A shopworn 1978 melodrama about a saintly woman who nurses a helpless cripple back to emotional health, thinly disguised as a “statement” about Vietnam. The film has less to do with politics, women’s or otherwise, than with a very conventional notion of the redemptive power of mother love. Which would be all right if director Hal Ashby had managed to mount it effectively—he hasn’t though, and the results are dramatically incoherent. Jon Voight does well with an impossible part, but Bruce Dern and Jane Fonda are respectively too much and too little. With Robert Carradine, Penelope Milford, and Robert Ginty. 127 min.


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