She Married a Dead Man and Boy, Was He Stiff! But Seriously, Folks...

Cornell Woolrich was one of the most memorable mystery writers I ever read, but I would hardly argue that he is the Frank Capra of American mystery writers. He tended to write about people who were either doomed or trapped, and only a few of his novels had anything close to a happy ending. His novel I Married a Dead Man was very easily one of his darkest books. So naturally when it came time for HBO to make a movie out of it back in 1996, they made it into a romantic comedy.

Stop and think about that. A dark mystery novel with a downbeat ending...gets turned into a romantic comedy. Mrs. Winterbourne, to be exact. (At least they had the good grace to change the title.)

The result was not quite as bad as I feared, but it's nothing to write home about, either. Ricki Lake played Connie Doyle, a teenage runaway who got impregnated out of wedlock by the wrong guy and then discovered that the guy did not love her as much as she thought. She ended up alone and homeless and spent her last dime on a train trip to her father's house. The train had an accident, two people who befriended her got killed, and the movie was off on its way to the perfect feel-good ending.

To be fair, it is hard to expect rom-com audiences to put up with the sort of dark plot twists that Woolrich liked to put in his novels. But then that is why they were not meant to be rom-coms.

Oh, well. At least Shirley MacLaine and Brendan Fraser got to earn a paycheck.

I eagerly await the inevitable musical comedy adaptation of The Bride Wore Black...