Unusually accomplished tv-movie (exceptional for 1981) about actress Patricia Neal’s hard-won recovery from a massive triple-stroke (while working on John Ford’s SEVEN WOMEN), holds up surprisingly well; tough and unsentimental almost till the end. Only a final double triumph (return to Hollywood/return to work) turning a bit sticky, but no deal breaker. Glenda Jackson hasn’t Neal’s sexy drawl or looks*, but manages a reasonable facsimile in the pre-stroke scenes before showing what she’s capable of, emotionally/physically, post-surgery when she has to relearn everything. Scenes where she frightens her kids like some blank-slate/Frankenstein monster just devastating. Yet the key to film’s continuing effectiveness comes largely from the ornery ‘tough-love’ rehabilitation approach of writer/husband Roald Dahl, putting her thru the wringer in his maniacal determination to get all the way back to the woman he knew before the stroke. Funny to think that Dahl now the better known name and not the Oscar-winning actress (for HUD).* Less funny to know that Dahl, serially unfaithful thru the marriage, divorced Neal, mother of his five children, two years after this film came out, then immediately remarried.
DOUBLE-BILL: *See Neal make John Wayne as sexy as he’d ever be on screen in the last film she completed before her stroke, Otto Preminger’s IN HARM’S WAY/’65’.
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Dahl’s estate recently bought by NetFlix for a cool half billion. Yikes! Past adaptations include WILLY WONKA, THE WITCHES, MATILDA and that most famous of all Alfred Hitchcock Presents episodes: LAMB TO THE SLAUGHTER.
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