Murder in a Small Town

Murder in a Small Town (1999)

A widowed theatre director moves to a small Connecticut town where he gets involved in solving the murder of a millionaire, who was the most despised man in town.

Date of release
1999-01-10
TMDB
6.2 / 10 (9)
Runtime
1h 32m
Genres
Mystery, TV Movie
Director
Joyce Chopra

Casting

Interesting facts

Murder in a Small Town is 1999 American television mystery crime thriller film produced and broadcast by A&E. The period film stars Gene Wilder as Larry "Cash" Carter, a stage director, theater manager, former actor, and unofficial consulting detective for the police department in 1930s Stamford, Connecticut. Wilder also co-wrote the film, which was the first A&E Original Movie. High ratings led A&E to plan a Cash Carter franchise. However, only one sequel, The Lady in Question (1999), was produced.

Production

"A&E wanted me to invent a character I'd like to play, an American, living in America. That's all," Gene Wilder said on the eve of the debut broadcast of Murder in a Small Town. "I said, 'I know exactly what you want – you don’t have to tell me.' I am their audience. I watch Sherlock Holmes, Inspector Morse, Cracker. I love a good mystery. I’d prefer to see a mystery to anything else."

"We heard through the grapevine that Gene really liked our mysteries and was interested in doing a mystery with us, so we jumped," said Brooke Bailey Johnson, executive vice president and general manager of A&E. "It was a great experience, a Vulcan mind-meld all the way, because we felt the same way about everything. He wrote the script, we loved it."

Wilder received an assurance that he could make as many of these films as he liked, on no set schedule, and he was given more than three months to write the script — a novelty in television.

"What also intrigued me, I could set my story in any period," Wilder said. "I don't belong in the 1990s. I get along OK, but I belong in another time, and I know it." Murder in a Small Town opens with Cash Carter as a member of a movie theater audience watching the climactic scene of the 1938 film Angels with Dirty Faces.

The script was written between January and April 1998. Wilder's writing partner was Gilbert Pearlman, his brother-in-law, a man with a varied career in promoting and producing theater, film and television.

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