Things are pretty exciting for a while for young Frances Farmer of Seattle. There is the atheistic high-school valedictory, the theatrical tour to Communist Russia, the Hollywood contract, the triumphant and defiant homecoming for the premiere of Come and Get It, the involvement with Harold Clurman's Group Theatre and the affair with Clifford Odets, who turns her head with his impassioned talk, his framed portrait of Lenin, his Beethoven's 7th on the phonograph, his rose petals sprinkled on the bed. But then Odets is revealed as a "bastard" and Clurman as a "prick," and there are physical altercations with a motorcycle cop and a makeup girl, and things turn pretty sour en route to jail, lunatic asylum, and lobotomy. The apportionment of these events is rather mean-spirited. The early episodes, with big time-gaps in between, are individually diverting, but they don't link up into a solid chain of causality. Sketchy as they are, they neither explain nor otherwise justify the detailed horrors that follow. And Jessica Lange's performance, with her expressive mouth and oozy voice that seems squeezed out of a tube, breaks down into a meaningless miscellany of Big Scenes. With Sam Shepard and Kim Stanley; directed by Graeme Clifford. (1982) — Duncan Shepherd
This movie is not currently in theaters.