The opening credit that “I Love You to Death” is “based on a true story” becomes a startling piece of information as the film unspools its farcical scenario of the simple, devoted Rosalie, played with unfamiliar anguish by comedienne Tracey Ullman, trying ineptly to arrange the murder of her philandering Joey, the movie version of Tony played by a broadly Italianate Kevin Kline. I wake up some mornings with the most extreme thoughts, either good or bad.”Ĭomedies about adultery are almost as old as drama, and murder plots based on adultery have a long tradition in Hollywood running right up through Kasdan’s own 1981 film “Body Heat” and on to “Fatal Attraction.” But finding humor in an offended spouse’s actual murder attempt is relatively unexplored territory-and for good reason, some would say, in a society where rising statistics of domestic violence are no laughing matter. “The potential is there, I think, for all of us to act in extreme ways. “This is a story about extreme behavior,” Kasdan said. The two are living together happily once again.
“He was so full of life, you couldn’t kill him,” said Lawrence Kasdan, the film director, who has made an improbable new comedy, “I Love You to Death,” based on Tony’s and Frances’ romantic troubles, now patched up since Tony recovered from his wounds and Frances was released from prison. He lay in bed unattended for four days with two bullets in him (another of his wife’s friends tried to help by shooting him in the head), and he still didn’t die.
“A body can only take so much,” Frances explained.Īfter failing in attempts to blow Tony up in his car and ambush him with a baseball bat (the bomb didn’t go off and he chased the bat-wielding assailant away), she hired two amateur hit men, who for $500 put a bullet in Tony’s chest after Frances first subdued him by spiking his chicken soup with sleeping pills.īut Tony didn’t die. Tony was cheating on her pretty much around the clock, and girls were starting to call the house. It was an impulsive decision, Frances said later, but not a capricious one.
In 1983, Frances Toto, a mother of four living in Allentown, Pa., and married to Tony Toto, a local pizza shop owner, decided to have her husband bumped off.