In Linda, Virginia Madsen's Bored Femme Fatale Follows In the Footsteps of Myriad TV Shows with Falling Ratings and Hooks Up with Ted McGinley

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.

Writing about the movies and television shows that patrons/readers have chosen for me for this column has led me to develop some very peculiar fields of expertise. A patron-funded exploration of the films of legendary video vixen Tawny Kitaen, for example, made me an expert on her steamy oeuvre and sad decline.

I’m developing a similarly granular knowledge of the early 1990s erotic thrillers of Virginia Madsen, many of which debuted on television, ensuring that they’re neither erotic nor thrilling.

When you’ve seen as many Virginia Madsen movies as I have you get angry on her behalf for the roles she was offered at an important point in her career. How could a gifted, impossibly gorgeous actress with amazing presence who made such an indelible impression in cult movies like Electric Dreams, The Hot Spot, Modern Girls and Candyman be reduced to an endless series of interchangeable sexy thrillers casting her as small screen femme fatales?

I don’t know why Madsen’s career wasn’t soaring at this time but I have learned to appreciate what makes one Madsen television movie better than another.

The 1993 television movie Linda is a cut above Madsen’s usual work during this period in aspiring to stylishly bleak Neo-Noir fatalism rather than erotic thriller tawdriness.

Linda is the second television movie adaptation of the titular novella by John D. MacDonald, a prolific writer of thrillers, many set in Florida and featuring salvager Travis McGee as well as the author who wrote The Executioners, the novel that inspired both versions of Cape Fear.

Stephen King is a big fan of MacDonald. Then again, King seems to very graciously be the biggest fan of EVERY pulp writer of note. I can’t say how many times I’ve checked out the Wikipedia entry for a seemingly obscure genre writer and discovered that King said that Finneas McFlaggerty was the greatest poet of his generation and that his Boots McGee novels about a blind bounty hunter and his talking cat elucidate the complexities of the human condition as profoundly as anything Dickens ever wrote. It’s nice that King is so generous with his praise but it does render it semi-irrelevant.

I’m not sure ANY writer is truly worthy of King’s hyperbolic  praise but MacDonald did write a nifty yarn that was previously adapted for television in 1973 with Stella Stevens in the lead role.

In Linda, Madsen plays the title character, a housewife turned femme fatale who is bored with her marriage to dependable, resourceful and fundamentally lame Paul Crowley (Richard Thomas).

Linda strips down to sexy lingerie in an attempt to seduce her almost impressively boring husband, but he keeps turning down her feverish sexual advances because he’d rather tinker with gadgets or think about ways to save money.

Honestly, a man like that is just begging to be framed for murder by his hot to trot wife (played, conveniently enough, by the female lead of Hot to Trot) and her married lover, which is just what happens.

Linda needs a shot of sex and excitement in her humdrum existence so she does what any number of prominent television shows with dwindling ratings have done through the years when they similarly need to spice things up: hooks up with Ted McGinley.

McGinley plays Brandon "Jeff" Jeffries, a hunky neighbor of the Crowleys who DEFINITELY isn’t too busy pinching pennies or fixing things to make sweet, sweet love to his neighbor’s wife despite being married to the stunning Stella (Laura Harrington).

The couples get along so well that they vacation together in Florida. Jeff and Linda do nothing to hide their torrid affair so Paul and Stella contemplate having an extramarital tryst of their own.

Infidelity leads to murder when Linda kills Stella with Jeff’s shotgun, then frames her husband for the murder. The most boring man in the world ends up behind bars but uses his preternatural resourcefulness to escape prison and tape his wife and her lover explicitly discussing the murder and their central role in it.

If Madsen got type-cast as dangerous women who use their sexuality to control and manipulate weak-willed men in the late 1980s and early 1990s that’s probably because she excelled in those kinds of roles.

Madsen was VERY good at being VERY bad. She was beautiful and had extraordinary presence, of course, but what distinguished her from other impossibly beautiful women playing venomous vixens was a fundamental chilliness and dark humor.

Linda is not a great movie. It’s not even a particularly good movie but it is good enough thanks largely to a legitimately great performance by Madsen as a cold-hearted schemer whose rapacious appetite for sex and money and escape destroy two couples.

McGinley may be one of the cheesiest cornballs in the history of sitcoms but Madsen has real heat and chemistry with the star of Happy Days, The Love Boat, Dynasty, Married…With Children and Hope and Faith.

Thomas begins the movie a total stiff but gets more interesting once he’s framed for murder and must figure out a way to avoid the electric chair.

Linda is a television movie with the soul of a Film Noir. It’s a steamy, sordid tale of betrayal and murder in paradise that’s the TV movie equivalent of the kind of trashy paperback you happily devour on a flight and forget before you even touch down.

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