Frances (1982)

The spectacular 8 hour limited series "Feud" made me revisit many of Jessica Lange's movies. Her performance is of such perfection that it reminded me how extraordinary she has always been. "Frances" is a shock to the system, unflinchingly so. The beautiful, sad, Francs Farmer in all its contradictions. Jessica Lange is absolutely mesmerizing. The movie suffers from what most biopics suffer from, A chronological succession of events and in the case of Frances Farmer, from bad the worse to much, much worse. The movie will drain you but the performance will keep you alert, alive, transfixed. There is more, Kim Stanley as Frances mother. An acting giant with very few film credits to her name. That alone makes "Frances" a collector's item.

Despite a lot of errors including one apparently fictional lover for Frances Farmer, the film Frances is a look at on oddball type movie star for her time.Today Frances Farmer's activities for various causes wouldn't raise a sleepy eyebrow in Hollywood. Never mind being committed to an insane asylum. She'd more at home now in the film industry than in the studio system of the day. The system is personified here by Paramount Pictures executive Allan Rich who is a cross between studio presidents Barney Balaban and Emmanuel Cohen in the day.But Jessica Lange truly becomes Frances Farmer the girl with a social conscience, truly who did not like the cheesecake image that Paramount wanted her to fill. She also learned from her experience in the Group Theater that even liberal activists could be snakes. Clifford Odets with whom she had one torrid affair with and Harold Clurman manager of the Group Theater let her down. Odets's wife never seen emerges as a villain of sorts who gets her man back. Not is she mentioned by name, but it was Luise Rainer who was still very much alive and lived to the ripe old age of 104.So in fact is Farmer's first husband Leif Ericksen never mentioned by name. He's given the fictional name of Dick Steele and he's a minor character and played by Christopher Pennock.Sam Shepard is not real, he's an amalgam of several left wing activists from the Seattle area where Frances Farmer was from. But he functions as sort of an emotional balance, someone who Farmer could turn to when she was unable to cope with all the lies and promises of show business.If there is an award for bit parts ever developed for the year 1982 it would go to Darrell Larson. He's a real bottom feeder stringer for gossip columnist Louella Parsons. He has two scenes with Lange and in the second she puts him down severely.Lange and Kim Stanley got Oscar nominations for Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress. Stanley who could have done Frances back in her salad days plays her mother, a rather straitlaced woman who thinks her daughter must be crazy after all she and dad Bart Burns are the Ward and June Cleaver of the 30s, how could they raise a left wing radical. Ergo, she must be crazy. And Frances was going to stay in those asylums until she learned the error of her ways.Jessica Lange fits Frances Farmer so well you forget this is a film biography and think you are peaking in on the life of Frances Farmer. As good as the film is I can't recommend too strongly that you read her autobiography Will There Ever Be A Morning? One of the most honest Hollywood stories ever written.

It's incredible that neither Jessica Lange nor Kim Stanley received the Oscar they were nominated for in this gripping film of a true story of a Hollywood actress who didn't make it because of her own over-brilliant personality, getting into conflict with everyone, having problems with adjusting to a society she couldn't agree with from the beginning; and although the film differs slightly from the true story, at large it sticks to the absolute truth at least psychologically. Jessica Lange is just formidable, and this must be her best performance. The interesting thing is that she actually very much looks like Frances Farmer, she was in reality just as beautiful as Jessica Lange if not even more, and her personality in Jessica Lange's impersonation couldn't be more convincing. Her mother Kim Stanley accomplishes a similar feat, and all the other actors tune well in to make this film as perfect a documentary biography as could be accomplished. To this comes the softening and almost seducing music of John Barry gilding the hard lines of the picture and making it more digestible, while my only objection is against the lobotomy ingredient, which is the one departure from reality. Although the terrible nightmare scenes from the asylum had to be included, since they were true, the exaggeration of the lobotomy was unnecessary. Perhaps it was just put there to end the traumatic hospital sequences.Frances Farmer became a legend, and by this film the legend was given an extra injection of continued eternity, and it's a uniquely fascinating portrait of an over-talented actress at odds with a reality, especially Hollywood at that time, that in no way was humanly acceptable.

To begin with, Thank you to everyone involved in this project.I watched this film and was drawn in to a point of feeling constantly off balance.That says a tremendous amount about the participants. They set the right mood, tone and pace and performed the hell out of their roles.It is, as many have said, an important and underrated film. In truth Frances Farmer was an actress best known for "sensationalized and fictional accounts of her life", a Hollywood legend so to speak for all the wrong reasons. (Especially her involuntary commitment to a mental hospital.) But the this account speaks volumes on the Institution system and treatment of those "non-compliant" with social norms of the time.As in the the film Changeling (2008), this film pricks up our ears to the dis-empowerment of women during that era (which still goes on globally). Like many other women of the period who were deemed disruptive, women often times were forced into the secret custody of a mental institution or denied rights (turned over to spouses, parents or other family). After the passing of the 19th Amendment, as women started to openly assert their independence many establishments tried to maintain their control over the free will of women. In the end they were in large part manipulated by a number of agencies and political machinery and ultimately had involuntary medical treatments/experiments in behavior modification performed (or extensive removals from society). Sadly there was a great deal of old school thinking that feed into that from prior generations of other women. This film pulls no punches in areas that are well documented historically.You can easily see where this film is headed but the deceptively simple script and compelling composition wrings out every bit of viewer-ship you have. I was welded to my seat until the end credits. I would have to say it would be very hard to watch this piece and not want Jessica Lange's "Frances" to win.Great work... definitively should be on the major "must watch" lists.