Who Cares Whodunit in Space-Age Mystery?
By Jim Bawden – Toronto Star (Ontario, Canada), Page G3
What’s new on TV these days? Even news magazine shows are deep into reruns. So any TV movie that’s fresh has to be welcomed. Even Murder in Space, which is on First Choice tonight at 8 with various repeats through next month.
The TV flick was filmed at CFTO studios and tries awkwardly to combine two formats: the murder mystery and the sci-fi adventure. It’s as if Agatha Christie had donned an astronaut’s space suit to look for clues in the Milky Way.
Murder in Space might be dismissed as likable summer entertainment except for a plot device I find irksome. You see there’s no resolution, no neat summing up. Isn’t that what mysteries are all about, crowding the suspects into one room and one by one narrowing down the field?
Doesn’t know killer
In one promotional clip, director Steven Hilliard Stern admits he does not know who is the killer. If he doesn’t know, and presumably the actors are in the dark, then how can poor viewers figure out what’s happening?
The gimmick in Murder in Space calls for the audience to vote on the identity of the murderer. You must fill out a ballot in First Choice’s monthly magazine, mail it in and wait until Aug. 18 for the killer’s identity to be revealed. So far the identity is known to the five producers and writers on the project and is interned deep in a bank vault in Los Angeles.
The clues to the mystery are buried in the movie’s dialogue. There are 13 questions you have to answer successfully and you might win a trip to Europe including a trip on the Orient Express.
The trip sounds like fun. The movie is not always enjoyable to watch because it is disjointed and inconclusive. The lack of an ending is a major irritant. Why didn’t they just shoot three different endings, show them all and let us pick one of them?
The actual movie betrays its TV origins. The space command site looks a bit threadbare for making command decisions. But the emphasis is firmly on characterization. The big hit of the movie is Wilford Brimley. He hasn’t as hectic a role as he had in Cocoon, no diving into pools here, but his walrus mustache bristles when the space mission he’s directing blasts into danger. Martin Balsam is his Russian counterpart, complete with an unbelievable Russian accent. Arthur Hill plays an ineffectual American vice-president. Heck, he even looks like George Bush.
Up in the space ship Michael Ironside is the intrepid American commander. Other suspects way out there include a dedicated Soviet cosmonaut (Damir Andrei), a German who might have done it (Tom Butler), a fetching Italian (Alberta Watson), a comely Russian (Cathie Shirriff), an English Rose (Kate Trotter) and a middle-aged French doctor with a brain tumor (Leo Ilial).
But, hey, considering this movie was shot in Toronto, couldn’t they at least have come up with one Canuck in the outer space cast?
Hardly profound
The story is hardly profound but there’s enough tension to help us wile away 90 minutes. There’s a killer onboard the craft. We watch the astronauts being picked off as we try to fit the pieces together. There isn’t enough story line on each of the suspects. They never emerge as more than pasteboard characters.
One thing’s for certain, Agatha Christie would never leave us dangling in outer space. By the time the identity of the killer is revealed and an ending filmed most of us will have forgotten all about Murder in Space anyway.
Out And About: CITY-TV is claiming more than 200,000 scratch and sniff cards were sold to promote its movie Polyester… Anne Murray has been signed by CBS to host the Country Music Awards on Oct. 16. She’ll be joined by Kris Kristofferson…
Martin Balsam is at CFTO studios this weekend in town along with Jean Stapleton, Charles Grodin and Marilu Henner to tape a TV drama Grown Ups to run on the Playboy Channel in the U.S. The second run will be on PBS’s Great Performances series next year.
A new Canadian mini-series has also started production. The Kids of Degrassi Street: Yearbook looks at the familiar characters from the first series as they prepare to graduate from Grade 6 and into senior public school. Six new episodes will be filmed for the CBC and the Disney Channel.
Citation:
Jim Bawden. “Who Cares Whodunit in Space-Age Mystery?” Toronto Star (Ontario, Canada), 28 July 1985, p. G3. Accessed via NewsBank.