"Lots of up and down" is how Patsy Cline describes her second marriage, with a lascivious smirk to indicate that it's really up all the time. But there is a lot of down, too: food-throwing, slap-exchanging, all the standard expressions of marital strife. Director Karel Reisz, seeing that his fellow Britisher, Michael Apted, had some good luck in the country field with Coal Miner's Daughter (in which Cline was a secondary character), has tried to get a piece of it for himself. His area of concentration, however, perhaps a return of sorts to his kitchen-sink origins, is more on mundane and squalid details (many of them lost in the barroom-dim lighting). It is supposed to have interest because Cline has interest. But there is no movie here. There is a performance, breathless, fey, overheated, by Jessica Lange (who lip-syncs to the original recordings, not too badly), and a more controlled, though more monotonous one by Ed Harris as the no-account husband. With Ann Wedgeworth and David Clennon. (1985) — Duncan Shepherd
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