning to the slogan “When you’re here, you’re family.”

Justice, directed by Noel Nosseck (No One Would Tell), opens suspensefully, with a predator prowling the streets. His abduction of Debbie (Carrie Hamilton), a 23-year-old aspiring nurse, is more graphic than her subsequent rape, which she immediately reports to police. Det. Bogardus (Blu Mankuma) assures her it wasn’t her fault and awkwardly tells her “I know I’m the same color as the man who attacked you, but I just want you to know, we get ’em in all colors. Like I said, don’t worry. If he goes on, we’ll get him.”

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Betrayed: A Story of Three Women Finds Meredith Baxter in a Murder-Free Infidelity Saga

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On April 21, 2023

In TV Movies

Swoosie Kurtz and Meredith Baxter won’t be smiling for long.

A little bit of lesbianism would’ve gone a long way in Betrayed: A Story of Three Women (1995), its heartache perhaps averted if only Swoosie Kurtz and Meredith Baxter had found love with each other, and not unreliable men, back in college. Our cad here, the dashing Rob (John Terry, whose other woman was a man in Change of Heart), belongs to Amanda Nelson (Baxter), who is best friends with Joan Bixler (Kurtz). And if you think the widowed Joan is upset when daughter Dana (Clare Carey of Coach) drops out of law school, just wait until she catches her in a compromising position with Rob.

“You’re referring to yourself and Rob as ‘we’? You two are a ‘we’ now? Oh, I think you had better rethink that little pronoun,” she rants to her daughter, who took afternoon naps in the Nelsons’ marital bed as a tyke. “‘We’ is in your imagination. ‘We’ is not even a possibility.” Before leaving in disgust, she hands her an old family photo, showing an adult Rob beside Dana, then a child. “It’s almost incest,” Amanda says of the affair, a sentiment neither viewers nor Joan disagree with, but it wouldn’t be a betrayal without blow-ups and breakdowns and even a good face-slapping (administered by Amanda to Joan in a grocery store parking lot) along the way.

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The Cat Creature Pussyfoots Around Lesbianism

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On September 21, 2022

In TV Movies

Gale Sondergaard has designs on Renne Jarrett in The Cat Creature.

Where to begin with all of the metaphorical lesbian double-entendre that director Curtis Harrington cheekily supplies in The Cat Creature (1973)? And how to explain that some of it was purely unintentional, as the openly gay Harrington had no way of knowing then that Meredith Baxter was not quite the woman that networks — and viewers — imagined her to be. (And then there’s the smaller matter of her hunky love interest, David Hedison, whose lookalike daughter Alexandra became one of Hollywood’s most visible A-list lesbians in a time when there were few.)

This pulpy tale, adapted by Psycho author Robert Bloch from his own material, is thin on story and long on atmosphere. It begins with appraiser Frank Lucas (Kent Smith) recording a voice memo for the attorney that hired him to inventory a wealthy and secretive dead man’s estate. “This place gives me the shivers,” he says of the darkened mansion before descending into its cellar, which contains a priceless collection of ancient artifacts. Prying open a sarcophagus, he finds a mummy wearing a striking gold amulet with emerald eyes.

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