Tuesday Knight topless in Who Killed the Baby Jesus? (1992) – and the rest of her career

I suppose I never would have known about this film if not for the fact that I got interested in Douglas Borghi, the man who wrote a 1990 script that seemed very similar to Malice, a 1993 film penned by future heavyweights Aaron Sorkin and Scott Frank. Borghi was never credited in the later film, but there were no lawsuits or appeals to the Writers’ Guild, as far as I know. That was odd, but odder still, Borghi seemed to have had a decent career going, then disappeared from the industry in 1995, never to return. (Discussed here.)

Who Killed the Baby Jesus? is a twisty heist film, obviously made with a modest budget.

A young drifter/criminal for hire stumbles upon a mother/daughter crime team. The mother and her beautiful young daughter are planning a jewelry heist against a gang of smugglers, and they need the drifter for muscle. He begins to have a romantic relationship with the daughter which complicates the caper because the mother is a psychopath who trusts nobody. As the crime plot progresses, the psychosis and homicidal tendencies of the mother become increasingly pronounced. There is a kidnapping, several dark betrayals, and a whole lot of murders before this story comes to its twist ending.

There has been no HD issue of this film and the quality of the available versions is dreadful, but the movie itself is completely competent. The limited budget meant that the action set-pieces had to be filmed with more suggestion than action, but the writer/director, the aforementioned Borghi, showed some real creativity with his camera placements and narrative techniques. I especially liked the cold opening sequence and the creative opening credits. Variety give the film a good review; it was received positively at the Seattle and Dublin film festivals; and there were newspaper articles about how the producers appeared willing to finance a sequel. The sequel never materialized, and Borghi never got to direct another film, despite showing that he could do the job.

And so the Borghi mystery deepens.

Tuesday Knight was especially proud of the work everyone did on this film. Some thirty years later, she posted:

Ms. Knight has nearly 100 credits at IMDb, and is still working to this day, mostly in cult and genre fare.

She did a topless scene in this film, but the quality of the release is so poor (VHS with hard-coded Dutch sub-titles) that you really can’t see much of what is going on. That’s a shame, because I don’t think the sex scene in this obscure film has ever been captured before.

The rest of her career nudity follows the same pattern. I found three other nude scenes, and two of them seem to be available only on VHS. The only clear HD scene is her final nude scene in The Babysitter (1995).

Here is a video of her sex scene in Who Killed the Baby Jesus?, which is intercut with other scenes.

That entire film is online for free.

There is also a “nude” scene in WKtBJ from the woman who played the mother, Rendé Rae Norman. To the best of my knowledge she never did a nude scene, so I wish I could claim to have found a lost treasure, but I really can’t. She basically used the ol’ suds bra.

In fact, it seems that the closest she ever came to nudity was the VHS box cover for this film!

Rendé is not a familiar figure, to be sure, but she has one of those faces you may recognize because she popped up from time to time on an episode of a major network television show. (Here she is, for example, in an episode of Seinfeld, s8e2.) She looks a bit like Joanna Cassidy, and her performance in Baby Jesus reminds me of Cassidy’s angry Zhora character in Blade Runner, except Rende’s mom character is Zhora on steroids.

There is very little information about Rendé online at IMDb or Wikipedia, so I derived a bio from her obituary, as follows:

Rendé Rae Norman was born April 1, 1958 in Pryor, Oklahoma. She graduated from Emporia High school in Kansas where she was the drum major and an active member of the theatre program. She went on to attend Emporia State College for her undergraduate degree, and there she was cast as the lead in as Mame Dennis in “Mame,” and Annie in “Annie Get Your Gun.” She went on to attend Southwest Missouri State University, receiving a master’s degree in fine arts and education. While attending Southeast Missouri State she was cast in lead roles such as Evie in “Stop the World – I Want to Get Off” and as Mona Kent in “Dames at Sea.”

After graduating college, she moved to New York to pursue her dreams of being an actress. She began performing in numerous cabaret shows and working in summer stock, where she was again cast in musical leads: Adelaide in “Guys in Dolls,” Rose in “Gypsy,” and Mona in “Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.”

Her first taste of screen life, a walk-on role in the soap opera “All My Children,” led to taking a leap and moving to L.A. Shortly after moving to California she was asked by Ben Vereen to be a part of the traveling company of “Pippen.” This was the jump start to her career in Hollywood. She then appeared on TV shows like “21 Jump Street,” “Seinfeld,” “Caroline in the City,” “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” “Desperate Housewives,” and “Cold Case.” She had a nine-episode character arc on “The Young and the Restless.” She also appeared in movies like True Colors with John Cusack and James Spader, Aspen Extreme with Peter Berg, and The Dentist 2 with Corbin Bernsen.

She also appeared in some indie films, and drew praise from Variety for a leading role as an angry, out-of-control grifter in Who Killed the Baby Jesus?

Performances are sharp, superbly led by Norman. Norman delivers a strong performance as an amoral individual who trusts no one and offers plenty of reasons for her social alienation.

While in Los Angeles Rendé Rae was able to use her other creative talents to assist renovating and refinishing her home and the office in which she worked. She closed out her acting career with a two-year run in “Menopause: The Musical” in Los Angeles.

She returned to Pryor in 2010 to assist with her parents, who had retired from their family-operated women’s boutique stores. She decided to make Pryor her home.

She passed away on November 14, 2020.