By Erin Free
In this regular column, we drag forgotten made-for-TV movies out of the vault and into the light. This week: the 1988 drama Scandal In A Small Town, starring Raquel Welch, Christa Denton, Ronny Cox and Robin Gammell.
In the excellent new documentary I Am Raquel Welch (available to stream on SBS On Demand), director Olivia Cheng offers a rich, punchy portrait of the eponymous screen icon. While the star’s extraordinary beauty and voluble sex appeal were what put her on the map, the doco shows that Welch was a lot more than just a goddess-like body with a face to match – she was also a talented, highly underrated actress who took control of her own destiny by moving into producing. From behind the scenes, Welch shifted the trajectory of her career, moving from colourful cinematic bon-bons like 1967’s Fathom and 1966’s One Million Years BC to more layered films like 1972’s Kansas City Bomber, 1973’s The Three Musketeers and 1976’s Mother, Jugs & Speed.
Raquel Welch was also a tenacious fighter, famously suing major studio MGM for breach of contract when they fired her without true cause (the studio replaced Welch with the younger and cheaper Debra Winger) from the 1982 adaptation of John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row. Welch won the court case but effectively killer her Hollywood career in the process. She was one of the first actresses to go after the movie business’s power elite in a highly public manner, and in a town as deeply misogynist as Hollywood, Welch was quickly branded as “difficult”, a label nothing less than anathema to most directors and producers. “I just wanted to clear my reputation and get back to my work, my work in movies,” Welch said after the court case, but in Hollywood, she was well and truly (and horribly unjustly) done.
Hollywood’s loss, however, was Broadway’s gain, with Welch reinventing herself as a stage actress. Her big screen blackballing was also television’s gain, with the pop culture icon finding a surprisingly comfortable home on the small screen. Though she’d made her telemovie debut in 1980 with the impressive Native-American saga The Legend Of Walks Far Woman, Welch really embraced the form after her career-battering court case. In the likes of 1987’s Right To Die, 1989’s Trouble In Paradise (a Queensland-shot lark in which she’s shipwrecked with Jack Thompson!), 1993’s Tainted Blood and Torch Song, Welch was gifted dramatic and comedic roles that she could really sink her teeth into.
Welch’s best telemovie, however, is arguably 1988’s Scandal In A Small Town, partly because of its solid, ambitious story, but also because it effectively utilises Welch’s striking beauty rather than attempting to suppress it. Just as Julia Roberts was in 2000’s Erin Brockovich, Welch is a blowsy, confident, tough-talking single mother who can handle herself in pretty much any situation. And also like Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich, Welch finds herself embroiled in an often vicious court case when she opts to take a moral stand rather than doing the easy thing and remaining quiet.
Unfortunately sporting the mid-length perm that came to define the 1980s for her, Welch is Leda Beth Vincent, a widow, single mother and cocktail waitress in the small southern town of Shiloh whose moral compass is far more firmly fixed than her good-time-girl reputation might suggest. As adept at brushing off drunks as Lynda Carter in Hotline, Leda Beth can tolerate a lot, but when her teenage daughter Julie (Christa Denton makes a very good fist of it here) starts telling her about what she’s being taught in history class, the beautiful and self-possessed cocktail waitress is decidedly unhappy.
According to Julie, her high school’s popular, highly regarded history teacher George Baker (Ronny Cox is so smug, sexist and superior that he practically demands a good slapping) has been dropping a series of questionable lessons on his young students, telling them that Jewish people started WW2, assassinated Abraham Lincoln, are behind the impending closure of the town’s sawmill, are controlling the planet’s finances, and are basically responsible for everything wrong with the world. Mr. Baker may as well be teaching his classes in jackboots or from under a white sheet, but his lesson plan goes unnoticed by his dim, disinterested superiors at the high school, who just seem happy that his students are paying attention and not causing trouble.
Unlike the parents of the other students, Leda Beth is understandably upset that her daughter is being turned into a Nazi. Pretty much out on her own, Leda Beth seeks the council of a nearby college professor (the very likeable Robin Gammell) and eventually takes Shiloh’s board of education to court over Baker’s creepy teachings at great cost to both herself and Julie. The not-so-good denizens of Shiloh violently try to persuade Leda Beth to back off, and when she doesn’t, the single-mother-with-a-reputation is crucified in court (Peter Van Norden is fantastic as a truly despicable and near-feral lawyer) when her character is called into question.
Strongly directed by Unsung Auteur Anthony Page (The Lady Vanishes, Absolution) and punchily written by Robert J. Avrech (who penned Brian De Palma’s Body Double), Scandal In A Small Town certainly dips into the melodramatic at times, but it’s wholly entertaining from beginning to end. Raquel Welch is at her charming, feisty, but still modest best, winningly playing Leda Beth as a decent woman just trying to get by. Natural and unaffected, Welch looks just as at home in the boozy honkytonk where Leda Beth works as she does in the film’s domestic scenes with her daughter, and is especially moving in the various sequences where she’s excoriated by Shiloh’s bigots for her past indiscretions.
As well as being a highly enjoyable showcase for the often unsung talents of the late and sorely missed Raquel Welch, and the best of her telemovies, Scandal In A Small Town is also a quiet but forcefully stated redress to the insidious nature of antisemitism, and how easily it can fester and spread if left unchecked. Despite Raquel’s very 1980s perm, that makes Scandal In A Small Town prescient indeed…
Availability: Scandal In A Small Town is easy to find online in a fairly decent presentation taken from an old VHS recording…complete with “Hey, can someone adjust the tracking?” tape rolls.
If you enjoyed this review, check out our other vintage telemovies Victims For Victims: The Theresa Saldana Story, The Seduction Of Gina, Blue Murder, The Brotherhood Of Justice, The Wave, The California Kid, The Cracker Factory, Night Terror, Inmates: A Love Story, The Shadow Riders, CHiPs: Roller Disco, Dawn: Portrait Of A Teenage Runaway, Young Love, First Love, Escape From Bogen County, The Death Squad, Hit Lady, Brian’s Song, The Defiant Ones, A Cry For Help, Trilogy Of Terror, Policewoman Centerfold, Smash-Up On Interstate 5, Something Evil, Savage, A Step Out Of Line, The Boy In The Plastic Bubble, The Dirty Dozen: Next Mission, A Very Brady Christmas, The Gladiator, Elvis, The Rat Pack, Silent Victory: The Kitty O’Neil Story, Terror Among Us, The Hanged Man, Hardcase, Charlie’s Angels: Angels In Vegas, Vanishing Point, To Heal A Nation, Fugitive Among Us, To Kill A Cop, Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, Police Story: A Chance To Live, Murder On Flight 502, Moon Of The Wolf, The Secret Night Caller, Cotton Candy, And The Band Played On, Gargoyles, Death Car On The Freeway, Short Walk To Daylight, Trapped, Hotline, Killdozer, The Jericho Mile, Mongo’s Back In Town and Tribes.
