Deadly Intentions (1985)

Director: Noel Black
Writer: Andrew Peter Marin, based on the book by William Randolph Stevens
Stars: Michael Biehn, Madolyn Smith, Morgana King, Jack Kruschen, Kevin McCarthy, Cliff DeYoung and Cloris Leachman

Index: Make It a Double.

Deadly Intentions wasn’t a feature film nor a straight to video slasher, as you might expect from the poster. It was a three and a half hour TV movie that unfolded over two nights, 19th and 20th May, 1985 on ABC. It was based, as so many such things seem to be, on a true story.

In real life, in 1977, a airport clerk in Tucson triggers a major investigation when he sees A. Donald Vester in a weird disguise. It turns out that he’s Dr. Patrick Henry, a dermatologist at a Baltimore hospital, in Dallas for a conference but on an incognito side trip to Tucson to kill his wife, Christina Bellios. However, he didn’t do it, for some reason, and so he’s tried not for murder but for attempted murder, given how far he’d gone to do it and how close he’d come.

The prosecutor was the chief prosecutor for Pima County, William Randolph Stevens, who received an Edgar Award nomination for Best Fact Crime for his 1982 book about the case. In 1985, that became this two part TV movie.

Of course, the names were changed, not to protect the guilty and innocent but surely as a clear attempt to not get sued. However, while I haven’t read the book, I’ve read everything I can find online about the case and this seems to follow it pretty faithfully otherwise.

So Dr. Patrick Henry is changed into Charles Raynor, not yet a doctor as we begin, merely a medical student, and Christina Bellios changes to Katherine Livanos, the student he helps out and who clearly has a huge crush on him.

To her, he’s perfect. To us, he seems notably off from the outset. He has bursts of anger. He follows a seriously detailed daily to-do list, his time divided into fifteen minute chunks. And at dinner with her parents, he wants to bail to be somewhere else even though they still have a birthday cake to bring out. He won’t say why but it’s dinner with his mother, who he keeps away from Christina.

We can understand why, as Cloris Leachman turns up the acid as Charlotte Raynor. “You’re not equipped to deal with life without me,” is just the beginning. “She looks after me like I’m a child or something,” he tells Katherine. Even at this point, as we wonder about what she did to him in his childhood—the film’s worst point is not digging deeper into that—we still know that he’s emphatically the bad guy.

Andd that’s even though we aren’t given the cheatsheet I gave you in paragraph two. We’re thrown in right at the beginning with a couple of young people connecting, so we can watch it build. He proposes out of the blue, when he’s given the position that he wants in Florida. He wants her to come with him. So, marry me?

We see far more of her family, a traditional Greek Orthodox couple, who are supportive of the news, once they adjust to the matchmaker not being involved. Charlotte throws her son out of her house. Violently. And as they leave for their honeymoon, she leans in to their car and spits at Katherine, “You won’t last three months.” Spoiler: she does and suffers for it.

Florida is a long way from family. From the start, she’s stuck under her husband’s control. He makes all the decisions. She’ll stay home to look after him, not get the job she seeks. She’ll follow his detailed to-do lists. She won’t spend more than ten bucks without his permission.

As she points out on their honeymoon, “It’s almost like you’re two different people” and Michael Biehn relishes in that, so it’s trivial to see why he chose this for his Double. It’s long and the first half is almost confined to Charles and Katherine, Biehn and Madolyn Smith, and he is firmly in the driving seat, taking photos of her at all the worst moments, swimming for her life away from an alligator he doesn’t tell her is in the water or puking up from morning sickness. He even wakes her up in the middle of the night, as if he wants a miscarriage. He’s having a wonderful time tormenting her and Biehn’s having a wonderful time with Charles.

The tagline on the poster arrives in Florida, when the neighbours give her a cat and it has the temerity to scratch him. He chases it, then hurls it at a wall. “I hate it when anything runs from me,” he states. “Don’t you ever run from me, Katherine. I’ll see you dead first.”

It shouldn’t be a shock if I tell you that Part One ends with her running from him. She gets out when he’s asleep and she takes their baby Alexander with her. Who he renamed Charles, because he makes the decisions. He wakes up and chases after her but she makes it onto the plane and, three years later, when the second part begins, he’s planning the trip to come out to Tucson and kill her, a trip we watch unfold in almost forensic detail.

This is very much a film of two halves. The first is a suspenseful build, one that gets more and more uncomfortable to watch. Charles is a little off so we hope Katherine doesn’t end up with him, even though we know that she will. And when she does and they move to Florida, we watch her ignore red flag after red flag, as a good Greek Orthodox girl always marries for life, even if it’s a mistake. It’ll get better, right? Of course it doesn’t, so she eventually gets to a point where she has to leave and we cheer for her. We wish her all the best a long way away from him, even as we know there’s a Part Two.

If the first part builds up Dr. Charles Rayner, the second part takes him apart and shows in exquisite detail how someone so completely in control can have that taken away, initially by a wife, then by law enforcement and a court. It’s a rise fall story, thankfully without the typical second rise. He was given seven years in the state pen. He’s eligible for release in 1986. Yes, there’s a sequel, but happily a fictional one.

There are other actors here beyond the two leads. Leachman is vicious punctuation, kept a long way from the story most of the time but a powerful presence when it turns to her, even if it’s just to not answer a phone. The defense attorney is a heavyweight, Kevin McCarthy, as Edward Reichman. He’s as appropriately slimy as Cliff DeYoung is tenacious as Bill Garner, a special prosecutor whose dedication to help is the heartbeat of Part Two. Jack Kruschen and Morgana King are solid as Katherine’s parents.

Mostly, though, it’s Biehn’s show. Charles is the only protagonist here. He’s always utterly in charge until that’s taken away and he rages at his loss of control. He’s the textbook case of someone who looks perfect on the outside but is a seething nightmare on the inside, waiting to pop out and do something evil. And Biehn is more than happy to oblige.