SPOILERS.
There seems to be no other user comment so I feel morally compelled to submit my take on this perfectly standard piece of TV-movie fare. I'd hoped it would be a murder mystery with some romantic intrigue in the background, but it was the other way around.
The movie is divided more or less into two parts. In the first, reminiscent of the second Jane Wyman/ Rock Hudson teaming, a widowered doctor (Powers Boothe, playing it kind of wearily) marries a stripper, Marci, who seems genuinely to love him as much as he needs her, perhaps for different reasons. But when he takes her home as his wife, in the manner of Jane Wyman marrying gardener Rock Hudson, Boothe's two children resent his having married beneath his station. They also of course resent Marci for trying to take the place of their real mother, but that's hardly worth mentioning because I can't think of a single film in which this dynamic isn't emphasized to death. Dr. Croesus, though, is not the smartest man on the planet and he can't understand their pique, or else he simply disregards it. And for obvious reasons. You have to see Marci in her underwear to understand the reasons thoroughly. But, also, she's not a bad type. And she's quite honest. She loves him, she tells him, "because you're a doctor, because if you can't come you call and tell me." But the friction between Marci and the two daughters -- Alyssa and Nancy, I think -- begins to generate some heat. And Marci, not knowing how doctors operate, so to speak, begins to wonder if he's not always tired and sexually inattentive because he might not be doing a little fee-splitting on the side. So she follows him one afternoon and spots him having lunch with a former girlfriend, who also happens to be Alyssa's counselor in medical school. Alyssa's grades have been declining and she might be washed out, which "would just kill Daddy." (Pardon me, I'm choking up a bit.)
Distraught following an argument with Dr. Croesus, Marci goes back to the stripper's bar to look up an old friend. He's no longer there, but she makes a new friend, one of those good-looking hunks who know how to ploy the system and provide a sympathetic ear while gradually coaxing the prey into the sack. It gets a little complicated now so try to follow this carefully.
Marci and Ed are spotted making out in the parking lot of the stripper's bar and Dr. Croesus is told of this by an informant. This prompts the unforgiving doctor to begin arranging a divorce, in which Marci is to get some kind of "adjustment" while the estate and the insurance go to the two kids. Marci, more distraught than ever, (everybody in this movie is distraught), goes back to Eddie and jumps his bones hungrily, and manipulatively as it turns out.
Marci then makes a big show of taking the younger daughter out on a shopping spree one night, even though Nancy doesn't particularly want to go. (Nancy is shown to be a naive airhead, bopping around silently to whatever is being beamed into her earphone from her Walkman.) Suddenly -- BANG -- or rather BANG BANG and Dr. Croesus is DOA.
But now our story turns a bit. Marci has seduced the insurance guy or the lawyer or whatever he is, and had the will changed so that she, Marci, gets a load of dough. And there has always been sibling rivalry between Alyssa and Nancy, so it's easy for Marci to recruit Nancy as a mole. Alyssa becomes the main suspect. The climactic scene has Marci and Eddie the Hunk gagging and tying both daughters to a chair, as Eddie covers them with a sheet and squirts charcoal-lighter fluid all over them, saying comforting words like, "Calm down. This won't hurt a bit."
I'll leave the plot at that point. The acting is no good, except for Booth and whoever plays Marci. The older daughter, Alyssa, has really only one expression -- a kind of angry indignation as the web is woven more tightly around her. The younger daughter hasn't reached that level of competence. But Marci fills the role pretty well. A slender but very neatly assembled figure, but at an age where the future is beginning to look a little darker than it did even a year or two ago. The kind of age that can lead to desperate acts in desperate women. (Cf: Janet Leigh in "Psycho".)
Marci's main problem is not her morals but her glands. She should have done whatever Dr. Croesus seemed to want of her -- even if it meant leaving him alone. Some people just don't realize what a treat it is to be married to a doctor. You actually have very few arguments with a husband who's a doctor because he's usually out of the house busily raking in the shekels. They're really easy to please if you just become a love slave and stop having birthdays. And as for Allysa's flunking out of medical school, well, so what? She can simply MARRY into the tribe.
The movie made me long to see "Double Indemnity" again.
There seems to be no other user comment so I feel morally compelled to submit my take on this perfectly standard piece of TV-movie fare. I'd hoped it would be a murder mystery with some romantic intrigue in the background, but it was the other way around.
The movie is divided more or less into two parts. In the first, reminiscent of the second Jane Wyman/ Rock Hudson teaming, a widowered doctor (Powers Boothe, playing it kind of wearily) marries a stripper, Marci, who seems genuinely to love him as much as he needs her, perhaps for different reasons. But when he takes her home as his wife, in the manner of Jane Wyman marrying gardener Rock Hudson, Boothe's two children resent his having married beneath his station. They also of course resent Marci for trying to take the place of their real mother, but that's hardly worth mentioning because I can't think of a single film in which this dynamic isn't emphasized to death. Dr. Croesus, though, is not the smartest man on the planet and he can't understand their pique, or else he simply disregards it. And for obvious reasons. You have to see Marci in her underwear to understand the reasons thoroughly. But, also, she's not a bad type. And she's quite honest. She loves him, she tells him, "because you're a doctor, because if you can't come you call and tell me." But the friction between Marci and the two daughters -- Alyssa and Nancy, I think -- begins to generate some heat. And Marci, not knowing how doctors operate, so to speak, begins to wonder if he's not always tired and sexually inattentive because he might not be doing a little fee-splitting on the side. So she follows him one afternoon and spots him having lunch with a former girlfriend, who also happens to be Alyssa's counselor in medical school. Alyssa's grades have been declining and she might be washed out, which "would just kill Daddy." (Pardon me, I'm choking up a bit.)
Distraught following an argument with Dr. Croesus, Marci goes back to the stripper's bar to look up an old friend. He's no longer there, but she makes a new friend, one of those good-looking hunks who know how to ploy the system and provide a sympathetic ear while gradually coaxing the prey into the sack. It gets a little complicated now so try to follow this carefully.
Marci and Ed are spotted making out in the parking lot of the stripper's bar and Dr. Croesus is told of this by an informant. This prompts the unforgiving doctor to begin arranging a divorce, in which Marci is to get some kind of "adjustment" while the estate and the insurance go to the two kids. Marci, more distraught than ever, (everybody in this movie is distraught), goes back to Eddie and jumps his bones hungrily, and manipulatively as it turns out.
Marci then makes a big show of taking the younger daughter out on a shopping spree one night, even though Nancy doesn't particularly want to go. (Nancy is shown to be a naive airhead, bopping around silently to whatever is being beamed into her earphone from her Walkman.) Suddenly -- BANG -- or rather BANG BANG and Dr. Croesus is DOA.
But now our story turns a bit. Marci has seduced the insurance guy or the lawyer or whatever he is, and had the will changed so that she, Marci, gets a load of dough. And there has always been sibling rivalry between Alyssa and Nancy, so it's easy for Marci to recruit Nancy as a mole. Alyssa becomes the main suspect. The climactic scene has Marci and Eddie the Hunk gagging and tying both daughters to a chair, as Eddie covers them with a sheet and squirts charcoal-lighter fluid all over them, saying comforting words like, "Calm down. This won't hurt a bit."
I'll leave the plot at that point. The acting is no good, except for Booth and whoever plays Marci. The older daughter, Alyssa, has really only one expression -- a kind of angry indignation as the web is woven more tightly around her. The younger daughter hasn't reached that level of competence. But Marci fills the role pretty well. A slender but very neatly assembled figure, but at an age where the future is beginning to look a little darker than it did even a year or two ago. The kind of age that can lead to desperate acts in desperate women. (Cf: Janet Leigh in "Psycho".)
Marci's main problem is not her morals but her glands. She should have done whatever Dr. Croesus seemed to want of her -- even if it meant leaving him alone. Some people just don't realize what a treat it is to be married to a doctor. You actually have very few arguments with a husband who's a doctor because he's usually out of the house busily raking in the shekels. They're really easy to please if you just become a love slave and stop having birthdays. And as for Allysa's flunking out of medical school, well, so what? She can simply MARRY into the tribe.
The movie made me long to see "Double Indemnity" again.