Limbo (USA, 1972) 112 min color DIR: Mark Robson. PROD: Linda Gottlieb. SCR: Joan Micklin Silver, James Bridges. STY: Joan Micklin Silver. MUSIC: Anita Kerr. DOP: Charles F. Wheeler. CAST: Kate Jackson, Katherine Justice, Stuart Margolin, Hazel Medina, Kathleen Nolan, Russell Wiggins. (Universal)
This ancestor to Coming Home shows how Vietnam affects people in domestic life, with its narrative about military wives whose husbands are POWs or M.I.A. in the Vietnam war. Kate Jackson has an early role as Sandy Lawton, who was wed just two weeks before her husband went to Vietnam. She moves in with another military wife, Mary Kay Beull (Kathleen Nolan), whose husband’s current state is unknown, and attempts to get on with her life, much to the resentment of the eldest of her four children. Sharon Dornbeck (Katherine Justice) receives a telegram that her husband in the Air Force has been killed. The three women travel to Paris to attend a Vietnam peace conference, where they view a film depicting atrocities committed on Vietnamese civilians by the hands of American soldiers. (As far as I can remember, this was an unprecedented American dramatic film to broach that subject.) The feature focuses on three women, although I wanted more of the fourth: a black woman (Hazel Medina as Jane Work), whose story would’ve offered more to the narrative in how the war affects people of other ethnicities than southern white women.
Mark Robson directed, in between, of all things, Happy Birthday Wanda June and Earthquake! The old school studio production seems anachronistic for 1972, furthered by the omnipresent syrupy music to tug the heartstrings that Robson doesn’t with his ham-fisted direction. It would benefit from more subtlety that Ms. Silver would excel in as a director, however at the time she was still directing shorts. Even James Bridges would’ve been a fine choice, as he would soon demonstrate in The Paper Chase. (Maybe there’s a story there.) All troweled on sentimentality aside, this becomes quite an absorbing mood piece about women caught between moving on with their lives, or staying devoted to husbands who may never return, with nice perspectives on military children and would-be suitors (The Rockford Files‘ Stuart Margolin as a school teacher; Russell Wiggins as the gas pump guy who begins a relationship with Sandy).
This extremely hard to find movie was made available to me via an MP4 from a “Facebook friend”. The copy I viewed anyway felt like a TV-movie: a dark transfer taken from a squiggly off-air VHS, which resembled the harsh lighting of an MOW. This version runs 18 minutes less than the length reported on IMDB, presumably edited down to fit in a two-hour time slot, so I don’t know what is missing, but I’m happy to have seen this ultra-rare film at all. WICU (Erie PA’s NBC affiliate) played this occasionally in their early 80s weekend schedules of all-night late movies, but before I would have been hip to it. Kudos to whoever made this copy, because “The Late Show” title card (KSTW, Channel 11, from Seattle!) is still seen at the beginning and throughout, where the original owner took out the commercials. Seen late on a Friday night, it felt like staying up to watch the late show on WICU all over again. At the end, the announcer mentions that tomorrow’s movie at the same time is The Don Is Dead. Endearing.
Greg Woods
Greg Woods has been a film enthusiast since his teens, and began his writing "career" at the same time- prolific in capsule reviews of everything he had watched, first on index cards, then those hardcover dollar store black journals, then an old Mac IIsi. He founded The Eclectic Screening Room in 2001, as a portal to share his film love with the world, and find some like-minded enthusiasts along the way. In addition to having worked in the film industry for over two decades, he has been a co-programmer of films at Trash Palace, and a programmer/co-founder of the Toronto Film Noir Syndicate. He has also written for Broken Pencil, CU-Confidential, Micro-Film, and is currently working on his first novel. His secret desire is for someone to interview him for a podcast or a DVD extra.