Angela Lansbury Weekend

Oh, all right, I'm a lazy sumbitch-- and I sometimes watch movies that aren't SF.

Even worse--I've been lost in estate questions and actual work (not that I have much of the latter) and I just got lazy. I'm finishing an Angela Lansbury Weekend. It wasn't designed that way intentionally;I got season five of Murder, She Wrote recently and watched a few episodes the end of this last week. Saturday, we found a cheapo DVD at Half-Price Books with two movies, Please Kill Me and A Life at Stake, both starring Angela Lansbury—that seemed interesting. I just finished watching the movies so it turned into a Angela Lansbury weekend.

The DVD is from Alpha and includes extras like cartoons and TV commercials (that I haven’t watched). The quality of Please Kill Me is terrible—missing frames, scratches, dropped dialog, poor audio—that makes it hard to watch. It really is a pretty good movie—Raymond Burr plays Craig Carlson, a lawyer who has fallen in love with his best friend Joe Leeds’ (Dick Furan) wife Myra (Lansbury). Craig tells Joe; Joe is flummoxed and says he needs a couple of days to think about it. After those few days, he goes to Myra, enters the bedroom and closes the door. The camera stays on the door—we hear a shot.

Joe is dead, shot by Myra. She says it was in self-defense. Myra is arrested and Craig defends her, confessing that he is the "other man" in his summation. It’s a fun movie.

The second feature, A Life at Stake, is better quality—not perfectly crystal clear but decent. This time, Edward (Keith Andes) is a home builder whose business was destroyed by a previous partner. A lawyer goes to him with an offer—a woman, Doris Hillman (Angela Lansbury), has arranged with her husband Gus (Douglas Dumbrille) to fund a new company. The new business will have Edward building homes and Doris selling them. Doris furiously flirts with Edward.

We first see Lansbury in a bathing suit looking sexy; she’s almost always bare shouldered in nice gowns. She’s sultry and seductive—it seems a bit odd after years of watching Jessica Fletcher—but she’s a damn good actress—and pretty sexy a that age.

More details later.