Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #35515 in DVD
• Released on: 2002-10-01
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Formats: Anamorphic, Color, DVD-Video, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English, French
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 140 minutes

Amazon.com Essential Video
Jessica Lange gives a career performance in a role she was born to play: the talented and troubled Frances Farmer. Farmer's awful trajectory travels from bright Seattle girl to 1930s Hollywood starlet to degraded (eventually lobotomized) mental patient. Lange, who has the blond, clean look of Farmer's heyday, goes into these places with the fierce abandon of a true believer. Her performance, the lush John Barry score, and the period re-creation are all worth applauding; almost everything else fails. Everyone except Farmer is grotesquely caricatured to fit the movie's thesis, which is that if you are intelligent and nonconformist, the system will resolutely destroy you. (The medical establishment is evil incarnate.) This simple conclusion seems inadequate and disrespectful of Frances Farmer's tragic problems. For a radiant glimpse of what the real Farmer had to offer, see Howard Hawks's Come and Get It, which bristles with excitement over a new discovery. --Robert Horton

From the Back Cover
Jessica Lange delivers the performance of her career as Frances Farmer, the notorious 1930's movie star whose impassioned opinions and outspoken behavior created scandal throughout the industry. But when she was betrayed by the studio system and committed to an insane asylum by her domineering mother, Frances descended into a madness that revealed the most horrific abuses of mental illness and exposed the cruelest consequences of Hollywood fame. Kim Stanley and San Shephard co-star in this tragic true story that shocked the world. Frances is now presented in a stunning new transfer from original film materials and is packed with startling new bonus features exclusive to this edition.