Written & Directed by Bill Condon
With: Pierce Brosnan as Charles Lattimore,Dey Young as Laura Lattimore, Kim Thomson as Francesca Lavin, Antoni Corone as Mike Dowling, J. Kenneth Campbell as Tim Ryder
In the early morning February 17, 1970, Green Beret Captain Jeffrey MacDonald, M.D. called the police to his home in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. He claimed two men, and a woman with long blond hair wearing a floppy hat broke into his home and attacked him and his family, brutally murdering his wife and two little girls. I remember hearing the news reports.
Captain MacDonald claimed the blond woman chanted ”Acid is groovy, kill the pigs.” Whereupon I said, Bullshit, this guy is a con. ”Acid is groovy, kill the pigs.” is the kind of line a square citizen like a Green Beret Captain M.D. would think ”hippy” thrill killers would say.
Try another line of BS Doc, that one don’t play.
After a decade of police screw-up, misdirection and lies, MacDonald goes to trial. MacDonald hires reporter Joe McGinniss to in effect join the defense team and write a book proving the much maligned doctor’s innocence. McGinnis encounters a problem with this assignment; MacDonald is guilty as Hell, and the book McGinnis writes about the case,
Fatal Vision, lays out the case for MacDonald’s guilt. Fatal Vision is a best seller, and becomes a miniseries. The homicidal doctor is unhappy in prison. Fuck him.
This is the background for the 1991 television movie, Murder 101.
Professor Charles Lattimore, who teaches a course on writing murder mysteries, is just returning from a sabbatical he spent much like Joe McGinnis, part of a defense team of Tim Ryder on trial for the brutal murder of his wife. A much less spectacular crime than MacDonald’s but no less heinous.
Not only did Lattimore write a book about the case, he provided the damning testimony in court that convicted Ryder. The two men had become friends. Close friends? A prison visit between the two seems to suggest their friendship was deeper than that. Considering the movie was written and directed by the openly gay Bill Condon (Gods and Monsters, Kiss of the Spider Woman), the inference is reasonable.
However, it is balanced out by Lattimore’s beautiful and temperately estranged wife (we see them later-on in the sack, post coital) . Lattimore assigned his class the task of writing a murder mystery. A good murder mystery (there is always a catch, isn’t there?).
Then the hi-jinx begin! Murders most foul. Yup, and who does all the evidence point to as the guilty party (lack of motive notwithstanding)? You guessed it, you Sherlock Holmes, you. Lattimore! . But is the vengeful Tim Ryder orchestrating the frame-up from prison?
You reach a point early on in the story when you say, this plotting sucks. I mean boarding on stupid. Fear not! The very last scene redeems it. You’ve been had Mr. Monk, Lt. Columbo, Ben Matlock.
And here you thought you were so smart…
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