Rating: - Had potential but in the end just another okay TV movie
I gave this movie three stars just because Virginia Madsen is an amazing actress to watch. She was well cast here, very believeable as Linda, a beautiful but unsuccessful housewife who longs for the good life, and goes slightly crazy in her longing. With her blond hair and arresting gaze, she is the focal point of the movie. Obviously the title suggests that. And she shines in her scenes, with a frighteningly cold, unremorseful attitude as she guns down a friend and neighbor and then frames it on her husband using the help of the rich husband of her friend. Yet strangely she is given top billing but not nearly as much screentime as she should have gotten.

Richard Thomas is believable but thoroughly boring as Linda's shocked husband Paul. He had no idea his sweet wife was capable of such atrocities. And he's right, she deserves to be put in her place, but the bottom line is we don't really care to watch him think his way out of incarceration, change the prosecuting attorney's mind with his innocence and purity, and finally get the better of his wife. We want to see her.

At the end of the movie there is an attempt to add some more interesting concepts, when Paul visits Linda in jail. After the visit, he says something about crying not for her but for the cheerleader he loved from a distance in high school (Linda when he first met her). That suggets a possibility that the film was not simply a typical murder-courtroom drama, but a glance at part of the human psyche, and a tale of how a sweet young cheerleader can turn out to be a prostitute and a murderer who craves money above all else.

The film doesn't have that much action, and it takes a long time to tell a predictable story, in a mundane way without much style. But in all Madsen's scenes we see a beatiful, complicated, ruthless woman from her expert portrayal, and thats enough reason to watch it. In the movie's final scene it should be her eyes that are the final zoomed in shot, not Thomas's.

Also: I don't know if this was based on a true story or not, but the message that appears at the end---that both Linda and her accomplice were executed for one count of murder, seems unbelievable.

Linda (1993)