LINDA John D. MacDonald

LINDA. Made for cable-TV, USA Network, 08 October 1993. Virginia Madsen, Richard Thomas, Ted McGinley, Laura Harrington. Based on the novella by John D. MacDonald. Director: Nathaniel Gutman.

   A summer vacation at the beach becomes a deadly affair when the wife of one couple kills the wife of the another, and in the process neatly frames her own husband for the deed.

   It starts slowly, goes into a period of intense action, interrupted only by massive amounts of commercials, then settles down for the obvious but highly anticipated conclusion to develop.

   USA is making great strides in making yesterday’s B-movies today, but this one has several strikes against it:

   (1) After the first two stars named above, the acting is absolutely horrible.

   (2) The behavior of the police, the D.A.’s office, and the accused husband’s lawyer are all equally unbelievable.

   (3) After the tale is told, there are still somehow several minutes to fill, and believe me, there is nothing even Richard Thomas could do at that point that could get anyone as choked up about it as we’re supposed to.

   The one thing the movie did have going for it was that it was based on a story by John D. MacDonald, so I went up to my upstairs closet and dug out the book it came from. It’s the second half of a paperback entitled Border Town Girl (Popular Library #750, June 1956), which is where it first appeared.

LINDA John D. MacDonald

   It’s only 70 pages long, and it took me less than an hour to read it. And I was right. The things I didn’t care for in the movie were things that weren’t in the book:

   No bad acting. No shipshod police work. No lousy cornball ending.

   It’s still a bit unchewable as a story, but JDM almost made me believe it. And if I hadn’t have seen the movie first, maybe I would have.

— Reprinted from Mystery*File #35, November 1993, slightly revised.


   [UPDATE] 06-13-10. There was an earlier TV movie based on the story “Linda,” one I did not know about when I wrote this review. It was on ABC, 03 November 1973, as the Suspense Movie of the Week. It starred Stella Stevens, Ed Nelson, John McIntire, and John Saxon, with Jack Smight as the director. On the basis of the actors alone, there’s a chance I might have enjoyed it more than I did the one on USA.

   I’ll have to see if I can track either one down, or hopefully both. I may have a VHS copy of the later one, but based on my comment about the commercials, there is a possibility that I watched it live. On the other hand, you still notice how many and how often, even when you’re fast-forwarding through them.