“Committed dramatically deconstructs the bizarre events in which Frances Farmer, once hailed as the ‘New Garbo,' was stripped of her civil rights, declared insane and incarcerated in a mental institution. While the poisoned quill of Louella Parsons would gleefully tout Farmer's breakdown as ‘Hollywood Cinderella Girl gone back to the ashes on a liquor-slicked highway,' critic John Rosenfield alone decried the brutal miscarriage of justice, writing it ‘shouldn't have happened.' But it did. By 1943 Farmer was a casualty of the star system and her tragedy was only beginning. Over the next five years she was subjected to the horrors of modern psychiatry, then in its infancy and full of bold prescriptions for ‘normalizing' society's ‘marginal' elements. Frances would be ‘saved' with a transorbital lobotomy.
“Committed is the first feature by New York filmmakers Sheila McLaughlin and Lynne Tillman; the independent production was already in the works when the Hollywood film Frances was released. Told from the point of view of Farmer (played by co-director McLaughlin), it examines the deteriorative impact of both her mother, Lillian, and her lover, playwright Clifford Odets, as well as the socio-political climate which believed that anyone who would reject Hollywood success was indeed mad. Committed does not purport to be a biography (like the Jessica Lange vehicle Frances) but a reassessment of history. Whereas Frances strongly suggests that Farmer could have escaped by accepting the love of the fabricated Harry York character, Committed demonstrates how Farmer's personal politics were at odds with those of her mother, her doctor and the mighty institutions which came down upon her head most literally.” Laura Thielen
Note: Committed will also be shown at the York Theater, S.F., on July 13 as part of the series, Women Make Movies. Selected for Filmex '84.