Blood & Orchids review: An ’80s miniseries takes on the Massie Affair

The crime
David Stannard, a professor who wrote a book on the so-called “Massie Affair,” summarized it as neatly as possible for the Honolulu Advertiser some years ago, although it’s sprawling and messy no matter who’s trying to logline it. Part of why it’s still relevant nearly a century later is in the labeling of it as an “Affair,” which makes it sound breezy and scandalous, versus bruising and deeply divisive, BUT ANYWAY: Thalia Massie, the young and immature wife of a rising Navy officer, stormed out of a party one night in September of 1931, and when she reappeared, with a broken jaw and torn clothing, she claimed a group of Hawaiian men had assaulted her.

Something happened to Thalia Massie, but she couldn’t seem to settle on a single version of what befell her, and a jury declined to convict the accused – at which time her mother, Grace Fortescue, conspired with Thalia’s husband Thomas to enact vigilante justice. This led to the murder of Joseph Kahahawai, a boxer whose alibi boiled down to “but I was across the island attacking someone else” – and while the jury in that proceeding did convict Grace Fortescue and Thomas Massie of manslaughter, the territorial governor of Hawai’i commuted their ten-year sentences to one hour. They served it in his office (most accounts make sure to mention the allegation that champagne was also served); the Massies and Fortescue sailed for California several days later along with Fortescue’s attorney, one Clarence Darrow.

…You see what I mean with the sprawl. 

The story
1986’s Blood & Orchids is a real time capsule, and I don’t mean of the early thirties in Hawai’i, already tense thanks to, let’s face it, American occupation – although the two-parter did get an Emmy nod for costuming. I mean of how the business of true crime got done in the TV monoculture nearly 40 years ago. 

B&O is based on the novel by Norman Katkov, who also wrote the teleplay and who rooted his book in the Massie case, adding noir elements and a fictional police captain, Curt Maddox (Kris Kristofferson). Katkov also changed some timelines and, as Harold Schechter notes in Ripped from the Headlines!, makes the Thalia Massie analog, Hester (Madeleine Stowe), more sympathetic – all changes that make sense in terms of “packaging” a complex and ugly chapter in criminal-justice history for a wider audience. 

Nothing is dumbed down or overly elided, either. The Massie Affair is a nasty tangle of capital-I Issues that you still see all over the genre today: victim-blaming, perfect-victim syndrome, and a general failure to believe women; institutional bias; the inability of the colonized to give consent or get justice; that privilege’s “truth” is the only one. Katkov’s script doesn’t back down from any of that – if anything, it’s over-explained, though it’s nothing out of the ordinary for the time – and it’s well cast to underline those points, as with the agreeable-looking Richard Dysart of L.A. Law as a sugar-plantation owner who expects the locals (including the constabulary) to obey orders, and Jane Alexander (Law & Order Mothership’s go-to Rose Kennedy stand-in) as the willfully brittle Grace Fortescue analog. 

Stowe as Hester is not given enough to do, but makes a meal of it without chewing the scenery, and having wisely sidestepped scrutiny of the IRL Darrow by renaming him Walter Bergman, the production also wisely slots José Ferrer in the part. He’s the perfect mix of courtly and sly, and you don’t have to think too hard about how compromised the character is…which is good, because, as I said, B&O is making its best attempt at noir for a network miniseries, which means everyone is compromised, plus Bergman’s much younger wife (Sean Young) is boning Maddox, and Maddox is the putative protagonist…and that’s also fine! Young is really watchable and restrained, hinting at a fascinating story for her character, and Kristofferson – generally, too much weapon for this story’s fight, I would say, but very good and foxy as hell – is amazing in the scene where he and Young’s Leonore first meet. He’s flirting with Leonore, embarrassed by it, and also unable to stop; it’s about a power of ten more nuance than the scene needs and it’s fascinating.

Not all the acting is as compelling, or…even adequate, at times (a lot of the peeps on the movie’s IMDb page have nothing else on their credits list but this, Hawaii 5-0, and Magnum PI episodes; I’ll just leave it at that), but mostly it’s very good. The pacing is not just fine for the era but objectively fine – none of those obvious “let’s follow the car allllll the way up to the house to time out the segment” shots – and the script is clearly on the right side of history. The question is whether that’s enough reason to invest three hours of your life, even if the movie’s available for free on YouTube,

and while it’s a closer call than I’d have anticipated, the answer’s still no. It is worthwhile to think about the fact that this property, better done and less lurid than many of its peers, has vanished below the horizon almost completely (until I got to the entry for it in Ripped, I’d never heard of it), and about why that might be – why, perhaps, the Massie Affair itself is no longer as compelling a topic, and why the old-school sweeps-period network miniseries hasn’t come back into vogue. (Or why Kristofferson might have wound up doing a lot more TV movies after Heaven’s Gate bombed, not for nothing.) 

But you can think about those things without watching Blood & Orchids yourself, because it’s not true crime worth your time. For more on the case, you can look at Wikipedia or read Bill James’s capsule overview in Popular Crime; you can watch the American Experience episode on the case (I talked about it on the podcast back in the day); I sold the Stannard recently – finally; it was one of my longest-“tenured” books at the shop – but I do have another one in stock (and you do get a discount with code ExBlurred, if you haven’t used it already!).