Mr. Blue indeed: Brian Dennehy and Enron let us down. (Editorial).

I have always thought of Brian Dennehy as a good, solid actor who fared best when he portrayed a character caught between his sense of conscience and his sense of duty. Think of the sheriff in Rambo or even the district attorney in The Burden of Proof. A quick Internet search provides a list of some 177 titles in which he has appeared, often as cop, sheriff, or marshal.

But it was a different Brian Dennehy who played a character called Mr. Blue in a recently aired made for television movie called The Crooked E. Of his 177 film roles, Dennehy apparently took some parts not for the art, but for the paycheck. The Mr. Blue role was one of the latter.

Certainly, the scriptwriters didn't help, but Dennehy hammed it up as Mr. Blue, an amoral character interested only in money. Mr. Blue faced no crisis of conscience in the film, not even when he confesses knowledge of an Enron subsidiary's faulty installation of a gas pipeline. During the movie's pedantic final scenes, Blue admits he simply took his check and shut up, even though the pipeline would later explode and kill or injure dozens.

I've not suddenly become a movie critic. But as The Crooked E will serve to define the Enron scandal for much of the general public because it is the first popular portrayal of the company's downfall, I watched the movie. I had read reviews that credited the film's producers and director Penelope Spheeris with making sense of a very complicated topic. I hoped the Tony Award winning Brian Dennehy was in the movie, and not the hack who appeared in Three's Company Revisited.

So let me say that the reviewers were wrong. ...