The Cradle Will Fall (1983)
Kathy DeMaio checks into the hospital and thinks she sees a body being loaded into the trunk of a car. When the body turns up later and the murderer, Dr. Highley, thinks that DeMaio can identify him, her life is put in jeopardy. Originally made for television and adapted from a novel by Mary Higgins Clark, the interesting twist to this thriller is that several cast members of the daytime soap opera "Guiding Light" play those same roles here.
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Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.
The story-telling is good with flashbacks.The film is both funny and heartbreaking. You smile in a scene and get a soulcrushing revelation in the next.
The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful
The biggest problem with this movie is it’s a little better than you think it might be, which somehow makes it worse. As in, it takes itself a bit too seriously, which makes most of the movie feel kind of dull.
***SPOILERS*** Another movie about an arrogant nut-job who thinks that he's God in playing with peoples lives in the name of "Higher Science". In this case Assistant District Attorney Katie Demaio ends up at the receiving end of the psycho's sick delusions of grandeur by getting involved with him by being admitted in the hospital that he works at.Recovering from a car accident Katie is admitted to the Westlake Fertility Clinic not because she has problems giving birth but because the local hospital was filled to capacity. Heavily doped up on drugs Katie just happened to look outside her hospital room window and saw someone taking this unconscious woman, who turned out to be Vangie Lewis, into the trunk of his car. It's much later when Vangie's body was discovered in her home dead from a cyanide cocktail that things started to gel in Katie's brain in remembering the evening she saw her outside, with her possible murderer, her hospital room. What's even worse for Katie is that the person who stuffed Vangie's dead body in the trunk of his car saw her too and that's when her life, as well as a number of other persons connected to him, became endangered.Incredibly complicate made for TV movie that has at least a half dozen sub-plots in it besides just the one about who murdered, and made to look like a suicide, Vangie Lewis. There's also Vangie's cheating husband airline pilot Capt Chris Lewis who's having an affair with his stewardess Joan Morton who want's him to ditch Vangie and fly off with her to sunny Jamaica. There's also the two doctors at the clinic the British educated Dr. Edger Hghley and his top assistant the cagey and secretive, about his past, Japanese/American Dr. Fachita who both seem to know a lot more about Vangie's pregnancy then there's telling Katie. It was at her insistence that Katie was put on the case by her boss in the city D.A's office Alex Myerson. To make things even more exciting, or complicated, there's Dr. Salem who's Vangie's gynecologist from her home state of Minnesota who's certain that she's clinically unable to get pregnant! So how on God's earth did Vangie end up dead with a seven month old fetus in her womb? And last but not least there's the nosy and very concerned, and the late Vangie's good friend, receptionist at the Westlake Fertility Clinic Edna Burns. It's Mrs. Burns who has an inkling to who Vangie's murderer really is but never lives to talk about it by becoming the killer's latest victim in the movie. We also have a sweet little side love story with the local police pathologist Dr. Richard Carroll who's just out and out crazy about Katie who's husband John died of cancer two years ago. Dr. Carroll loves his job not just because of it's good pay and medical and pension benefits but because it has him spend most of his time working together, and thus being able for him to strike up a relationship, with Katie.The ending is not at all that surprising since we already know who Vangie's, as well as the two other murder victims in the film, killer really is. The big surprise is how totally insane the murderer is and yet at the same time him be able to keep his insanity hidden and under raps from almost the entire length of the movie!
Set at the Guiding Light hospital, this movie uses the soap stars in an interesting way! Although the story is not focused upon the GL stars, it offers a peak into their lives at the hospital. Lauren Hutton is very effective as a strong-willed woman having to make time in her life for an operation. Nice plot twists at the end will keep you guessing as to the outcome. Joe Ponazecki as Detective Wyatt is perfect casting!