Cranky Lesbian

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Dolly Parton Decks the Halls in Unlikely Angel

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On November 28, 2022

In TV Movies

Dolly Parton and Roddy McDowall plot her salvation in Unlikely Angel.

Even if you aren’t the type of Dolly Parton fan who finds A Smoky Mountain Christmas’s lesbian subtext to be as bountiful as the beloved entertainer’s talent—or other assets—you are likely to derive some amusement from Roddy McDowall (who last we saw in Flood!) sternly lecturing her about resisting “affection for the opposite sex,” as he puts it, in Unlikely Angel. That he does so as a slightly bitchy Saint Peter makes it all the better.

The two meet at the pearly gates after Parton’s bar singer, Ruby Diamond (“everybody says I’m a gem!”), dies in a car crash. Peter notes with some concern that Ruby was, overall, less than virtuous. Consulting his book, he elaborates: “All your life, you have done exactly as you wanted, gone where you wanted, said what you wanted. You have never thought of anyone else but yourself.” She doesn’t dispute this, nor is she shocked to learn that Uncle Clem hasn’t joined her mother and the rest of their family in heaven.

Peter offers her a chance to redeem herself by healing a grief-stricken family in the week leading up to Christmas. Ben Bartilson (Brian Kerwin, who I’ve loved since Torch Song Trilogy) has drifted apart from his children after the tragic death of his wife, devoting all of his energy to work. Young Sarah (played by future sex cult leader Allison Mack) and Matthew (Eli Marienthal) spend a lot of time alone, when they aren’t scaring off a string of nannies. Ruby’s deposited on their doorstep with little more than a suitcase, a guitar and an aw-shucks smile.

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In Flood!, a Schlock Deluge

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On November 17, 2022

In TV Movies

Robert Culp and Martin Milner (with Eric Olson) fight water with fire in Flood!

There are scares to be found in disaster impresario Irwin Allen’s sloppy, schlocky made-for-television production of Flood! (1976), but few involve water, which is mostly shrouded in darkness when it’s shown at all. You might instead scream at a closeup of Francine York’s false eyelashes, probably the only structure in town strong enough to withstand the rushing currents.

Or perhaps you’ll shriek in fright as Robert Culp tries, and miserably fails, to emote during a dramatic revelation scene that screenwriter Don Ingalls (Fantasy Island) mangled almost beyond comprehension. Others might fear they’re losing their grip on sanity at all the age-mismatched couples. My favorite was baby-faced Abbie (Carol Lynley, enormously pregnant with a pillow) and Sam Adams (Cameron Mitchell, enormously pregnant with a bad toupee, his face pulled back so tightly it’s uncertain whether he could see).

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The Flight Before Christmas: A Pleasant Diversion

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On November 13, 2022

In TV Movies

Mayim Bialik and Ryan McPartlin find love in a hopeless place (Montana) in The Flight Before Christmas.

Casting Mayim Bialik as a shiksa in a Christmas movie is like casting Fyvush Finkel as Santa Claus, a potentially controversial observation that might alarm new readers who don’t yet know I’m Jewish. Despite their likability, neither actor would be particularly believable to some viewers (raises hand) as an evangelical Christian or devout Catholic. The producers of Lifetime’s The Flight Before Christmas (2015), including Bialik herself, compromise by making her character, Stephanie Hunt, the product of an interfaith marriage.

Stephanie has a Jewish mother (of course) and a Catholic father. Jennifer Notas Shapiro’s screenplay makes this clear first when Stephanie’s mother guilts her about holiday plans over the phone, and again when Stephanie clarifies the matter for anyone who struggles to tell ethnic moms apart. To best friend Kate (Roxana Ortega), she mentions her “meddling Jewish mother” in the context of a familiar joke: “I swear, one of these days I’m gonna find out she called my gynecologist directly to inquire about my waning fertility.”

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Kate Jackson Makes the Grade in Satan’s School for Girls

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On October 21, 2022

In TV Movies

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.

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A Stranger Among Us: What’s New and Exciting?

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On September 26, 2022

In '90s Films

Melanie Griffith and Eric Thal are drawn to the unfamiliar in A Stranger Among Us.

The early ’90s brought viewers an unusual one-two punch from Sidney Lumet—unusual because the veteran filmmaker only managed to knock himself out. A Stranger Among Us (1992) and Guilty as Sin (1993) are the pictures in question, the former starring Melanie Griffith and the latter her then-husband, Don Johnson. That I recognize each as a dud does nothing to lessen my affinity for them, especially A Stranger Among Us, which bravely asks and answers the question: “What if we remade Witness with Hasidic Jews and cast Eric Thal as Kelly McGillis… and it sucked?”

Griffith plays Emily Eden, a flirty NYPD detective who jokes of her cowboy reputation that she’s Calamity Jane. (Our first hint that this was a questionable undertaking came in the form of its original title: Close to Eden.) Stranger opens with Emily and her partner Nick (Jamey Sheridan, adrift in a role that’s more conceit than character) reminiscing about both their first collar and their on-again, off-again relationship. “Cha-cha all night and then straight to the courthouse in the morning,” she recalls, before spotting a couple of sleazy perps she wants to take down without backup.

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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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Celebrating A Smoky Mountain (Lesbian) Christmas

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On July 25, 2022

In TV Movies

Dolly Parton’s Smoky Mountain wig is a precious gift to viewers.

“A film that defies both description and sobriety, you either understand its brilliance or you don’t—it’s the El Topo of made-for-TV movies.” That’s how I described A Smoky Mountain Christmas when Bo Hopkins died earlier this year. But I left out another, more controversial opinion: It’s also a psychosexual lesbian Christmas drama for the whole family.

The peanut butter to Kenny Rogers’ Six Pack jelly, this Henry Winkler-directed 1986 made-for-TV musical holiday fantasy begins with Parton’s voice-over narration. “Once upon a time, and not too long ago, a princess lived in a beautiful castle, built upon a grassy green hill. People thought she had everything. They envied her talent, her fame and fortune—and her special relationship with longtime gal pal Judy Ogle. And they said her spirit could light up the darkest corners of any heart.”

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The Golden Girls: “The Engagement” Episode Recap

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On July 16, 2022

In Friends of Dorothy Z.

Sophia expresses what will become her typical Blanche refrain on The Golden Girls.

Pilot episodes are tricky endeavors, particularly for sitcom writers. In 1985, when The Golden Girls premiered, they had just under 25 minutes (these days it’s 22 on network television) in which to introduce characters, provide an appropriate amount of exposition, and make us laugh enough to tune in again the next week. The Golden Girls‘ pilot episode, “The Engagement” (S1E01), written by series creator Susan Harris, accomplishes all three of those goals in style.

Helmed by the legendary Jay Sandrich, who directed 119 episodes of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, “The Engagement” benefits from the long and laughter-filled relationships viewers already had with three-fourths of its cast. Bea Arthur, Rue McClanahan and Betty White not only had a slew of hit series between them, McClanahan had famously costarred with White on Mama’s Family and with Arthur on Maude—their comedic chemistry already sizzled.

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My Mother’s Secret Life … as an Escort

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On May 6, 2022

In TV Movies

Loni Anderson (un)dresses for success in My Mother’s Secret Life.

The big daughter-seeks-birth-mom TV event that everyone remembers from 1984 is, of course, the miniseries Lace. History has unfairly forgotten My Mother’s Secret Life, and I’ll be pleased if I can get even one person to revisit it. It’s an engaging (and unintentionally funny) telefilm that is perhaps best described as “Loni Anderson’s Charlene moment.” I encourage everyone to get in the mood right now by listening to the song of which I speak.

Now that we’ve taken the hand of a preacher man and made love in the sun, I think we can continue. My Mother’s Secret Life opens with Anderson’s Ellen Blake draped in about 30 lbs of designer clothes and furs. It’s all soon to be removed with artful precision in a demanding john’s penthouse suite. “I’m the buyer here,” he tells her aggressively. “I want to know what I’m buying. You do come at a premium rate.”

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Elizabeth Montgomery’s Sins of the Mother

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On May 4, 2022

In TV Movies

Elizabeth Montgomery raises a toast to an appalling lack of boundaries in Sins of the Mother.

If ever a film review deserved the headline “Bebitched,” it is Elizabeth Montgomery’s Sins of the Mother (1991). Adapted from Jack Olsen’s true crime novel Son: A Psychopath and His Victims, Sins does for motherhood what Montgomery’s The Legend of Lizzie Borden (1975) did for daughters.

Wooing her son one minute, tearing him to shreds the next, her Ruth Coe has the colorful vocabulary of Moira Rose; the histrionic tendencies of Rose and Lucille Bluth; and enough sinister Cluster B features to fuel an HBO limited series. On a cinematic scale of mother-son immorality, ranging from Psycho to Savage Grace to Ma Mère, Ruth’s relationship with son Kevin (Dale Midkiff of Back to You and Me) is mercifully mild. They are, in some ways, a more respectable version of con artists Lilly and Roy from The Grifters.

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