BrentCarleton

This is one of those so called ground breaking 60's dramas which uses the familiar device of a hopeless, frustrated spinster, (such as Jane Wyman would have played 10 or 15 years earlier, think "Miracle in the Rain") in an attempt to propagandize the audience into thinking the solution to her dilemma is sexual liberation.

Thus we have plain jane school-teacher Woodward finding carnal knowledge with a former classmate who's on a brief return visit to her home town.

Woodward sees sky rockets, marriage and children, and of course suffers the inevitable disillusionment of desertion.

Exceedingly well acted by all concerned, with many precise observations of small town life, (including a brilliant evocation of an old ladies bridge club) , the film uses these strengths to cloak, (make respectable?) distasteful scenes of Woodward's ruination in the hay, along with a highly improbable Lesbianic interlude with Estelle Parsons.

How interesting it would have been to have seen this theme treated the way Francois Mauriac would have realized it--and yet nowhere is the moral, much less, supernatural dimension even fleetingly evoked much less alluded to.

Indeed the films' only reference to religion is a depiction of a revival meeting featuring a wild eyed snake handler.

And so, in the end, (like so many other late sixties pretensions), all that we are left with here is mere, dreary, sociological naturalism, a melo but with the same basic ends as a Norman Lear comedy (all you squares need to unshackle all of your old wives tale repressions)--and not the lyrical star dust of Tennesse Williams who explored the same themes in "Summer and Smoke".

Not the sort of role Loretta Young would have played!

What other daytime serial in history corralled three Oscar winning/and or nominated ladies to head its cast? Only this--based on Rona Jaffe's novel of the same name and with big screen veterans Gale Sondergaard, Geraldine Fitzgerald and Patty McCormack.

This show seemed to have everything going for it--gifted and attractive performers, beautiful sets, evocative symphonic under-scoring, and a melodic theme song, (recorded on album and performed on the show by Connie Eaton). For those of us captured by its absorbing story in the long ago summer of 1970, its cancellation was as sudden as it was inexplicable.

Gale Sondergaard was the sinister proprietress and editress in chief of Key Publishing, the publishing house wherein the central action was located, the story centering on the interconnected lives of three stenographers. These were April (Julie Mannix), Kim (Katherine Glass) and dishy Patty McCormack as Linda. All three were effective in their roles as well as being very easy on the eyes.

And the plots! The girls may have been searching for the best of everything, but were sure stymied in attaining it--particularly Miss Glass who got involved with a hippie-biker pusher, ("Squirrel" played by Gregory Rosakis) and ended up being stabbed multiple times and left amongst the debris of a deserted alley,(near dead but not quite!).

Then there was the little boy who innocently ate from a box of sweets laced with LSD, and fell into convulsions whilst he rolled on floor screaming in agony.

Lurid, perhaps, but memorable...