HALLMARK Channel has found a nice niche for itself in appealing to women over 40 – a group too long relegated to the shadows, as far as advertisers are concerned. And that’s all because someone in the 1960s decided that women over 40 don’t try or buy new products. Right.
Hallmark has figured out two things: One, these women comprise a huge consumer group who do, in fact, try and buy, and two, women over 40 (and their men) tend to go out to dinner/movies/you name it more often during the week than Saturday nights.
So, the channel is hell-bent on creating as many original Saturday night movies as they can.
Enter their latest, “Ladies of the House,” a sob-sister story starring every 1970s star they could dig up. (Not literally.) And while it’s, yes, cornier than Kansas in August, it’s also a joy to watch these pros pull out the stops and make even mediocre material fly.
The plot concerns three women at or past retirement age – Rose (Florence Henderson), Elizabeth (Donna Mills) and Birdie (Pam Grier) – who take up a challenge by their pastor to get a rundown house back into some kind of shape so it can be sold. The profits would go to keeping a daycare center open.
Like I said, corny.
The ladies take on the challenge and decide to renovate the dump completely on their own.
The broken down house and the renovation of it becomes a metaphor for their lives.
Rose finds out that her perfectly wonderful husband, Frank (Lance Henriksen), has cancer; Elizabeth, married to a emotionally battering plastic surgeon (Gordon Thomson), has to face the fact that he’s also a cheater; and Birdie must figure out what to do about her newly-retired husband (Richard Roundtree) who is constantly underfoot.
Some of the dialogue is even worse than some of the old-fashioned ideas the writer puts forth about how men think about women, but with the bad comes some genuinely fine acting – most especially by Henderson and Henriksen. Their scenes together are so poignant and so truthful that ladies of a certain age all over the country will be throwing themselves out the window – or at least crying into their beer. Yes, advertisers -women over 40 don’t just drink tea. They drink beer and the tea tends to be of the Long Island Iced variety.