Name that Lifetime movie!

April 29, 2004 9:19 AM

Want to help with an obscure Movie/TV quote that's slowly driving me mad? [more inside, honest]

I'm pretty hazy on it, but it came to me while watching "The Mothman Prophecies" and I can't just let it go. There are two principal people in the scene, we'll call them Person 1 and Person 2, who is a woman, I think. The scene is a questioning of some sort. Person 1 shows a picture to Person 2, and the picture is her husband, long deceased, and Person 2 starts crying. Person 1 apologizes but Person 2 says something to the effect of "No, it's okay, I just didn't expect to see him today."

It seems to me like it might be from an episode of CSI, but I might also have made it up (in which case I'm going to use it in a story or something, because I kind of like it)

posted by Monster_Zero to media & arts (14 comments total)

It seems like a fairly generic situation, but on reading your description I have some recollection of the scene. I'm just as stymied as to the source, though. I've had a similar case of a scene from TV etched into my memory - it involves detectives entering a darkened room completely aglow in luminol (I think that's what it's called - the stuff that makes blood traces glow in the dark), to a cartoonish degree. Anyone have any idea where I might have seen this (It might be a generic 'TV crime show' device...)?
posted by adamkempa at 10:02 AM on April 29, 2004

Sounds like Bobby Ewing to me. But it's not.
posted by loquax at 10:04 AM on April 29, 2004

Adam, any more details? Sounds vaguely like a scene from the Denzel Washington flick The Bone Collector.

Monster_Zero, yours also sounds familiar but.. not coming to me.
posted by dobbs at 10:27 AM on April 29, 2004

Reminds me of a 2002 episode of Law and Order called "The Ring." There are a number of times when the police show someone a picture/belonging of someone who they thought died in the WTC. Except the "someone" is female, not male. I think either her fiance or roommate or mother says something along the lines of "It's all right, I just wasn't expecting to see her today." Of course, it might just be a regular police procedural device. I don't watch many cop shows, though, so it stuck in my head.
posted by jbrjake at 12:26 PM on April 29, 2004

I was going to say Law and Order, but sarcastically. I've seen that episode though and it does ring a bell.
posted by whoshotwho at 12:34 PM on April 29, 2004

Rumor is Google's in the process of indexing all the closed captioning from every DVD. Don't know if they're doing the same thing with television.
posted by gramcracker at 1:08 PM on April 29, 2004

Well, thank you very much. That sounds sooo familiar and I am now going nuts as well. In my recollection, it's the husband who has lost his wife though. And I keep thinking that it's Jeff Bridges. But it's not...grrr
posted by sre71 at 1:15 PM on April 29, 2004

sre71, you could be right about it being the other way 'round from what I said, now that you mention it.

As for Law and Order, it seems unlikely because I don't follow the show, but on the other hand I may have paused on it while surfing channels. I'll try to hunt down the episode you mentioned, jbrjake.
posted by Monster_Zero at 2:20 PM on April 29, 2004

Dobbs -
I saw the bone collector - thats' not it.
This was on TV somewhere in the 1988-1992 timeframe. It was probably a cop show of some sort, maybe a movie of the week. I just have a ridiculously vivid memory of them flicking off the lights and the walls, bed just covered in glowing green. Probably too vague. Thanks though!
posted by adamkempa at 4:18 PM on April 29, 2004

I got it!

The movie is 'Smoke' and the scene is William Hurt leafing through Harvey Keitel's photo album (Keitel's character takes a photo every morning right outside the doorway of his smoke shop for 20+ years) and he comes across the photo of his dead wife, who happened to be passing by. He starts crying, Keitel attempts to comfort him and Hurt says exactly what you said he said.

Sleep well.
posted by sre71 at 5:10 PM on April 29, 2004

adamkempa: I know the movie you're talking about, but I can't remember the name. It was a Lifetime movie, about a woman who went missing, and it was thought that her husband did it. The missing woman's family was trying to get custody of her baby, or something, and the husband's family thought they were crazy for suggesting that he'd murdered her. Then the police searched the house, sprayed the luminol on everything in the master bedroom, and the husband's parents were sleeping in there so they turned the lights off, and blam, the room lit up. If I recall correctly, he killed her with a dumbbell.

But I can't for the life of me remember what the name of that movie is!
posted by bedhead at 6:43 PM on April 29, 2004

Found it!

In A Child's Name, starring Valerie Bertinelli.
posted by bedhead at 6:45 PM on April 29, 2004

Wow Bedhead, your description matches my memory exactly, so that must be it. Looks like it's airing on May 30th, so I'll have to tivo it and see. Thanks a lot!
posted by adamkempa at 8:45 PM on April 29, 2004

Rockin'! Thanks!
posted by Monster_Zero at 9:07 PM on April 29, 2004