Customer Reviews

Dead on the Money [VHS]

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Bottom line, it's not very good, but it happens to be the very last film (TV or movies) that Eleanor Parker ever did. For that it is worth it, she is still beautiful and classes up the younger actors.

This Turner Pictures TVM adapted by Gavin Lambert from the novella by Rachel Ingalls and directed by Mark Cullingham, has a Mills and Boon romance mentality crossed with the level of mystery you find on Murder, She Wrote. There is nothing real at stake when Amanda Pays becomes involved with Corbin Bernsen, who then involves her with his rich cousin John Glover, the superficiality emphasised by an idiot score by Michael Minard. The narrative has Hitchockian aspirations, with lifts from Rebecca and Suspicion, plus the use of San Francisco as in Vertigo, but Cullingham is to Hitchcock what Pays is to a struggling actress. One senses the attempt to present Pays in the ingenue vein of Audrey Hepburn, but the only thing impressive about this bug-eyed English bunny who uses a growl when being serious to break up her prim intonation, is her The Shout-like ability to scream over ocean waves, and even Cullingham's payoff for this skill is weak. When we discover Pays as a maid in a play called Death of a Lady, a supporting performer who gets individual applause, we know that the title is going to be prophetic, and dialogue like "Love is the greatest role of all" doesn't help, though the appearance of the Fools Rush Inn gave me a smile. Bernsen is used for his bare chest and hunky boyishness, and while it's nice to have veterans like Sheree North, Eleanor Parker and Kevin McCarthy around, they have little to do. The best performance is from Glover, wearing a thick head of hair and unafraid to make his "eccentricity" look silly. When Pays makes an entrance and we find Parker listening to Mimi's Song from La Boheme our expectations are momentarily raised, but the resolution is ridiculous.