Blind Faith

I grew up with the Marshall family. We went to elementary school, middle school, high school east and mass at St.Joe's every Sunday. I knew John pretty well and he was always a sweetie and really funny. My older siblings new the older boys better then I. The movie was good. I feel bad for John, Chris and Roby though. The father was a very mean man and Mrs. Marshall was never nice to us either. God rest her soul. I think Joanna Kerns is a great actress but I cannot remember Maria being so nice. She was very rude to my Mother on one occasion and my Mother cried for days. I will never forget that. I hope the boys do not read this but it is true. They where in fact the richest family in my school and back in the 70's and 80's they seemed to be very well off. I remember there home and it was beautiful. To bad the parents looked down on people that where not on there social status.

I voted this 7/10 because I like made for TV true crime movies, but it has its flaws.

It's about the murder of Maria Marshall (Joanna Kerns) in 1984 at a rest stop along the Garden State Parkway in New Jersey where her husband, Rob Marshall (Robert Urich), has stopped to examine a tire that he thinks is going flat. He is hit in the head by an assailant. She is shot in the back. The motive appears to be robbery though nothing was taken.

I just rewatched "Echoes In the Darkness", and that true crime film was by far the better made and more suspenseful film with much smarter villains. I don't really blame the production that much as the widowed husband is beyond goofy and stupid. You can only do so much with a true crime film if you have an uninspiring villain. After his wife is murdered, all Rob Marshall can talk about is Felice Richmond (Robin Strasser) with whom he was having an affair and was planning to marry after he left his wife. He seems to openly pine away for Felice MUCH more than he is mourning his wife, which makes him unlikeable to his friends and alienates his grown sons. Then there is the 1.5 million dollars in life insurance he just recently took out on his wife and his own mounting money problems. 1.5 million dollars would be about five million dollars in 2025. Complications and suspicions ensue.

The movie tries to drag out the proceedings longer than needed. There is an entire scene about the Marshall's 20th wedding anniversary, two years before the murder, that makes the family and the marriage seem quite happy. Was this the true state of things, or was this just a mirage? It's never clearly stated.

Then there is just the overall rather weird tone of the film. The first half of the film takes on an oddly spiritual tone while overdoing the deifying of the victim.

There's lots of acting talent on the screen, including an early performance by Johnny Galecki of Roseanne and Big Bang Theory fame. Dennis Farina takes on an unusual straight-arrow role as the prosecutor.

If you like true crime I think you'll like this, but you may have the same small complaints about the production that I had.

This mini-series is one of my personal favorites. It was one of the first to show New Jersey not as gang-related or as urban but suburban Ocean County in Toms River, New Jersey. Joanna Kerns does a beautiful job playing the mother and the late Robert Urich does an equally superb job playing the father. The boys were played exceptionally well in despite of the growing suspicion of the father's involvement and his obvious guilt. He is still on New Jersey's death row and will never get executed in the state. I remember when I first watched this mini-series on television and later I watched it on lifetime. The mini-series depicts the story of a family who should have had it all only to blow up in the face of Mr. Marshall who arranged his wife's murder to collect insurance money. You can't forget Dennis Farina as the prosecutor in the role, Doris Roberts who plays the loving blinded older woman who helps with the boys, and Robin Strasser does a superb job playing the mistress who finally helps bring down Marshall. I am not saying that she wasn't guilty but you know that you can't judge somebody.

Actually, I found this movie to be very good. Granted, it was long but on a snowy Saturday afternoon it was very entertaining. I say this because I think the acting was excellent. Robert Urich did a fantastic job as the self-centered father. The casting for all the characters was also very good It was intriguing how the whole story unfolded and kept me very interested. Also, I thought it was very important to show how the mother's death (and their father's possible involvement)effected the sons. It is one thing to deal with the death of your mother but to then have your father implicated in her death was done meticulously. The interaction among the three brothers was very interesting. I would definitely recommend this movie.

This is a well-acted and absorbing drama, with appealing and talented actors. The piano soundtrack by Laurence Rosenthal was absolutely beautiful -- poignant and evocative. Robert Urich was very good as the weak and self-absorbed husband, and everybody in the movie was watchable, really. To me, the most tragic thing about the aftermath of Maria Marshall's murder was that her sons couldn't even look back on happy memories for comfort. In one scene, the boys are watching some old home movies of their parents and themselves when they were just toddlers. Their mother is laughing and playing with them in the swimming pool, while the father is roughhousing with them and laughing into the camera. But these sweet scenes are fractured by the knowledge that the mother they loved so much was murdered by their father, and they can no longer watch them with a normal feeling of nostalgia, or look back in sentimental memory at their family life.