Dave unearths a small screen slice of melodrama.
Directed by TV veteran Alan Metzger, A DANGEROUS AFFAIR doesn’t reinvent the wheel – but everything it does in terms of script, structure, and astute casting ensures that this tale of obsession remains an engrossing ninety minute distraction.
“It’s important to see that this can happen to anybody,” asserted the film’s star, boob tube icon Connie Sellecca. “Even though we hear more about the incidents of celebrity stalkers, the largest percentage of women who face this are ordinary people. I read a lot of stories about people who went through it, and it’s a scary, scary thing.” [1]
Sellecca is Sharon Blake: a successful businesswoman in no rush to end her singledom. Best-laid plans as the saying goes – and into her life comes Robert (Gregory Harrison), a real estate guy determined to woo her with charm, chow and a fist-chewingly awkward serenade of I Only Have Eyes For You. Predictably, Sharon’s new beau has a long history of being economical with the truth and a tendency for psychopathic levels of obsession…
An examination of Robert’s early life makes for an interesting segue, and it proposes a handful of reasons that explain his behaviour. In Sellecca’s eyes, the film’s psychological aspects were a vital component:
“It’s just to show that there’s violence in his background, and that he didn’t have the love of the female, his mother. So he thought that if he was totally loved by a woman, then everything was going to be OK. He fixes on my character and believes that that is going to make everything else in his life OK – but then it becomes obsessive.” [1]
Harrison excels in roles like this, armed with the ability to flip from charmer to psycho in a heartbeat, while Sellecca plays victim with great sympathy and vulnerability. As the private detective tasked with keeping Robert at bay, it’s Christopher Meloni, though, who shines brightest.
A Dangerous Affair premiered on ABC on New Year’s Day 1995, and was the debut feature for screenwriter Alan Rosen who’d spent much of the previous decade churning out episodic television in the shape of Diff’rent Strokes and Archie Bunker’s Place. Reviews were fair to middling. However, the San Francisco Examiner were particularly savage, suggesting that Metzger’s sturdy potboiler was “blatantly inspired by the O.J. Simpson case” and describing it as “an exploitative thriller and a sleazy yarn.” [2]
That’s a glowing recommendation in my book.
USA ● 1995 ● Thriller, TVM ● 96mins
Connie Sellecca, Gregory Harrison, Christopher Meloni ● Dir. Alan Metzger ● Wri. Alan Rosen
[1] Dangerous: Connie Sellecca Stars in Timely ABC Drama About Stalking by Pete Bucci, The Honolulu Advertiser, 1st January 1995
[2] TV Guide, San Francisco Examiner. 31st December 1994
The Schlock Pit 