TV REVIEWS : ‘Matrimony’ in Chicago: Potent Drama

In the early 1980s, Chicago’s finest were found to be riddled with corruption in a headline-making police scandal that began with a murder cover-up and stretched serpentine-like from cops on the beat to downtown magistrates to the door of the police chief himself.

NBC’s gripping four-hour miniseries “Deadly Matrimony” (at 9 p.m. Sunday and Monday on Channels 4, 36 and 39) unpeels the layers of venality that poisoned Chicago’s South Side until a lone and dogged police sergeant named Jack Reed (Brian Dennehy) uncovered enough evidence to throw the bums in jail.

Central to the movie’s suspense is the gruesome discovery, eerily portrayed over the opening credits, of a woman’s body in the trunk of a convertible that’s just been fished out of a shipping canal after six months under water. In a deft flashback, director John Korty and writer Andrew Laskos then curl the drama three years back, where we meet the victim (Embeth Davidtz) in the full bloom of her beauty and innocence.

Swept off her feet by a powerful, dashing attorney (Treat Williams) whose corrupt fiefdom extends from the mob to the police to the judicial system, she blindly embarks on a fairy-tale marriage with a prince who turns into a frog--a possessive, abusive, adulterous, murderous frog.

The wife (whose growing terror hardly dims Davidtz’s glimmering looks) flees to freedom. But her new-found independence and salvaging, clandestine affair with a college professor (Terry Kinney) costs her her life.

Based on the glamorous Chicago couple Alan and Dianne Masters, the terrifying domestic story is dramatically counterpointed by the skepticism of a streetwise lawman whose lonely investigative vigil is both personal and heroic (the characteristically gritty, blue-collar Dennehy).

The production gathers steam from hour to hour, has flavorful locations (it was shot in Toronto) and is fleshed out with dimensional characters (including Lois Smith as the victim’s blind mother and Susan Ruttan as the sergeant’s supportive, albeit impatient, wife).