Customer Reviews

Raggedy Man

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I remember going to the theatre to see this film about a year after "Coal Miner's Daughter". I knew anything with Sissy Spacek in it had to be good. This film is not only good, its sensational with Sissy giving one of her finest performances. (When has she ever been anything but excellent in anything??) I can't add much to what the majority of the reviewers have said about this film. The DVD audio and video are high quality and the film is beautifully remastered. The musical score is top-notch and the forties background cannot be bettered. The supporting cast is excellent as well with Eric Roberts the standout as the kind hearted sailor, Teddy, who assumes the role of the man of the house....at least temporarily. A young Henry Thomas (before E.T.) makes his film debut here, I believe as Sissy's older son Harry. Sissy has great interaction with the children. The film is Sissy's all the way and I believe she should have been nominated for another academy award for this performance. There are many dimensions to Nina. My favorite scene in this movie may be minor but it never fails to make me feel good.....Sissy is sweeping her kitchen and turns the radio on and the Andrew's Sisters come on singing "Rum and Coca Cola" and Sissy carefree and lightheartedly gets into singing along with the music, dancing with the broom. I just love this scene!! The ending packs a wallop and I always get teary eyed. If you haven't seen this film it is worth your time and money to get it. The DVD unfortunately has no extras, no scene selection, no subtitles and is not in widescreen.

This movie is tops. One of those rare movies you can view again and again for the great acting and the photography and setting. As a story it is true to life. I grew up in a small town during that time and yes, worked on a one person switchboard! Sissy Spacek always gives a top notch performance and she is especially at home in this movie. A mother trying to care for her children and caught in the mores of the '40s and a small town. A wonderful story and wonderfully photographed.

This movie is superb in every imaginable way: the photography, the fidelity to the WWII era in small-town America (I know: I grew up in the 40s in a Texas town just like this one with a telephone/telegraph office-in-a-home), flawless casting, fine writing, inspired directing, mesmerizing story and breathtakingly suspenseful--then achingly tender-- denouement. (Sissy and Eric will meet again, I have no doubt.)

This is one of the very few movies I've thought worth buying to watch again & again.

One of Sissy's finest, yet most underrated performances, with her husband (Fisk) directing her in a gripping and suspenseful screenplay by William Wittliff (*Perfect Storm* and *Legends of the Fall*). This is Fisk's first as director, but as a former art director, it is beautiful in its attention to detail, and he presents his wife with the care that only a director in love with his leading lady can do. Sissy plays a telephone operator in a small Texas town during World War II, raising her two boys and keeping to herself. While fending off the frightening attentions of a couple of the local yokels, she causes a great deal of consternation by taking up with a sailor passing through. He is handsome and loving, and bonds with her children, but the story takes many turns before its shattering conclusion. A neglected gem, it is a magnificent showcase for Sissy's talent.

I fell in love with Eric Roberts after seeing this film. His portrayal of the jilted sailor who finds a brief ray of happiness with Sissy Spacek was teriffic - all the energy and optimism of young love shone through in his performance. If he had continued to make movies this good, he would have been a huge star.

Sissy Spacek gives her usual flawless performance, creating a rich, three dimensional character. The kids in this film are absolutely wonderful.

Worth getting, worth watching, and it still holds up after all these years.

I remember seeing this film for the first time when it played on HBO back in the early 80's. I was just getting into photography at the time, and I was immediately struck by the masterful use of light and composition that this film exhibited. It was almost as if the great story and interesting characters were a bonus to the photography! Especially appealing to me is the opening sequence, where the car's headlights are shown through the sheer curtains of the house at night, then the camera follows them as they move across the walls of Sissy Spacek's bedroom, stopping on a family photo, with a small porcelain flower's shadow showing on the face of the family photo. If you appreciate great photography, this is it!

Other noticeably great photographic sequences include the thunderstorm, where the power goes out while Nita and her new sailor friend, Teddy Roebuck, are talking to each other across the kitchen table. The room goes completely dark, and we see both characters illuminated only by the flashing of the lightning bolts through the window, and by a cigarette lighter. Another occurs when Teddy brings Nita a pair of stockings, and she holds them up to inspect them, pushing her hand into them while the backlight of a candle on the kitchen table gives a very soft iridescence and glow to her silhouetted arm, while she and Teddy hold hands. Then, too, there is the masterful use of light coming from a hidden part of the room where Nita is taking a bath, which illuminates her from the side with a warm glow, while the troublemaker Triplet brothers window peep outside her house.

This is one of those great sleeper movies that are seldom known or seen, but are quiet gifts when found. From an industry which I generally tend to loathe in this day and age, I recognize and classify "Raggedy Man" as a movie made by masters of their craft. It is both a feast for eyes and ears.

Another teriffic performance from Sissy. The perfect role for her. As with several other of her movies, she has such a nice, warm relationship with children (The River, Coal Miner's Daughter. The inner strength she shows in dealing with her situation, the way she holds her own with her boss and the townspeople, is remarkable. Very nice little nude scene too! Only the ending was a disappointment, going from a truly heart warming story to a "Halloween" ending was all wrong. Still, very much worth seeing.

Sissy Spacek has made a career of playing the rural disadvantaged woman in so many films that to watch her places the viewer in a comfortable cinematic chair from which to watch her battle entrenched odds. In RAGGEDY MAN, Sissy is Nita, a World War II wife whose husband has mysteriously left her and her two young boys to an uncertain economic fate. Nita is a telephone operator who plugs into war news on a daily basis and thus incorporates the frequent death notices of local soldiers into her already fractured life. She is pretty,lonely, overworked, and underpaid. And to a pair of rednecked brothers, she is clearly undersexed as well. Nita wants nothing to do with them or with any man either until a handsome sailor Teddy (Eric Roberts) strolls into her life and sparks fly long enough for the town gossips' tongues to wag. Teddy is welcomed into Nita's life as a reminder that passion is not extinguished within her. Her two boys bond immediately to Teddy. Overseeing all this is the mysterious scarred Raggedy Man, a local oddball who performs chores and seems to stare at Nita and the enfolding drama within her house. The major problemof RAGGEDY MAN is that director Jack Fisk fails to integrate the trio of Nita, Teddy, and the Raggedy Man. If the focus was to be on the strains of life for a single woman in the South of the World War II era, then the movie should have stayed on topic. And for most of the film, it does, and the viewer learns to care for Nita and her boys as they decide how and to what extent Teddy can fit in. Yet this scarred stranger intrudes too often to dilute the viewers' interest. Further, there is no interaction between Teddy and him. The ending tries vainly to justify the Raggedy Man's appearance at convenient times with no one able to recognize him or guess his identity until a surprise ending of violence. By this time, sailor Teddy is long gone and RAGGEDY MAN concludes in an uneasy stasis of diverted audience identification. RAGGEDY MAN had the potential to be a truly captivating exploration of how some people unexpectedly reach out to like minded souls only to find that society can be a destructive wild card factor, but in this case, the attempt to introduce an element of mystery was incompatible with stark human drama.

`Raggedy Man' is a small film in approach and scope, yet there are moments that leave you with a lot to chew on so-to-speak. The problem I have with the film is that it doesn't seem to know what kind of film to really wants to be. It seems to throw everything at you, leaving you to discern for yourself how you want to take it. In parts it works very well, but together it tends to be rather uneven and a little preposterous.

The ending, it just irks me.

The film tells of Nita Longley, a middle aged mother of two living in rural Texas during World War II. Divorced from her philandering husband and working as a telephone operator, Nita is confined by the life she was dealt and struggles to find some sort of balance between living and dying in this small town. She's accosted by two creepy men and mistreated by her selfish boss, and coupling this with the raising of her two young boys is wearing on Nita. Then she meets Teddy, a young sailor who stumbles into her life in the middle of a storm. Her sons immediately grow attached to Teddy, who proves to be a father figure they've needed, and Nita too finds herself falling for this young man. News travels fast and the town is up in arms over Nita's apparent lifestyle choices, but in the end everything Nita does is for the benefit of her sons.

As a love story this movie works rather nicely, and I found myself intrigued by the relationship blossoming between Nita and Teddy. As a suspense driven thriller though, the film fails to really impress. I think maybe because it tries too hard in such a short time period. It shifts gears so drastically so suddenly, and this makes the final few minutes of the film feel out of place.

It becomes `Halloween'.

The acting is a saving grace for the lack of direction in the script, which is astonishing especially on the part of Spacek who has to juggle two films so-to-speak. She does so very well, capturing the naivety and graceful innocence of a romantic heroine as well as the fear and natural mothering instincts of a terrified victim. Eric Roberts shocked me, delivering a charming and delightful performance. William Sanderson and Tracy Walter deliver their performances with the right amount of edge to create believable villains.

Sam Shepard has a small role, and the most preposterous at that, and it's not like you can call what he does acting so I'll refrain from comment.

It has all the workings of a good film but winds up becoming nothing more than a halfway decent one. It has its moments and really the whole first half or so is really good, but the ending is just too over-the-top for me; and the final revelation, on the porch, is just ridiculous in my opinion. Spacek is stunning, that much is very true, but the film itself is not.

I just watched Raggedy Man for the first time in probably 20 years. The movie still holds up as the people I watched it with, who have verying tastes all thought it was a really good movie. The consensus was also that nobody had ever heard of it. This movie stars a very young Sissy Spacek and Eric Roberts and they do a great job. It also has some very recognizable character actors filling out the cast and Sam Shepard in a pivotal role. This movie takes place during World War II on the home front. Most of the men are old or older men and men who couldn't make it into the military for one reason or another. Sissy Spacek is a divorced mother of two wonderful little boys, one played by Henry Thomas of E.T. and Gangs of New York fame. She works as the town switchboard and is stuck in a dead end job trying to raise her two boys on her own. She is seen as a "dee-vor-say" which back in that time meant that she was probably "loose". The towns folk are mostly good people but judgemental and a bunch of nosey gossips. There are also a couple of ex-convict brothers who are redneck jerks who have their eyes set on Sissy's character. Eric Roberts is a young sailor on leave for 4 days before he ships out who meets Spacek and her two boys and hits it off with them much to the scorn of the prudes and gossips in the town.

This movie is a sweet and tender movie but it does have some violent content that is not for everybody but nothing graphic such as is todays standard. The movie is a forgotten and until recently out of print gem. Check it out.