Midnight Oil:Movies and More

Death of a Marriage

Ellen Burnstyn and Kris Kristofferson give a memorable performance in this tale of a woman's journey to finding herself and a better life.   

A friend of mine committed suicide a few days ago. My friend struggled with depression and anxiety. She was also someone who struggled a lot in her marriage. Her marriage broke down a few years ago. The marital breakdown was a source of much pain and distress for her, especially since it involved a messy custody situation with her young children. For my friend, there was no cloud with a silver lining as there was in the two films displayed recently on Saturday Night at the Movies: there was just the cloud.

Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore was the first offering on SNATM on TVO. I had never seen this film with Ellen Burstyn and Kris Kristofferson before. I didn’t know quite what to expect. The opening scenes shot through some kind of a rose-coloured lens filter gave me the definite impression of being in Kansas with the “Wizard of Oz”. “Dorothy”, however, is singing a different kind of song and has a foul mouth with a sassy attitude that is quite disconcerting if we are supposed to be in the Land of Oz. Dorothy is a little bit less than innocent as she starts her long journey down the yellow brick road.

The rose-tinted glasses soon fall off as we are zapped back from Alice ’ less than idyllic childhood days to present day reality. Alice is now a grown woman, married with one child. Her childhood fantasies to become a singer have remained just that; a fantasy belonging to her youth.

Pop music is pretty important to Alice . Because pop music is important to Alice , it also becomes pretty important to this film. As Alice moves through the mundane realities of her everyday life, music is always playing in the background writing a subtext to the action of the film. It seems like the radio is always on providing some kind of escape or outlet for Alice ’ true emotional state. Much the same thing seems to be happening in parallel for the young Tommy, except that his choice in music is completely different.

Everything changes when Alice gets a call telling her that her husband has been killed in a trucking accident. Alice has just been lamenting with a friend and neighbour about the state of her marriage and the inadequacies of her sex life. She has just finished saying that she thinks she would be just as happy without a man around. Alice adds the qualifier that maybe if her lover was someone like, say, Robert Redford, a different kind of man from the run of the mill variety, it might just possibly be worth it, but she doubts even that possibility.

Upon hearing the news that her husband is dead, Alice sobs, “God forgive me!” But what is there to forgive, Alice ? Sure, Alice had been having a little fun at her husband’s expense. Mostly, I think what we are supposed to see in Alice ’ words is longing for fulfillment that she has not found in her marriage. It wasn’t a perfect marriage. Perhaps it was a poor excuse for a marriage. But then it was over. Alice finds that she has to start over again. This time she has to rely on herself to make her way in life. Her child, Tommy, is depending on her.

Alice undergoes a makeover in order to try to find a job as a singer. Most everything about Alice gets overhauled from this point forward; her understanding of herself, the way she relates to her son, and the way she relates to men.

Alice “finds herself” in a most unlikely place: in the toilet of a highway diner. Alice has a pivotal conversation with her fellow waitress, the foul-mouthed Flo (played by Diane Ladd in an Oscar nominated performance). Alice and Flo have a little heart to heart talk in the bathroom while things descend into a state of chaos in the diner. Flo gets into a serious pep talk mode, encouraging Alice to believe in herself and take responsibility for her life. Flo pulls out an odd little cross made out of safety pins and says, “Sometimes, that’s what’s holding me together. You just need to figure out what you really want and then let the devil take the high road.”

Hmm. I wonder what Flo meant by that? It must work because the film quickly works its way to a happy ending after that point!?!? What Flo seems to be steering Alice towards is an uncompromising pursuit of self-actualization through pursuing personal goals; if Alice wants to be a singer, then she should just go out and do it and the rest of the world will have to fall into line in deference to the supreme good of self-actualization.

What actually happens is that the principal players learn something about the art of compromise in order to have a chance to live together and work out happiness in the co-operative situation of family life. David is willing to give up his ranch in order to be with Alice . Alice is willing to give up going to Memphis to make it “big” as a singer. Once she has made up her mind to accept David’s proposal, Alice sees that she can be a singer anywhere. Tommy comes to understand that you can have a fight with someone (namely David) and still love them. Tommy decides that accepting the risk of living with David is worth it, even if he doesn’t share his taste in music.

Hmm. So where does that safety pin cross thing come in? Maybe I missed something. It looks to me like Flo has devised her own kind of secularized religious relic. Her cross is something that Flo has put together herself. Flo appears to have assigned a meaning to this symbol that reflects her individualized outlook on life. Flo’s “cross” only works because it reminds Flo that she herself has to be her own “Saviour” and that she holds things together by her own efforts accompanied by a few lucky breaks – a little bit of a different ideology than was upheld by people who first started wearing crosses around their necks.

Ironically, Alice seems to find resolution by travelling in the opposite direction, a direction that has more in common with the original meaning of the cross of Jesus. It is through giving up on something that she wanted (dying to herself, in a sense: see the original context for this idea) that Alice gains the possibility of a new life. Instead of losing her identity through entering this relationship with David, paradoxically Alice finds herself. Alice even has the possibility of experiencing the fulfillment of realizing her dream of being a singer, but in a different context. But none of it will happen unless Alice is willing to make the compromise, take the risk of love, and lay down her autonomy.

Suggested Reading :

• Sneak Peak from “ Alice … ”: Is it true that turkeys are so dumb that they will drown in a rainstorm? The answer you want to know courtesy of Tony Mastrogiorgio on the IMDb message board: http://www.snopes.com/critters/wild/turkey.htm
• Help! We need some marriage first-aid over here! What to do to prevent a marriage meltdown
• Why women end up leaving men
• Helping your kids survive your divorce and remarriage
• Personal Side: Finding hope as a child of divorce

“They’ll pay you thousands of dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul.” – Marilyn Monroe

It was wonderful as a little “light after dinner entertainment”. The luminous Marilyn Monroe starred in both films on Saturday Night at the Movies on TVOntario. Laudible performances were given by her co-stars were Tom Ewell in “The Seven Year Itch” and Jane Russell in “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes”. But let there be no doubt about it: it was Marilyn who was and remains the main attraction in these films.

You know, I tried that thing that Marilyn recommended in “The Seven Year Itch”; undies in the ice box. It was yet another blazing hot day. After my shower, I was down in the basement rummaging around trying to find a frozen chicken for supper in the freezer. I didn’t really notice that my undies had fallen into the chest freezer as I groped around for that elusive frozen bird. It was an unusual, somewhat refreshing sensation to put the underwear on after I finally discovered my mistake. Somehow though, when Marilyn does it, she comes off as an irresistibly sexy simpleton. When I do it, I just end up being a plain old klutz. Sigh.

Marilyn sure showed us a good time on Saturday night with these two films. There is much to recommend and more to enjoy in both of these little numbers. So much has been written about these two famous films and their even more famous “star”.

“The Seven Year Itch” still makes people itch in a place where they love to scratch. It is just so delicious to watch the interplay between the fanciful Mr. Richard Sherman and the girl upstairs. Tom Ewell as a kind of 1950’s “everyman” fantasizes about everything with hilarious results. He even fantasizes about his fantasies. At one point the lively wit of Richard Sherman retorts to “What blonde in the kitchen?” with “Wouldn’t you like to know. Maybe it’s Marilyn Monroe!” As the ultimate sex symbol of her day, who could believe that a man like Richard Sherman would end up with Marilyn Monroe hiding in his kitchen? What a laughable idea!

Everybody does laugh at such a preposterous state of affairs including Helen, the shadowy figure Sherman ’s down-to-earth wife who has been packed off to the country for summer holidays. Nobody takes themselves too seriously and nobody takes the subject matter too seriously. It is a sex farce, but a toned down one. Marilyn maintains a kind of dim witted innocence throughout, Ewell never really makes much progress outside of his vivid imaginings, and, in the end, no permanent harm is done (except perhaps for a broken tomato plant.) Wouldn’t it be nice if life were really like that?!! It would sort of be like relationships with a bungee cord attached; all of the thrills, none of the spills!

In the next film, Marilyn plays Miss Lorelei Lee, a nightclub singer with a rather limited imagination. It appears that Lorelei’s imaginative efforts are confined to working out how many diamonds she can stuff onto a coveted tiara. Her “loyalest” best friend, Jane Russell in the role of the worldly-wise Dorothy Shaw, tries in vain to reform Lorelei from her fortune seeking ways with men. Lorelei is a hardened case. She has no reason to reform.

She herself is not hardened, mean-spirited or cheapened by her all too obvious gold digging. Lorelei is something of a silly fish out of water as is shown in the comic scene where she is caught halfway out the porthole. Lorelei is not doing anything terribly reprehensible when she climbs out the window. It just looks bad. She then makes a bad scene worse by drawing Henry Spofford III into her literal cover-up and trying to carry on a normal conversation with Piggy (Sir Francis Beekman). It’s those big hips that get her in trouble. Lorelei, we are to believe, is just “made that way”. Can she help it if she has curves everywhere that drive men insane? Lorelei is just using her natural endowments to get ahead in the world, in much the same way as Sir Beekman has used nature’s gift of the diamond mine to become a wealthy and powerful man.

In an ending fit for musical-comedy and nowhere else, Marilyn and Jane waltz down the aisle in spectacular wedding gowns for a twin bill marriage ceremony. It is entirely fitting. And I suppose that all of the women are supposed to be examining the fabulous tight fitted wedding dresses common to that era. When you focus on the wardrobe as you have been doing for much of the rest of the film, (well, at least the women have been paying attention to the clothes; maybe the guys' attention has gone elsewhere!) you hardly notice how preposterous and strangely out of synch this whole wedding thing is at the end. It is such a ‘50s thing – and I don’t just mean the lavish costumes.

But then, we’re at the movies. It’s time to sit down, relax, and not worry too much about anything. Put some ice in a glass and pour yourself a big lemonade. It’s less hassle than the icy undies.

 On SNAM August 27th at 8pm see "Our Man in Havannah" and "The Third Man".

Suggested Reading :

• Because in real life, no bungee cords are supplied: Being loved for who you are
• Women, beauty, and self-esteem: a dancer looks at herself in the mirror.
• Gentlemen Prefer . . . What Men Really Want
• The famous subway scene, seen above, reportedly turned heads, was reshot on the studio lot, and ended Marilyn's marriage to baseball great, Joe Dimaggio. See Marilyn's mini-biography on IMDb.

• Sneak Peak at the IMDb message board: Is that really Veronica Lake singing in those nightclub acts? Answer: No, it is a voice over by one Martha Mears.
• Near death experience: My friends died when the van rolled, but I survived. Why?
• How about those crazy NDEs? (near death experiences) What do they mean?
• How are you supposed to tell the good guys from the bad guys if no one is wearing the black or white hats? Get your cheat answer on the quick link. (Hint: start at no. 17)

The War Within

Saturday Night At the Movies on TVO brings us an interesting and entertaining character study. William Holden and Alec Guiness convincingly portray men at opposite poles caught in the rat trap of a Japanese P.O.W. camp situated in a remote jungle during WWII. "King Rat" deepens the study of the psychology of men pushed to the limit in a gripping account of human suffering and depravity.

This week on Saturday Night at the Movies on TVOntario we were treated to two great films about life as a prisoner of war during the Second World War. It was yet another hot summer night. However, the heat was not too oppressive this time as I sat under my whirring ceiling fan sipping my tropical fruit juice and eating my ice cream at midnight . We had eaten barbecued hotdogs for supper.

Although I might have been deprived of a hotdog bun and real ice cream because of my allergies, the deprivation was nothing compared to what the poor souls endured in the films. “King Rat” is unforgettable with its scene of the British officers tucking into a fine meal of rat in a tin can. Equally memorable are scenes of the King’s clan hidden away in a prison cell to wolf down the remains of a fellow prisoner’s pet dog and Peter Marlowe salivating over the offer of a freshly fried egg. Food, or the lack of it, was a pretty central event in “King Rat”.

Physical deprivations of all kinds, loathsome disease and death, mental and physical torture in abundance, and moral excavations into the souls of men exposing their innermost parts – what a merry old time it was. It was enough to ruin a good bowl of ice cream!

Both films uncovered frightfully few heroes – none to be exact. One might expect that there would be some extravagant heroism to compensate for all of those dreary rat eating scenes. Instead, things continue pretty much in the same vein in which they start in “King Rat”; an ancient officer sitting unceremoniously on the outdoor latrine with his pants around his ankles, a vacant stare in his eyes.

The closest thing we get to heroism is where Corporal King decides to buy overpriced drugs to save his man Marlowe’s gangrenous arm from amputation. Marlowe takes it as a gesture of friendship and is forever grateful. King is somewhat more ambiguous.

Although the two of them celebrate in an unfeigned dance of joy when they both realize that Marlowe’s arm has been saved, King later minimizes what happened. King doesn’t have friends. He runs the racket in the camp. He moves the pawns around the board, but he doesn’t have friends.

In a final scene after the camp’s liberation by allied soldiers, Marlowe runs after the departing truck to say goodbye to King. The rules have all changed. The Corporal is no longer the King of the camp. He is just one more anonymous soldier being trucked back to obscurity in civilian life without even the benefit of saying goodbye to the one guy who thought of him as a friend. You get the picture that instead of being liberated, King is being hauled off to start a life sentence as a nobody. I guess moral bankruptcy and its accompanying dehumanizing effects turn out to have not such a great payoff in this story.

One of the “difficulties”, if it can be called such, is that there is no contrasting character or storyline to King’s morally hollow vision of life. Under the extreme pressures of the P.O.W. camp, everyone, from the top officer to the lowliest private, is portrayed as participating in the dog-eat-dog social structure of the camp. Every man can be bought for a price; even Peter Marlowe who tries to be his own man and set his own terms according to his British upper class vision and values. Even Lieutenant Grey, the camp Provost Marshal who spends his days sniffing out injustices and infractions with the tenacity of a hunting hound, comes to realize that he has been living with a kind of self-delusion. It is true that Grey is not “on the take” as are so many others in the camp. However, as Peter Marlowe astutely points out, Lt. Grey has been subjugated by hatred. Marlowe maintains that it was Grey’s consuming hatred for King accompanied by the desire for revenge on a number of levels that kept the Lieutenant alive in the camp. Thus, even Grey,the supposedly virtuous man, the pillar of moral rectitude, is left looking rather small and squished up in the end. There are no heroes to be had here in Changi , Singapore according to the movie version of James Clavell’s novel. Any profoundly human trait that would make a man greater than his squalid circumstances is in short supply, even in shorter supply than the food in Changi.

At one point Marlowe sits down with some British officers who invite him to play a game of cards. Marlowe is scheduled to have his arm amputated because of gangrene. In the conversation that ensues, the chaplain inadvertently mentions “having faith” in reference to the card play. Marlowe unleashes a bitter tirade against the vicar aimed at the Lord God Himself. Marlowe spits, “Faith! Don’t give me that old line of bull! What can God do about anything?” The chaplain replies quietly, “He can heal.” Marlowe continues to spew venom: “Well, it’s a good job He’s done in here . . . men dying of dysentery and blindness. . . . He couldn’t be bothered. Do you know what I think? I think God is a vicious, sadistic maniac! You can take your God and your precious faith. They’re both a stinking joke!” The officers remain silent. I suppose they feel ill-equipped to defend the Almighty in such circumstances. It is evident that the best that Marlowe can hope for is the speedy amputation of his arm in a matter of hours.

But then, a miracle of sorts does occur; a miracle engineered by an unlikely source, the conniving and calculating Corporal King. For motives that are surely mixed in with a healthy dose of self-interest, King makes a move and buys the drugs necessary to cure Marlowe’s infected arm. Corporal King is a rather small, squished up deity to be sure, but he is the only one that Peter Marlowe has. And he gets the job done. Marlowe lives on with his arm intact.

In this godforsaken hellhole, Fate is blind and the universe is a brutal and barren place for a bunch of humans scrabbling to hold on to survival. Civilization seems very far away.

In “The Bridge over the River Kwai” we get a somewhat different view of men and civilization. Colonel Nicholson, the consummate British officer, played by the most excellent Alec Guinness engages in a very personal type of warfare with his opponent, Colonel Saito, played by the equally excellent Sessue Hayakawa. The battle of iron wills ends with Nicholson getting his chance to demonstrate the superiority not only of British engineering techniques in building the bridge, but also the general “superiority” of British civilization. Nicholson rallies the troops and builds the bridge to show that “Britons never, never, never will be slaves”.

It is all so appealing, so entertaining this myth about the heroic warrior who brings about victory in the middle of defeat by the sheer virtue of his own will and character. The audience gets swept along with the story of Nicholson’s heroism. It is easy to minimize those nagging doubting voices just as Colonel Nicholson does. The voice of the doctor, Major Clipton, who dares to suggest that the bridge building project might just possibly be viewed as treasonous by the British, is ignored. What utter poppycock and nonsense! The colonel remains blissfully blind to this reality until the final sequences of the film. It just does not fit in with his vision of the world. It never occurs to him to see things any other way. Clipton also gives voice to a primary commentary of the film, namely that war is insanity no matter how sane, rational and “right” the participants claim to be.

The other dissident is, of course, the American, Shears. Shears is played very ably by William Holden. Shears is determined to survive the war any way he can, utilizing whatever Yankee ingenuity he can muster up. Morals and virtues are something he holds onto very lightly, to be jettisoned at the first moment of inconvenience in his personal battle for survival. Shears sees an opportunity and grabs hold of it, hoping that it will take him to a better place than where he is now. His general strategy in life much resembles his unpremeditated leap into the churning Kwai river during his escape from the camp. Shears is profoundly cynical. He sees men like Nicholson as dangerous lunatics putting many in harm’s way because of their misguided notions of honour, duty and suchlike.

Ironically, Shears miraculously escapes from the hands of one lunatic British commander, Nicholson, only to fall under the command of another, Major Warden. Against his will and his better judgement, Shears is talked into “volunteering” for a suicide mission to go back into the jungle and destroy the bridge. It all takes place in the most polite and apologetic manner possible over an oh-so-civilized serving of tea and crumpets. Before you know it, after the blackmail scene is over (Did I call it “volunteering”?), Shears finds himself swimming down the River Kwai to blow up the famous bridge so carefully constructed by Col. Nicholson and company. Shears becomes an inadvertent hero all over again as he dies trying to blow up the bridge. His luck has run out. This time it is the British officer, Warden who limps out of the jungle to life, liberty and a hero’s welcome.

The utter futility of war and the insanity of national and personal pride are underscored by the final event of the bridge being blown up by none other than Colonel Nicholson himself. Nothing happens as it should. Stuff happens, but none of it ultimately makes any sense. It’s just a crazy juxtaposition of blind Fate and people like Saito and Nicholson who delude themselves into thinking that they are in control. People like Dr. Clipton are left on the sidelines after the cataclysmic events to pick up the pieces and muddle on through life.

But, oh, what a grand adventure it was to go creeping up the River Kwai with the commandoes and what a spectacle it was to see that bridge and the train come crashing down!

In the newspaper this week there was an article written in commemoration of the surrender of Japan and the end of WWII in the Pacific. It was written as a personal memoir of a Japanese prison camp survivor. Aren Geisterfer was a teenager when the camps in Indonesia were finally liberated. Much as in these movies screened on TVO, the end of the war came as a surprise for the prisoners, an event met with elation, confusion and bitterness. One of Aren’s good friends in the camp died just before the liberation, as did his saintly Christian mother who was in a nearby camp. Aren was left a confused and embittered 14 year-old: “How could God let such terrible and unfair things happen? Where was He when it really mattered?” It was a real story told by a real prisoner of war who encountered real pain and suffering.

I remember other real stories that I have heard about other real people who lived and died in P.O.W. camps during the Second World War. Pain, suffering, and inhumanity were all present in abundance in their stories. But once in a while there was something else that was present that we didn’t see in the two selected movies. Once in a while there would be someone who was a real hero; not just a temporary put-up job like Shear’s heroism, but a real, unaffected heroism that came out of who those people actually were when no one was looking. Some of those people were Christians.

I think of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran pastor, theologian, and teacher who was executed by the Nazis a matter of days before Allied troops reached the camp where he was being held. Bohnoeffer was incarcerated for association with a failed attempt to assasinate Hitler. I think of a priest who willingly took the place of a guilty man executed for some petty crime in a German prison camp so that the man could live on and take care of his family. I think of Corrie ten Boon, a middle-aged Christian Dutch lady, who was dragged off to a prison camp for hiding Jews in her attic. I remember being impressed with her story when I was younger and saw a movie about her life. Before her sister, Betsie, dies in the prison camp, Corrie says to her, “Listen to me, Betsie! When we tell people that God is there, even in the worst of times, they will believe us because we have been there. We have lived in the hell of this prison camp and we still found God there. They will have to believe us.” And many people did believe Corrie after the war was over as she travelled the world with a message of love, forgiveness, hope and reconciliation.

Genuine heroes might not grow on trees in this or any other age, but they do exist. Thank God, they do exist.

Next week, Saturday Aug. 13, at 8pm EST on TVO's Saturday Night at the Movies tune in for a viewing of villainy with “This Gun for Hire” (1942) and “The Glass Key” (1942) both starring Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake .

Suggested Reading :

• Did you know that they trashed a real train on the “Bridge over the River Kwai”? IMDb trivia. 
• Keep your eye on the fat middle-aged Dutch lady: the true story on film of Corrie ten Boom's wartime heroism.
• Where is God when evil and suffering make life “insanity”?
• Why is the evidence for God so elusive and confusing?

Whodunit?

I do love a mystery. This Saturday Night at the Movies murder mystery lovers were regaled with a double dose of fun and games, murder and mayhem. Actually, I got a triple dose since I listened on Saturday to one of those classic English country manor house murder mysteries on tape. It was part of my summer holiday ritual; a book on tape on the beach while watching the kids play in the water. I had forgotten that this week’s SNAM on TVO was also full of that kind of cloak and dagger stuff. I think I got an accidental overdose.

Happily, I survived three murder mysteries in one night. It was actually quite entertaining as well as being a real workout for the brain cells. I confess that with the book on tape I had to go back and re-listen to certain parts more than once in order to keep the plot and the characters straight. There was an unfortunate choice of names in Doyles and O’Days, Monaghans and McKinleys, all in a mixed up muddle of Catholic and Protestant Irishmen. At the time, it was very important to keep them all lined up on the right side of the political fence.

Watching “The Last of Sheila” posed some similar problems. You had to really concentrate to keep things straight. James Coburn plays a multi-millionaire producer engaged in a slightly sadistic game aboard his personal yacht in the Riviera with a roster of six guests. The guests have all had some connection with himself or with his late wife, Sheila, killed a year before in a hit and run accident. Coburn takes fiendish delight not only in setting up the game, but in trashing the egos of his six guests. Backstabbing, in the figurative sense, is a pastime for the Coburn character. It is not hard to do given the guests he has on board, an assortment of Hollywood types, each with their overblown or fragile egos. Each guest also has at least one slimy secret that becomes worked into the fabric of the game.

Halfway through the movie, the backstabbing goes from the figurative to the real thing. When bodies start falling out of cupboards, you really have to start paying attention. Steven Sondheim and Anthony Perkins might be an unexpected duo as creators of “The Last of Sheila”, but it seems to me that they did a good job moonlighting as scriptwriters.

Deathtrap , originally a Broadway play by Ira Levin, also kept you on the edge of your seat, but for different reasons. In Deathtrap, it was not the overabundance of players or details that kept the mind occupied. Michael Cain plays the has-been playwright, Sydney Bruhl. Cain is desperate to restart his career by generating a new hit play any way he can. The perfect opportunity seems to present itself when a student writer, played by Christopher Reeve, presents him with a wonderful new stage thriller. Soon Cain schemes to knock off his protég é and steal his work. Dyan Canon plays Cain’s hysterical wife, Myra Bruhl, to good advantage.

In case someone has not seen the play or the movie version, I won’t spoil it by going into further detail as to what happens next. Let’s just say that the plot winds its way through many and various surprising reversals that keep one in suspense. You just have to keep watching to see the next twist in the action. It can be very addictive. The ending is just as much of a surprise and a bit silly to boot.

The three main characters, Cain, Canon and Reeve give excellent performances.

As someone observed during the Interviews, the genre of the murder mystery, when it is well done, as it is in both of these films, is about looking at the perfectly obvious and then looking again to figure out who did what and why they did it. All the evidence is there before your eyes, but it takes looking at it again to make sense of what you did not see the first time around.

I couldn’t push rewind on the SNAM movies like I did with my book on tape. There are things that I might like to go back to and look at again just to see if I caught it the first time, but there is nothing like the first viewing or the first reading of a murder mystery. There is something very satisfying about that “aha” moment the first time around.

Next Saturday, tune in for two classic movies about prisoners of war, "King Rat" (1965) with George Segal and "Bridge over the River Kwai" (1957) with Alec Guiness starting at 8pm ESTon Saturday Night at the Movies on TVOntario.

Suggested Reading:

• A skeptical investigator re-examines an ancient whodunit about a well-known personage and comes to a surprising conclusion.
• Oh, and about the infamous homosexual kiss in "Deathtrap"... Oops! IMDb trivia