Shirley Booth, making her film debut at the age of 45, brought her Broadway role to the screen to rave reviews: the critics found her "dowdy," "slovenly," "immature," "lazy," "pathetic," "foolish," all the things that William Inge's Lola Delaney should be. She is a middle-class housewife who has lost more than her dog (the eponymous mutt) over years of pretending a bright day is just around the corner. She has lost all touch with reality, driving husband Burt Lancaster to drink...or was it the other way around? His moody performance as Doc Delaney expresses profound regret for a spent youth in an anger too weary to surface. The intrusion into their home of a fatally attractive young boarder sends Doc Delaney off the wagon, bringing on an onslaught of what Doc and Lola (but not the film) have always avoided at all costs: naked realism. Lindsay Anderson wrote in Sight and Sound: "Come Back Little Sheba is a poignant picture of a situation near despair-the Delaneys' is the sort of relationship that carries on quietly in one corner of a Chekhov play. The sharpness of perception and the tenderness to human frailty which is implicit throughout...express a sadly stoical attitude...(It is essentially about the sad business of making the best of a bad job.) These are far from the traditional qualities of commercial cinema..."