Dancing suggestively at an outdoor barbeque, Jimmie Sue Finger (Barbara Hershey) looks as harmless as a torch in a haystack.
”Who is that?” asks 18-year-old Mike Ketterman (Morgan Weisser), one of the party guests.
”That`s my mother,” says daughter Angela.
If memory serves, it doesn`t take much to get the hormones of a high school boy raging. And in ”Stay the Night,” a fact-based mini-series airing at 8 p.m. Sunday and Monday on WLS-Ch. 7, Jimmie Sue has enough well-honed hussy in her to throw Mike into a lustful frenzy.
She seduces him, over the first portions of this movie, in calculated ways. It`s a series of encounters at once foolish (she`s old enough to be his mother) and creepy (Mike has just begun dating Angela). Yet Hershey gives Jimmie Sue such a beguiling way that it is possible to believe, if only for a moment, that she might really be in love with the kid.
Her husband is barely visible. And when he is, he appears oafish and bland, hardly a match for Jimmie Sue`s, ahem, exuberance.
When Jimmie Sue starts to manuever the young man into territory charged with more than sex-with tales of physical and sexual abuse she says she and her daughter have suffered at the hands of her husband-she becomes less vixen than devil, convincing the kid that the husband deserves killing.
As Mike meekly goes to jail for murder-pinning to his cell wall pictures and drawings of his woman-his mother Blanche (Jane Alexander) gets hot for vengeance, for proof that her son was tricked into committing murder.
The Jimmie Sue-Blanche relationship that forms proves far more interesting and emotionally complex than that between Jimmie Sue and Mike.
It had started with a bang.
”You leave my boy alone,” Blanche had warned.
”You make any trouble for me honey,” Jimmie Sue had replied with chilling calm, ”and I`m gonna drive nails in your son`s coffin.”
But as Blanche starts to cozy up to Jimmie Sue, hoping for a slip, so does Jimmie Sue start to manipulate Blanche. As the encounters become increasingly ambiguous, you`ll wonder who will prove the most skillful seductress?
The dowdy Blanche starts to blossom, giggling and getting a new hairdo. Jimmie Sue, in turn, gets comfortable enough in her ”friendship” to err.
The mother triumphs, but there`s a certain pain in it.
The ”Stay the Night” package represents, on paper, the mix of mini-series commodities that make producers salivate.
The potential for sleaze always lurks in such packages. But scriptwriter Daniel Freudenberger, director Harry Winer and the fireworks between Hershey and Alexander, and the believably wide-eyed performance by Weisser make ”Stay the Night” sizzle with style and substance.
– A strained nostalgia afflicts every frame of ”Miss Rose White,”
bringing an unnatural sentimentality to its actions and characters.
On its surface, this is a story, adapted from Barbara Lebow`s off-Broadway play, ”A Shayna Maidel,” of cultures clashing.
The title character (Kyra Sedgwick) is forcing herself into the post-World War II melting pot by changing her name and otherwise hiding her Jewish heritage from her boss at a Manhattan department store and her boyfriend, who also works there.
It`s a task that becomes more difficult with the arrival of her older sister, Lusia (Amanda Plummer), a concentration camp survivor full of anguish and with a thick foreign accent.
But beneath this double-life dilemma is a family drama that centers on the girls` Orthodox father, played with impassioned thunder by Maximilian Schell. The plot is thick with themes of abandonment, guilt and love lost, as well as lessons in bridging emotional and cultural gaps. It`s a tough go, often painful but ultimately rather thin.
If you are able to pay more attention to the acting than the action, however, you should find a measure of enjoyment, and even an honest tear here. Plummer, who can be so irritatingly nervous, is perfectly controlled, full of quiet pain. Sedgwick shows Rose`s growing conflicts and makes believable her character`s transformation. Schell rages beautfully, and Maureen Stapleton and D.B. Sweeney do solid work in minor roles.
It is a shame that director Joseph Sargeant bathes everything in moody light and that the drama is given far too neat a wrapping. This handsome
”Hallmark Hall of Fame” presentation has the kick of a greeting card.
– I can`t remember what filmmakers did before they could use 911 as a means by which to jump start a movie`s action.
It is 911 that Bonnie Von Stein (Sharon Gless) calls, barely conscious and covered in blood after being beaten by a hooded man who invaded her home wielding a bat and killing her husband.
Thus begins ”Honor Thy Mother” (8 p.m. Sunday on WBBM-Ch. 2), which then follows a familiar, flashback-strewn path that eventually leads everyone to believe that Bonnie`s college-age son is responsible for killing his stepfather and bloodying mom.
As played by William McNamara, the son is so edgy and weird that he is unable to convey any of the maybes that this tale so desperately needs. While merely a suspect, he all but auditions for a prison term.
This forces the film to spin out of control.
The script by Richard DeLong and Robert L. Freedman unfortunately turns the complexities of the kid`s motives and the mother`s blind love into a series of sob-stained statements.
This is the first of two movies that attempt to take the dramatic measure of the real North Carolina crime. The other, ”Cruel Doubts,” airs as a four hour mini-series in May. Few stories, thoughtfully concocted, cannot be told satisfactorily in two TV hours. ”Honor Thy Mother” emerges as too thin even for that.
