Susan Granger’s review of “If I Didn’t Care” (Artistic License Films)
Homicide in the Hamptons. It happens – all too frequently, it seems, in this low-budget noir/thriller that begins with a murder. Who’s the victim? Who are the perpetrators?
The intriguing drama revolves around a philandering, duplicitous househusband, Davis Meyers (Bill Sage), whose career-propelled wife (Noelle Beck) commutes via the ubiquitous Hampton jitney to Manhattan, leaving him to hawk wishful real estate ‘deals’ on his cellphone and walk the beach with their basset hound, schmoozing with the local police investigator Linus (Roy Scheider, channeling “Columbo”) who’s also into walking his dog. While dawdling during the off-season at a local watering hole with an ambitious, available blonde, Hadley (Susie Misner), Davis and the dame cook up a plan to murder his wealthy wife – a sleazy scheme that goes tragically awry.
Filmmaking brothers Benjamin and Orson Cummings capture not only the picturesque setting of the exclusive Long Island resort community but also the paranoia of privileged people with far too much free time coupled with an acute awareness of the ‘easy money’ that’s slipping through their hands. Seizing the opportunity, they’ve utilized familiar Hamptons landmarks (Barrister’s, Shippy’s, Suki Zuki) and enlisted the considerable talents local residents – Roy Scheider, Noelle Beck and Ronald Guttman – who artfully propel the predictably ‘noir’ plot to its all-too-abrupt conclusion. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “If I Didn’t Care” is an unsettling, suspenseful 6.
As a side note, the song “If I Didn’t Care,” which made the Inkspots internationally famous, was the first solo music-and-lyrics effort of now-95 year-old Jack Lawrence, a resident of West Redding, Connecticut; his hit parade includes “Tenderly,” “Sleepy Lagoon,” “Linda,” “Beyond the Sea,” “All or Nothing At All” and “What Will I Tell My Heart?”
