Tag Archives: Patrick Cassidy

Retro Television Review: The Love Boat 8.2 and 8.3 “Vicki and the Fugitive/Lady in the Window/Stolen Years/Dutch Treat”

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past!  On Wednesdays, I will be reviewing the original Love Boat, which aired on ABC from 1977 to 1986!  The series can be streamed on Paramount Plus!

This week, we have a two-hour episode of The Love Boat!

Episodes 8.2 and 8.3 “Vicki and the Fugitive/Lady in the Window/Stolen Years/Dutch Treat”

(Dir by Robert Scheerer, originally aired on September 29th, 1984)

This week, the crew is assigned to a European cruise!  Aboard the Royal Viking Sky, the crew and their passengers sail from England to the Netherlands and back again.  This is one of those episodes that was shot on location and, as always, the scenery is lovely.

The stories on the other hand….

Vicki falls for a deckhand named Peter (Patrick Cassidy).  In fact, Vicki even finds herself falling in love with him.  (In this episode, it’s established that Vicki is now 17.  Is she old enough now to actually get paid a salary for all the work she does on the boat?)  However, Peter is actually Anton, a young man who is being pursued by Interpol.  The show spends a lot of time trying to make it appear as if Antono is a criminal of some sort.  Actually, he’s just a royal prince who ran off because he wasn’t ready to accept his official duties.  Vicki is happy to discover that Anton isn’t a criminal but unhappy that he now has to stay behind and rule a kingdom in Europe.

Captain Stubing probably could have helped Vicki during all of this but he was too busy pursing a romance with Inga Van Damme (Elke Sommer), a mysterious passenger who, much like Anton, appeared to be keeping a secret from her romantic partner.  Telling Stubing that she couldn’t be with him, Inga left the ship early.  Stubing wandered all over Amsterdam, searching for her.  And he discovered her …. working as a madam.  “It is legal here,” Inga explains.  “But is it morally right?” Stubing replies.

Speaking of being morally right, Dr. Foster (Pat Harrington, Jr.) finds himself on the boat with both his wife (Eileen Brennan) and his mistress (Teri Copley)!  Wow, how many times can the exact same thing happen on the Love Boat?  As always with this show, the husband went back to his wife but, fortunately, his mistress met someone while leaving the boat.  “Can I help you with your bags?” the charming stranger asks.  “Are you married?” the former mistress replies.

Finally, Danish Lisa Anderson (Cloris Leachman) meets Erik Larsen (George Kennedy), another Dane, on the boat.  (George Kennedy speaks with his normal American accent.)  Erik falls in love with Lisa (Hey!  That’s my name!) but Lisa is haunted by memories of her former lover (Tim Robbins) being dragged away by the Nazis during World War II.  At first, it seems that Lisa is too haunted by what happened to move on.  However, it is eventually revealed that her former lover is Erik Larsen!  Somehow, Tim Robbins grew up to be George Kennedy.  In her memories, it appears that Lisa betrayed Erik but actually, by pointing him out to the Nazis, she bought him time.  While everyone else in the town square was being executed, Erik was being interrogated and, because of this, he was still alive when the Americans returned.

So, here’s the problem.  Cloris Leachman, not surprisingly, gives a great performance as Lisa.  And George Kennedy, once you get over the idea that he’s supposed to be Danish, gives a pretty good performance as Erik.  But flashbacks of Nazi atrocities feel very much out-of-place when mixed in with scenes of Vicki dating a prince and the doctor trying to balance being on a cruise with both his wife and his mistress.  Tonally, this episode is all over the place.

That said, the scenery’s lovely (am I repeating myself) and Ted McGinley fit in nicely with the rest of the crew.  Pat Klous isn’t bad as Judy but, at least at this point in the season, she doesn’t have the same sort of brother/sister chemistry that Lauren Tewes had with Fred Grandy and Bernie Kopell.  McGinley, of course, had the advantage that, while he was new, he still wasn’t replacing anyone.  Poor Pat Klous still has to escape from the shadow of the former cruise director.

Ghosts of Sundance Past: Longtime Companion (dir by Norman Rene)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

The Sundance Film Festival is currently underway in Utah.  For the next few days, I’ll be taking a look at some of the films that have previously won awards at Sundance.

First released in 1990, Longtime Companion was one of the first mainstream feature films to deal with the early days of the AIDS epidemic.

The film follows a group of friends and lovers over the course of ten years.  The film opens with a crowded and joyous 4th of July weekend at Fire Island.  Willy (Campbell Scott) is a personal trainer who has just started a relationship with an entertainment lawyer who, due to his beard, is nicknamed Fuzzy (Stephen Caffrey).  Willy’s best friend is the personable and popular John (Dermot Mulroney).  David (Bruce Davison) and Sean (Mark Lamos) are the elder couple of the group.  Sean writes for a soap opera and one of Fuzzy’s clients, Howard (Patrick Cassidy), has just landed a role on the show.  He’ll be playing a gay character, even though everyone warns him that the role will lead to him getting typecast.  The group’s straight friend is Lisa (Mary-Louise Parker), an antique dealer who lives next door to Howard and who is Fuzzy’s sister.  The film takes it times showing us the friendships and the relationships between these characters, allowing us to get to know them all as individuals.

Even as the group celebrates the 4th, they are talking about an article in the New York Times about the rise of a “gay cancer.”  Some members of the group are concerned but the majority simply shrug it off as another out-there rumor.

The movie moves quickly, from one year to another.  John, the youngest of them, is the first member of the group to die, passing away alone in a hospital room while hooked up to a respirator.  (The sound of the respirator is one of the most haunting parts of the film.)  Sean soon becomes ill and starts to dramatically deteriorate.  It falls to David to take care of Sean and to even ghostwrite his scripts for the soap opera.  Howard’s acting career is sabotaged by rumors that he has AIDS while Willy and Fuzzy tentatively try to have a relationship at time when they’re not even sure how AIDS is transmitted.  At one point, Willy visits a friend in the hospital and then furiously scrubs his skin in case he’s somehow been infected.  When one member of the group passes, his lover is referred to as being his “longtime companion” in the obituary.  Even while dealing with tragedy and feeling as if they’ve been shunned and abandoned to die by the rest of America, the characters are expected to hide the details of the lives and their grief.

It’s a poignant and low-key film, one that was originally made for PBS but then given a theatrical release after production was complete.  Seen today, the film feels like a companion piece to Roger Spottiswoode’s And The Band Played On.  If And The Band Played On dealt with the politics around AIDS and the early struggle to get people to even acknowledge that it existed, Longtime Companion is about the human cost of the epidemic.  The film is wonderfully acted by the talented cast.  Bruce Davison was nominated for an Oscar for his sensitive performance as David.  If not for Joe Pesci’s performance in Goodfellas, it’s easy to imagine that Davison would have won.  The scene where he encourages the comatose Sean to pass on will make you cry.  Interestingly, when David gets sick himself, it happens off-screen as if the filmmakers knew there was no way the audience would have been able to emotionally handle watching David suffer any further.

Longtime Companion played at the 1990 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Dramatic Audience Award.

A Movie A Day #65: Hitler’s Daughter (1990, directed by James A. Contner)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Ted Scott (Patrick Cassidy), a White House press aide, is contacted by his former professor, Dr. Bauman (Donald Davis).  Bauman gives Ted a file that he claims will prove that not only did Adolf Hitler have a daughter but she was subsequently smuggled into America and is now on the verge of occupying the White House.  Ted thinks that Bauman’s crazy but then Bauman is murdered and Ted is framed for the crime.  With both the police and the bad guys after him and with time running out, Ted must now figure out who is Hitler’s daughter.  Is it Sharon Franklin (Melody Anderson), the famous TV anchorwoman who is having an affair with a Senator?  Is it Patricia Benedict (Veronica Cartwright), the wife of the Vice President?  Or is it Senator Leona Crawford Gordon (Kay Lenz), who has just been put on the opposition party’s presidential ticket?

Hitler’s Daughter was originally made for the USA Network and, throughout the 1990s, it would frequently air late at night.  As far as the film’s quality is concerned, Kay Lenz was beautiful as ever but otherwise, Hitler’s Daughter was a typically forgettable low-budget made-for-tv thriller, complete with bad guys who can shoot everyone but the main character, exploding cars, and villains who carefully explain their plans before trying to kill the heroes.  It does end on a down note, with almost everyone dead.  This probably seemed edgy in 1990 but it seems predictable today.  Exactly ten years after this otherwise forgotten movie aired, Hitler’s Daughter was briefly again in the public spotlight a group of online conspiracy nuts claimed that Hillary Clinton was trying to suppress the movie’s release on video would harm her chances of getting elected to the Senate.

Far better than the movie is the novel on which it was based.  Written by Timothy B. Benford, the literary Hitler’s Daughter is an entertaining and enjoyably pulpy page turner.  Benford was the former police commissioner of Mountainside, New Jersey when he wrote Hitler’s Daughter in 1983 and the book touched with an nerve with at least a few readers.  According to a story in The New York Times, shortly after the novel was published, Benford woke up to discover a wooden swastika burning on his front lawn.  The movie stick closely to the book’s plot but never translates what worked on the page to the screen.