Movie Info

Jessica Lange gives a career performance in a role she was born to play: the talented and troubled Frances Farmer. Farmer's awful trajectory travels ...(read more...) from bright Seattle girl to 1930s Hollywood starlet to degraded (eventually lobotomized) mental patient. Lange, who has the blond, clean look of Farmer's heyday, goes into these places with the fierce abandon of a true believer. Her performance, the lush John Barry score, and the period re-creation are all worth applauding; almost everything else fails. Everyone except Farmer is grotesquely caricatured to fit the movie's thesis, which is that if you are intelligent and nonconformist, the system will resolutely destroy you. (The medical establishment is evil incarnate.) This simple conclusion seems inadequate and disrespectful of Frances Farmer's tragic problems. For a radiant glimpse of what the real Farmer had to offer, see Howard Hawks's Come and Get It, which bristles with excitement over a new discovery. --Robert Horton

Director: Graeme Clifford

MPAA: R

Running Time: 113 min.

Release Date: Dec 17, 1982

Cast: Allan Rich, Anjelica Huston, Bart Burns, Jeffrey DeMunn, Jessica Lange, Kim Stanley, Robert Harris, Sam Shepard