At the time am I writing this, there is a unusual social movement on the ascendance and that is this “tradwives” thing. It claims be all about women, but it sure looks like something that is only encouraging women to bring themselves down by returning to traditional roles and homemakers and child bearers. I suspected something weird was in the air when I learned how popular Amish romance novels were becoming.
I get the feeling Lindsay Wagner’s character in 1979’s The Two Worlds of Jennie Logan would be all for this. She and husband Alan Feldstein buy this ginormous old house that is supposedly an hour’s commute from New York City, but which is clearly somewhere in southern California. It is the type of house used on occasion for either period films or horror. It is similar to the house used in Phantasm and was, in fact, used for the fourth installment of that series.
She feels an intense connection to the place even while the real estate agent is showing them around. Touching the walls, she laments how anybody could have painted the beautiful wood she somehow knows lies beneath the latex covering. She starts to go up into the attic and the agent tells her not to bother, that there’s just a bunch of old crap up there. This stops her in her tracks, while I would have charged right up there to see what the man was hiding. My guess is a bunch of mannequins and stuffed animals with photocopies of the terrifying visage of Phyllis Diller stapled to the face of each one, the agent’s own personal harem of fuckdolls.
Actually, there will turn out to be only one mannequin up there and it is faceless. This old-timey wire-frame bust is wearing an antique white dress. Wagner is instantly smitten with it (The dress, not the bust, you weirdo). When she puts it on, she gets a loud ringing sound in her ears and it appears she gets an intense pain at the base of the back of her neck on the right side. Then she finds herself in the previous century, so it seems time travel can be accomplished by a Vulcan neck pinch from an invisible person.
In the past, she encounters a widowed painter played by Marc Singer. The initial encounters are brief, with him thinking she is the ghost of his dead wife. As each visit to the past gets longer, Wagner finds herself falling in love with the man. She will then try spare him the fate revealed by research she does in the future. Wait, present. No, her future present. Screw it, let’s move on before this gets to be like the title of The Moody Blues’s Days of Future Passed.
Feldstein is initially incredulous over his wife’s accounts of time travelling, then jealous, as it becomes obvious she is having an affair with a long-dead man. It is doubtlessly difficult to complete with the dead. Also, there is a bit of karmic retribution, as Feldstein had a one-night stand of which he repeatedly informs Wagner “meant nothing”. Wow, dude, so you didn’t even cheat on your wife with somebody you regard in any way equal or superior to her, thus making Wagner less than nothing in your esteem.
It might help Feldstein make amends if he would wear a shirt more often and not walk around with his chest puffed out like a highland gorilla declaring its alpha male supremacy. He could at least put one on when washing his deeply brown car. Ah, the 70’s, when brown was one of the most popular colors for autos. Believe me, they were ubiquitous.
One could say Wagner is torn between two worlds, though it is obvious she pines for, and will end up in, the past. In the present, she has friends who seem to spend every weekend on Fire Island—which I found odd, as it is my understanding that has been a popular gay destination since the middle of the 20th century. In the past, she has Singer, though she also has to deal with the strong jealousy of Linda Gray, as the sister of Singer’s deceased spouse and who wants to fill dead sister’s lacy shoes (but not with butterscotch pudding, which confirms how thoroughly I have failed to understand that period).
There was an element of the time travel device which nagged me for most of the runtime and that was wondering what happens to Wagner in the present while she’s back in time and making time with Singer. Does she disappear for the same amount of time she was in the past? Does she come back to the same moment, with no time elapsing? This is finally answered in a way at the end, and I found the answer only led me to more annoying questions.
I found the plot to be too insubstantial to support the runtime of a little over an hour and a half. Still, the cast fares pretty well for what is basically a soap opera. I believed Wagner as the title character. Feldstein is a one-dimensional ass, and is the most thankless of the roles here. Similarly, Gray’s character has barely any nuances, except for a startling turn when she is shown as greatly aged, courtesy of effective make-up from Stan Winston. It is strange to see Marc Singer in something that isn’t action oriented. I admire his attempt to increasing his range by doing this project, yet I couldn’t help but think of a football player in a school play who hopes his teammates in the audience won’t rib him too harshly afterwards.
The Two Worlds of Jennie Logan isn’t bad for what it is, and this made-for-TV movie could even pass for an independent film of the time. That doesn’t mean it is particularly good, and I only recommend it for those who are looking for more cinema in the vein of the following year’s Somewhere In Time. Something about this telefilm feels like many missed opportunities, though I would be hard-pressed to say what those are. I know one thing, at least, Gray had way too many opportunities to make a catty aside speculating whether Wagner owned more than one dress.
Dir: Frank De Felitta
Starring Lindsay Wagner, Marc Singer, Alan Feinstein
Watched on Imprint Australia blu-ray (region-free)