Das Schicksal kennt kein Erbarmen

I picked this one up at the local dollar store. Recently, dollar stores have been buying out these old B-rated clunkers, packaging them in cardboard boxes, painting it up all pretty, and selling them for a buck. If you're a dollar store fan like I am, you know what I'm talking about.

Anyhow, I picked this one up expecting another B-rated clunker (don't get be wrong ... I LOVE B-rated clunkers). But what I got was a pleasant surprise. First of all, the package was mislabeled. It said 90 minutes. Instead, it's about 140 minutes. It looks like it was a made-for-TV movie or mini-series.

Never have I seen a movie where at the end, I felt like I had watched 10 different movies with 10 different stories. But that is what this is.

Very lengthy, complex, weirdly wonderful movie. This is some kind of great movie with some very deep points to it, yet I'm not sure what they are, other than the dangers of being an obsessive mother.

Watch it if you find it somewhere (like at the dollar store). I have a short attention span when it comes to movies, but this one kept my attention for 140 minutes.

It's worth more than a dollar. It's actually worth at least 2 dollars. LOL

Callie (Lindsay Wagner) is a single mother who is forced to deliver her son for adoption. A few years later, she meets the millionaire and owner of an important newspaper, Randy (Jameson Parker), gets married with him and retrieves her son. The story is long and follows Callie and her son until he is a married man. This movie looks like a Mexican soap-opera, combining love, hate, betrayal, blackmail, birth, death, corruption etc. Unfortunately the end of the video I watched is damaged and it was not possible to watch the end of Callie's saga. Michelle Pfeiffer in the beginning of her career, a little fat and having a very rounded face, has an important participation as the vulgar wife of Callie's son. My vote is six.

This movie is being sold by "Passion Productions" with the blurb: "Michelle Pfeiffer stars as Callie...." Obviously someone didn't bother watching the film or finding out much about it before writing the packaging for the DVD and videotape.

From the opening this film is narrated by Kimball Smyth, (Andrew Prine), an integral character who serves as a sort of Greek chorus, commenting on the events as they unfold. In the late 1950s Texas teenager Callie Martha Lord (Lindsay Wagner), an unwed mother, is forced to sell her baby to adoptive parents. She regrets this but, moving on with her life, Callie goes to Dallas and becomes a court stenographer. The film now follows the events of her rise from self-directed young woman to owner and editor of a Dallas newspaper. Dabney Coleman as her rich and devoted husband manages to locate and somehow repurchase her lost son, presenting him to his wife as a gift. Making up for lost time, Callie devotes herself so exclusively to Randy that she begins to dominate his life, transferring her ambitions for his future onto the young man who doesn't share them. Events from the 60s and 70s impact the story as it unfolds an increasingly sophisticated Callie and a rebellious Randy who marries a less than suitable Sue Lynn (Michelle Pfeiffer) in an act of passive aggression. Everything takes a downturn now. There is murder, incarceration, broken dreams and unrequited love. But somehow, Callie emerges relatively unscathed and manages to find a way to, in effect, start over. There is a furtive, mean-spirited energy that drives the story: entitlement, privilege, lies and secrets, issues of dominance and reprisal color the action, making it darker than it need have been. As a contrast and for its calm, detachment, Prine's narration is, arguably, the best part of the film.

Lindsay Wagner is Callie Martha Lord from Chillacott, Texas who moves to Dallas after giving up her son for black market adoption. Whilst working as a waitress she meets the Dallas Post Despatch newspaper editor Randall Bordeaux (Dabney Coleman) whom she marries. Randall locates Callie's adopted son Randy (Jameson Parker), and she succeeds Randall as editor, however Callie's ambition for Randy is ruined by his wife Sue Lynn (Michelle Pfeiffer), with Randy on trial for murder.

The treatment is noteworthy as a role for which Wagner abandons her customary long blonde hair. Her Callie is a brunette, who changes from a wavy long style to a short mannish cut and ends with a straight pageboy bob with grey touches and shadows under her eyes to indicate aging. Callie is seen as a court reporter wearing spinster spectacles, in a tacky orange ball gown, and black widow weeds and sunglasses. Wagner's makes amusing use of her southern accent, and is touching with Randy as a child, but the few times where she has long hair she does her flicking mannerism. She is good with indignation eg `Who bore him?!' and `Who is this child?!', when crying with `Why did God wait so long to punish me?', and spits out a whipped `Why?' in a hospital scene. In a trial she chews on her lips, and there is an off-camera big scream. At one point Wagner runs a champagne glass over her lips as she looks at Randy, and in her last scene with Parker, she gives a look of terror to `Do you hate me?'.

It's interesting to compare the acting styles of Wagner with the practically unrecognisable chubby-cheeked Pfeiffer, particularly in one confrontation scene. Wagner is all controlled technique whilst the novice Pfeiffer has a preferable messy emotionalism.

The teleplay by Thomas Thompson is mediocre, using a narration by Kimble Smythe (Andrew Pine) who is barely around and giving Callie a life long friend in Jeannie (Joy Garrett). Thompson tries for a gothic tone in the tale, closing with a cyclic act, with the shootings paralled with that of JFK. However the Mildred Pierce association, where a movie marquee shows it playing, doesn't quite work. The dialogue is soap opera cornball, with `She crossed the line between possession and obsession', `Please don't waste your love on a woman who can't accept it', and `It takes a whole lot more courage to die than go on living on the instalment plan'.

Director Waris Hussein only enlivens trial scenes, which border on camp, cutting to Callie's reactions, and he uses the spinning newspaper edit. To his credit, however, he freezes on television footage of JFK before we see him in the car at the airport, and we aren't shown the shooting of someone who gets it in the face.