Months ago, I referred to all those cheap videos I purchased at the pawn shop. However, in my infinite tardiness, I’ve still not viewed all of them yet. Last night, I tried to rectify this scenario somewhat, when I watched the three-dollar video, Best Kept Secrets. This film is an old ABC made-for-tv movie from the early 1980’s, and stars Patty Duke Astin, Frederic Forrest, Howard Hesseman, and Peter Coyote. It is far from a great movie, but it does have some interest, especially if you normally go for these older network-tv movies.

Patty Duke is the wife of a cop (Forrest). She helps out at the local church, and he’s hoping to get promoted to the Special Investigations Unit. They have two kids, a son and a daughter. Everything seems relatively okay, although the wife is naturally nervous during the times when the husband is out in dangerous situations. But something happens which sheds a dark light upon the profession that the couple have been devoted to for years, and which also may create a rift in the marriage.

The husband doesn’t get his promotion. He is told that it is a “personality conflict”, but when he talks to his friend (Coyote), his former partner who now works with the SIU, he finds out that the Unit has a file on his wife, and whatever was in that file was scandalous enough to convince the Unit that the cop wasn’t fit for the job.

The husband manages to get a bit of classified info out of his friend. The info includes the revelation that the wife had a fling with another cop five years previous. An angry confrontation between husband and wife in the grocery store gets the woman upset and violated enough that she is determined to find out about this alleged file, and what other things are inside.

Things are complicated because the official line is that the police department has destroyed all the files, and no longer spies on nonviolent citizens. Yet she knows that isn’t the case. And when she gets no support from the police chief, the SIU department chief, or even from her blowhard of a husband, she fearfully attempts to call the reporter (Howard Hesseman) on the police beat. She gives him tantalizing information, but keeps hanging up whenever he asks her for her name. He decides to print what he’s got, and after some of his own digging, he finds out who the woman is, and hopes that she’ll be able to give him the smoking gun that would blow this story wide open.

The script isn’t bad, but could have been better. Certain things are given only cursory mention, such as the activity that the woman is involved in that clearly made the SUI decide that her husband wouldn’t be able to get promoted. Certain other plotlines aren’t fully resolved. The movie feels somewhat choppy overall.

The acting is not the best. Patty Duke, as a kid, gave one of the most amazing performances ever as Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker, but here she is merely adequate. Forrest and Coyote are also merely adequate, and some of the other performances are plainly stilted and wooden. When I saw Howard Hesseman doing his reporter thing, I couldn’t help but still think of him as Johnny Fever from WKRP in Cincinnati, and I think the filmmakers couldn’t help but to think that way as well -- his surprisingly brief role seems more for comic relief than anything else.

What is admirable about this movie is that the storyline isn’t nearly as explosive as I thought it would be. Even though it involves secret files, police corruption, and connections to organized crime, the story doesn’t hype up the situations any more than absolutely necessary. This is a TV-drama, not an action picture. The movie focuses more on the wife’s feelings during the whole affair. She is frustrated by what she sees as a massive cover-up, and is even more upset when her own husband doesn’t seem to support her. And she also is forced to make a choice between doing the ethical thing and exposing the corruption of the department, and leaving things quiet, therefore saving careers and friends.

The ending is also quite interesting for a made-for-TV movie. I won’t reveal it, but I’ll say that it actually does show us that, even if you stand up for your rights, and try to do the right thing, doesn’t mean that everyone will support you. We are treated to an ambiguous, melancholy conclusion, which is certainly a much more honest way of dealing with such a story. It may not please everyone -- people are so used to happy endings, that I’m sure that some will say that the film feels unfinished. But I thought that it was an honest way to end the story.

While Best Kept Secret is probably not much better than a good made-for-TV movie, it has an interesting enough idea to make it reasonably successful.


Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: VHS
Video Occasion: Good for a Rainy Day