Word: bedded
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Burning Bed, NBC, Oct. 8,9-11 p.m. E.D.T...
...take up a topic, adorn it with stars and promote it as another prime-time breakthrough. As drama, these TV crusades have such familiar faults-too simplistic, too preachy, too ponderously "educational"-that a good one can easily get lost in the shuffle. In the case of The Burning Bed, that would be a shame...
...story, as usual, is based on a true incident. On March 9, 1977, Francine Hughes, a Michigan housewife, resorted to desperate action against the ex-husband who had beaten her repeatedly over more than a decade. As he lay sleeping in a drunken stupor, she poured gasoline around his bed, lit a match, packed the children into the car, and drove off as the house went up in flames. The TV movie, written by Rose Leiman Goldemberg from a book by Faith McNulty, tells the story of Francine's marriage, mostly in flashback, as she relates...
...Strangers), the movie avoids both sentimentality and sententiousness. Its portrait of a lower-middle-class marriage is as incisive and coldblooded as anything TV has shown. Yet the violence is frequently underplayed to good effect. In one scene, the couple's three children huddle together on a bed and listen impassively to the screams and blows coming from the other room. When the front door slams, they troop in unison to the window to watch the fight continue outside. A dozen graphic scenes could not tell us more about the numbing familiarity of this domestic reign of terror...
...putting too many early pressures on boys: many men say the happiest memories of their mothers are those that center on a childhood illness, when the boys dropped their fears of appearing unmanly and allowed themselves to be comforted unstintingly. "My mother would sit near my bed after she brought me lunch, and we'd listen to soap operas together," one man recalled. "When I went back to school, it was as if I'd been completely revitalized...