"While My Pretty One Sleeps" is a 1997 film based on the book of the same name by Mary Higgins Clark. Unlike the other reviewer on this site, I had a hard time believing it was made in 1997 because I thought Connie Sellecca looked pretty much the same - drop dead gorgeous. I was certainly not put off by what her age was supposed to be, nor did I think that she and her father looked the same age.
Anyway, produced by Grosso-Jacobsen, who always use that same Psycho-type music, this is a pretty good mystery, but because I read the book, I didn't have the surprise element perhaps others will have. Sellecca plays Neeve Kearny, whose father (Beau Starr) put away a mobster 20 years earlier. The mobster, Nick Sepetti (Frank Pellegrino), as he's leaving the courtroom vaguely threatens Kearney's wife and daughter. Later, his wife is murdered while jogging in the park. Kearny goes to Nick's parole hearing every time he comes up and makes sure he stays in for 20 years. The day he's released, Kearney, now retired, gets a call threatening his daughter, now a successful designer.
It turns out there are more suspects, as Neeve is helping to bring down a designer who has his clothes made in sweat shops. She's working with a journalist (Patricia Gage) and a TV reporter (the late Simon McCorkindale). When there's another murder, that shakes things up.
It's a good story, given the old Grosso-Jacobson touch with one of their regular directors, Jorge Montesi. There were a couple of things that didn't make sense, that were done strictly for convenience; one was the McCorkindale character not insisting on walking his date to the door of her apartment building, cold or not; another is Sellecca jogging alone in Central Park after what happened to her mother - not sure I'd be repeating that.
Sellecca and McCorkindale are good, as are a few others, notably Richard Monette, the head of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Canada, who played Uncle Sal. Some, like Ethel's ex-husband and his new wife, were dreadful.
Enjoyable. Check out the fashion show in the film - could they spare it.
