Nutcracker: Money, Madness and Murder

I love Lee Remick, but I just didn’t love her in this role of Frances Schreuder in this production. The director was dependent on using The Nutcracker ballet theme as a statement to all the worldly goods that Frances tried to acquire. The attempt is pedestrian at best with shots of her daughter dancing SNOW from the ballet. Other than that reference to the ballet, the juxtaposition of a sociopath and The Nutcracker is a bit thin. The cast is lifeless and hardly supports the star, and Ms. Remick just can’t carry the whole crew.Also, this disc WILL NOT play in a standard DVD player that has a recording option. I got all settled in my favorite room ready to watch this film and I discovered I had to get up and move to a bedroom where I had only a PLAYER. All in all, not a happy experience. I am going to trade this DVD off first chance I get.

This is one of those made for TV movies about an infamous murder of the time. This one is just really interesting. It is a bit long 3 two hour parts (about 5 hours of watching) but the performances are brilliant and there will be a few very young faces of actors in recent series. But the one to watch is Lee Remick. She just rears into the role and never lets it go.Like most print on demand DVDs it is a bit pricey and has no extras.

It's difficult to "review" a movie my very own son (then only six years old), Jarrett Lennon, was in, so I'll just say that was the first feature-length (and longer, by golly) project that he got to work on, and Lee Remick was a darling, as were the producers and the director. Our time staying in New York City (staying at the Plaza Hotel) was delightful, as I got to take Jarrett all over the city and show him my old haunts. Central Park, as always, was the perfect place to work in.The story is true, and we had some pretty intense discussions about the topic.

WILL NOT PLAY

Great movie with the late Lee Remmick. BE FORWARNED: The DVD will not play on any PC nor a DVD recorder/HDD. If you're still holding on to an old analog DVD PLAYER (only) you should be good to go.

In the late 1970s Frances Schreuder was a New York socialite with deep pockets who donated astonishing sums to the New York City Ballet and similar causes. But those who knew her well also knew of the darkness that underlay her surface: she was a vicious sociopath who saw those around her in terms of how they could be of service to her. When her wealthy father Franklin Bradshaw threatened to pull the plug on her financial excesses, she manipulated her son Marc into traveling to Utah to murder his own grandfather so she could gain access to the family fortune.The Bradshaw case was truly infamous, and the public was both enthralled and disgusted. The case had major news coverage and was detailed in two best-sellers, AT MOTHER'S REQUEST and NUTCRACKER. Both books were adapted into television movies in 1985. The most celebrated was NUTCRACKER. Presented over the course of three nights, it had a longer running time and was therefore able to include more detail; it also had the advantage of a truly extraordinary performance by Lee Remick as the manipulative mother.NUTCRACKER isn't perfect. Like every other made-for-television network movie, it has abrupt cuts and gaps to accommodate commercials. It was also done on the cheap, something that most particularly shows in terms of period detail---the story moves across four decades and the costumes and sets are sometimes spotty. Remick is also clearly uncomfortable playing Frances as a college girl, for which she was obviously too mature. What with all these issues the first twenty minutes or so feel a little clumsy, but once the script gets Frances out of Bryn Mawr the story begins to uncoil with the nastiness of a rattlesnake attack.The overall cast is very good, but there's no doubt about it, this is Remick's show. She plays Frances as someone who is perceived as likeable and interesting by people who do not know her well---but is perceived as manipulative and vicious by those who do. It is a remarkable feat of acting because, while we as viewers are always aware of Frances' monstrosity, we can see why a good many of those around her are not, at least not immediately. The film contains a good many flashbacks and flashforwards and plays with time as if it were a deck of cards, but Remick provides a consistency that gives everything a remarkable cohesion.NUTCRACKER, which is on three DVDs, has no extras of any kind---it doesn't even have chapter headings---but the visual and sound elements are very good, especially for a television movie made over twenty-five years ago. Strongly recommended.GFT Amazon Reviewer

i just watched this miniseries this afternoon and i was totally amazed. Lee Remick should have won the emmy cause i can not think of another performance from that year that was better in 1987(maybe farrah fawcett in poor little rich girl but then it would need to be a tie)it's a chilling experience about the craziest family you'll never forget. get this movie you won't be sorry.

This film was hard to watch. This could be the flaw in the way it was written, directed or acted, but more subtlety would've made it more believable. It's based on fact, about a woman who is very disturbed mentally. It begins with a scene from her babyhood that's excruciating. She cries and cries incessantly, despite all efforts to soothe her. Her siblings and parents are gathered around her crib. Her tearful mother leads them in a cloying song, drowned out by her wailing, and the scene seems to go on forever. It's a bit like a horror film. As an adult she is always yelling in a shrill annoying voice and attacking those who've inadvertently set her off. These scenes too go on and on and on. We get the point already. As played, it's hard to believe anyone around her would've stayed around her once witnessing one of these all too frequent rampages, let alone married her and had children with her, no matter how charming she could be when she wanted to be. I had to watch it in installments to find out what happened. If I hadn't purchased it I would have ejected it early on and sent it back.

EXCELLENT