You Belong to Me

You Belong to Me has some good bones to it. It started off well with enough mystery and intrigue built up from the start. How did those 3 women disappear? However I felt the underlying motive and how the murderer got away with it was all rushed. Why did he do what he did, how did he do it and get away from it? If the murders happened on a cruise, then how did he not get recognised by others around. Also the dodgy lawyer and the motive for his actions was never fully explained. What was his angle and what was he up to?

After building all this suspense they rushed through the final moments so there was no great payoff and pulling it all together in this mystery.

I saw this movie last night for Lesley Anne Down and it's surprised me that it's very enjoyable. Lesley proofs that she can more than playing Madeline in North & South. It's also surprised me that this tv-movie had some suspense in it, I didn't know who the killer was until the end and that was very surprising

It starts off kind of hokey; the old song "You Belong to Me" is playing, while you see a series of newspapers with headlines about somebody disappearing. This sequence seems like too short a short cut to introduce the mystery; some footage on the cruise ship would have been a far better opening. But the film soon picks up, and the significance of these things is explained.

Leslie Anne Down, as a radio talk show psychologist/self-styled detective is the main strength of the movie, as she inextricably gets tangled up in a series of murders that are apparently linked to the disappearance. The movie takes a standard murder mystery format here; as soon as a character is introduced, they are queued up in line to be the next victim. Down, along with her cop friend (Tony De Santis) try to sort out the mystery, and stop the carnage. There's no shortage of suspects, and it keeps you guessing.

A pretty good movie overall, but the clichéd stupidity of the killer in the closing sequence is almost laughable, and detracts from the story's effectiveness. Still, a good watch.

I'm not a particular fan of the way these Mary Higgins Clark adaptations are handled by Grosso-Jacobson, but I love a mystery and I love Lesley-Anne Down, so I checked out this one. She's gorgeous as usual, no surprise there. The lovely Lori Haller, who has done so much television in Canada, was on hand too.

Down plays a radio psychiatrist who becomes involved with trying to find out what happened to a young woman some years earlier, in trying to help the mother comes to terms with it. In reaching out to her viewers, a pattern emerges, and soon, it's realized that a serial killer was meeting women on cruises and killing them.

I did figure out the killer - for some reason, though these TV movies give you plenty of suspects, they have a way of telegraphing the killer to the viewer.

Okay movie.

I don't know the story behind PAX picking up the distribution TV rights (or at least now showing) to/a bunch of Mary Higgins Clark TV movies.

You Belong to Me is one of the better ones. There is one scene about 10 minutes in that sets up the main characters (2 sisters, and a possible rich lover the two will me interested in). The one problem I have with the scene and the film is that just previous we see a foldout and hear talk of a cruise. The scene also appears to be on a cruise and unless you listen very carefully, the setting kind of throws you off track (i.e. was that a flash back I just saw?)

Suffice it to say, the story is told strait forward and dispite thinking you know the killer all along, a neat red herring is thrown in.

The ending isn't a complete surprise (since there are really only say 7 possible murderers (i.e. only 7 men in the picture with any screen time and you can basically not count the 2 store owners)), but the story balances the line between giving you enough clues to follow the story and not enough clues to totally figure it out.

If you are a fan of Mary Higgins clark, you may be disappointed that the movie has a TV look and you may wish for a big screen treatment of some of her work, but in terms of mystery you won't be disappointed.

Rating: 7