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Tag: Tony Curtis

Thanksgiving Day: Mary Tyler Moore and Tony Curtis Serve a Turkey

Mary Tyler Moore spanks Jonathon Brandmeier in Thanksgiving Day.

Readers, I’m going to ask you to sit down before we continue any discussion of Thanksgiving Day (1990), because I’m about to say something that might upset anyone with lingering nightmares about Just Between Friends (1986). It’s as difficult to break this news as it is to receive it: Mary Tyler Moore wears a pink spandex leotard in this one, too. Not only that, we’re subjected to lingering shots of her scantily-clad tap dancing skills in lieu of excessive aerobics instruction. Scream and cry and hug Judd Hirsch about it, and then we’ll move on.

Even without those godforsaken leotards, you have to approach Thanksgiving Day with realistic expectations. NBC billed it as “the most unusual holiday movie ever” for a reason—it’s a big ol’ frozen turkey. Performed in the screwball style of Rue McClanahan’s Children of the Bride (1990), but without its pathos or crooked charm, we are left with little more than Moore’s exhibitionism and repeated gags about serving roast beef on Thanksgiving. Oh, and there’s a lesbian. Except, American television being what it was in the early ’90s, Moore’s daughter isn’t really a lesbian. She ends up with… Sonny Bono.

Kate Jackson Does Time in Inmates: A Love Story

Killer Bees were nothing compared to hard time.

Kate Jackson’s incarcerated again in Inmates: A Love Story (1981), and while it’s frustrating that her love interest is Perry King and not Meg Foster, we must learn to accept it and move on with our lives. (Gluttons for punishment will recall that Foster was King’s lesbian love interest in 1978’s seven-layer dip of offensiveness, A Different Story, in which he also played gay, but that’s a rant for another day.) If you can manage your disappointment, even as Jackson wears flannel and performs garbage duty, you’ll be rewarded with a bizarre, mostly enjoyable telefilm with a rare early ’80s lesbian subplot.

Jackson’s Jane Mount (no comment on the butch surname) is doing “a nickel to a dime,” as she puts it, at the Greenleaf State Co-Correctional Institution, an experimental coed facility. The men and women bunk in separate areas but fraternize in the cafeteria, prison yard and other shared spaces. Sexual contact is a verboten but couples pair off anyway, which is how Jane’s closest friend, young Grace (an affecting Fay Hauser), becomes pregnant. When Grace spots the baby’s father canoodling with another inmate, Jane tells her to leave and approaches the cad with her cafeteria tray — and a trademark mischievous Jackson smile that signals he’s about to receive a helluva comeuppance.

Quick Programming Note for Kate Jackson Fans

Kate Jackson, affectionately known here as Charlie’s Butchest Angel, celebrates a birthday later this month. If time permits I plan to look back on a few of her telefilms. First up will be Inmates: A Love Story (from 1981, the same year as Thin Ice), in which she again finds herself behind bars, this time in a co-ed institution with Shirley Jones as the prison superintendent.

Will sparks fly when the impossibly handsome Perry King shows up in a three-piece suit as a white collar criminal? Why is Tony Curtis loitering near the men’s showers dressed like a cross between a pimp, a cat burglar and the Gorton’s fisherman (by way of Johnny Cash)? We’ll attempt to answer all these questions and more next week, but I wanted to put this here now as a promise. Because, through a convoluted and predictably gay series of events, a few Jackson fans check in here almost every weekend looking for new Kate content.

Finally, an update on last week’s post about my anniversary. My wife and I don’t normally exchange gifts but since this was a milestone year I gave her a painting of the place where we got engaged. She gave me a Tom of Finland book that some of you will surely appreciate. Now the question becomes whether to leave it on the coffee table when her super-religious parents visit next week.

UPDATE: Here’s the Inmates: A Love Story review.

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