A Question of Guilt

Tuesday Weld gives a moving performance. The cast includes able, veteran TV character actors. It explores serious themes. But this 1978 TV movie does too little with its rich but grim subject matter and largely obscure characters to be as entertaining or enlightening as it could.

Two young girls go mysteriously missing and turn up dead in ditches. They had lived with their mother. She is middle-aged, attractive, fiercely independent Doris Winters (Weld). After marrying young to a town drudge and years later "kicking him out," Winters, a lingerie model, donned platinum blonde wigs and "made it" with "more than 50 men" in town.

An informal conspiracy of prejudiced townspeople, a judgmental cop (Ron Leibman), political-hack, conviction-hungry police brass (M. Emmett Walsh) and prosecutor (Ron Rifkin), and a sensationalistic media closes in on Winters. Her casual male friends stand by her at first, but soon let her down. A drab neighbor woman belatedly claims to have seen a damaging scene the night the kids disappeared. The cops and DA bully a stubbornly indecisive medical examiner and a jealous, ruined Winters ex-lover (Alex Rocco) into giving damaging testimony. Like a Greek chorus, Leibman's partner keeps piping up to complain about weak evidence and how the investigation is mostly character assassination, focused only on Winters and ignoring other suspects. They include Winters' discarded but still-besotted husband who had been spying on her obsessively after they separated and had been seeking custody of their kids, as well as some stray area head-cases who had confessed.

At times, the movie is a suspenseful balancing act. There are traits to like and dislike in Winters. Weld convincingly conveys a kind of animal attraction. The movie shows that her lifestyle can make her popular during good times but vulnerable at a time of need. Her persecutors are not necessarily "evil." The crimes are horrible, she does not fit the image of a doting mother and arguably had a motive, there are some "discrepancies" to her story that may be suspicious, and the coroner's staff do not share their boss's indecisiveness about key medical evidence. The movie balances the themes of the demeaning harassment and possible railroading of a murder suspect and the vindication of innocent child victims. Today's concern is with too few moral values, but the movie suggests the damage that can be done -- at least to the integrity of the process and those caught up in it -- by crusading moral zeal (or resentments sometimes masquerading as such).

But the movie falls short by simply holding these conflicting themes in constant tension, without exploring them enough or resolving them at all. It plateaus at too low a level of drama, observation, and insight to make watching the increasingly slow-moving, repetitious, depressing material feel as if it has been worthwhile. In certain ways, it seems cold, clinical, mechanical, and lacking in depth (for example, the movie makes little or no attempt to humanize the victims or most of the many characters).

A key character is miscast and one-dimensional, wasting the talents of Ron Leibman. Aside from similarly stiff, sour, closed-mouth guest appearances as Rachel's father and Ross's nemesis on the TV show Friends, I have never seen Leibman add so little. He got rave reviews for a gritty, colorful supporting performance as a DA in the 1997 theatrical release Night Falls On Manhattan. In the early 1970s TV movie The Art of Crime, he chewed up the scenery as a Park Avenue gypsy art dealer turned amateur sleuth. Later in 1978, after Question of Guilt, he played hyper-kinetic ex-con-turned-lawyer Martin Kazinski in the intense TV show Kaz.

Here, except for an occasional gesture or verbal tic, Leibman is almost unrecognizable. As cop "Lou Kazinski," he is straight-jacketed in a lifeless, superficial, cardboard role. With unexplained, stiff, tight-wound bitterness, he stands around doing a teeth-clenched slow burn in countless reaction shots, mutters under his breath, and occasionally spits out hateful comments about Winters or rebuffs his cop partner. There is only one, brief scene at his home. He arrives at 3am from work, awakening his wife. He then picks a fight with her about the loud music playing down the street, calling the partygoers "animals." Most disappointing are his unrevealing interactions with Winters. Other cast members do competent jobs with unexceptional material.

The film has too little interesting to say about police or courtroom procedure. It gives almost no details about the crimes. It leaves up in the air whether Winters committed them. If she did not, then the detailed, damning testimony of her neighbor and ex-lover are out-and-out lies. It is easier to reconcile what happens, including her passionate but vague and perhaps deluded denials, with her being guilty. But the film ends, after a trial verdict, with Winters walking into a room alone, looking around, glancing at a photo of her two dead girls in her wallet (strangely, the only time the movie really humanizes the victims), and gazing toward the camera with slightly changing expressions, after which the screen freezes and the credits roll. I replayed this for any sign that the movie was trying to say something, but came up empty.

In reaction to "Hollywood" clichés, it has become fashionable (and a cliché in its own right) to praise a movie for not providing "answers." A movie may not take the trouble or the risk to resolve the plot, for fear that it might be seen as pat, contrived, or worst of all sins, a "neat" or "happy" ending. But it is a fault, not a virtue, when a movie fails to tell a meaningful or entertaining enough story. If it leaves the truth of the key event hanging, then it better have a lot to say otherwise. Rather than a strength here, the ending compounds weaknesses in the rest of the movie.

Thankfully "A Question of Guilt" maintains the courage of its convictions. Being a late seventies television movie, one expects a neatly wrapping up of the proceedings so that we can go to our beds with the feeling all is well with the world. This very much strengthens what could have been just another television crime or court drama. This uncompromising stance is totally in synch with the uncompromising attitude of the central character.

A fine supporting cast in Ron Liebman, Alex Rocco and Viveca Lindors all help in elevating the movie but it's the crucial key role as played by Tuesday Weld that really makes "A Question of Guilt" worthwhile.

It was television rather than the movies that afforded Tuesday Weld the opportunities to display her considerable acting talents in a range of well played roles which have largely been forgotten since they were doomed to the oblivion that is the fate of even the finer works of the genre.

During much of the film, Weld dons a blonde wig bearing a striking resemblance to Michelle Pfeiffer in "Love Field". It didn't take long for Pfeiffer to enter the big league in which she's acquitted herself more than competently, "Love Field" being her finest moment. That is not how it panned out for Tuesday Weld. The big league for whatever reason, she would remain excluded from other than memorable supporting roles ("Looking for Mr. Goodbar", "Once Upon a Time In America").

The result is that it's very hard to find her best work on video and admittedly many of her movies are not exactly essential viewing. Still, she never gives a weak performance which does makes these movies well worth seeking out.

This movie really shows off the talents of Tuesday Weld. She plays a mother who's children are murdered by an unknown assailant. While the police can't figure out who did it, all of Tuesday's neighbors jump on the "Character Assassination" bandwagon and accuse her of the crime simply because they don't like her. Apparently, the homely housewives are jealous of her because she wears mini-skirts, wigs of all colors and styles and has many boyfriends. According to these pea-brained, white trash apartment dwellers, Tuesday is guilty because she's a tramp! Interesting story about how gossip and rumor can really make a bad situation worse. The police aren't much better, especially Ron Liebman who is especially nasty when confronting Tuesday about her past. This cop is really on a high moral soapbox and we the audience really detest this guy. Every thing Tuesday tried to do for her kids is turned around and used against her. Tuesday Weld should have won an emmy for this role, she plays it with such a diverse characterization. This woman is all flash on the outside but quite a different person when she's alone. The scene in the jail where we get to see her without her wig and makeup was pretty brave (Several years before Farrah Faucett went sans makeup for the Burning Bed). All in all, it's a good movie but it leaves a lingering depression and shows what can happen when jealous, bitter people start a hate campaign against a person who's guilt is left up in the air for the entire movie.