Violenza familiare

This is perhaps the greatest social problem and not just of our own age, but men have always been beating up their wives, and it's not until the last hundred years or so that the wives have been able to do something about it, like getting a divorce. We don't hear much about abused wives in earlier centuries, while John Galsworthy's "The Man of Property" could be the first one to actually pinpoint the problem. There are three wives here, actually four, who all are grossly mishandled by their husbands on a rising gradient for the worse, until one of them actually is beaten to death, and of course he didn't mean to do it. It just happened that way. Two of the husbands get violent and abusive by drinking, and they always keep promising not to do it again, while they always keep doing it again. Finally one of them stops drinking, and there is hope, while the greatest hope is for the one who actually persists on getting a divorce and obviously triumphs - we never learn what happened to that husband, not to the other husband who beat his wife to death. The dramaturgy here is great, it starts slowly to gain momentum half way, and then the drama becomes indispensable, and you will stick to it to the end. Karen Grassle as the lawyer's wife is the great character here with her son as a witness saying nothing until it is over, but all the actors are excellent.

Gritty social commentary rather than entertainment, Farrell & Grassle, Burton & Fields and Duff & Blondell play the respective couples from different socio-economic, demographic situations experiencing domestic abuse. The system is depicted as a perverted haven for wife-beaters, with no viable solutions to end the violence in fear of it merely escalating (which it appears it inevitably does either way).

It's a departure from the lighthearted TV that Grassle, Fields and Farrell were co-starring in at the time, whilst Burton was fresh off the plantation fields of his ground-breaking show 'Roots'. Also good to see veteran Blondell in one of her final roles, even if it's a tragically sad state of affairs for her character, suffering at the hands of her husband (Duff) an abusive alcoholic.

Also featuring in smaller roles are Diana Scarwid playing Blondell's adult daughter trying to escape her own struggles, and Ketty Lester (also from 'Little House on the Prairie') playing Fields', no-nonsense, tough-love neighbour.

Three different stories (two which overlap) and three distinctly different resolutions offer some glimmer of hope but it's regularly uncomfortable and at-times distressing, typical of the halcyon era for telemovies in the 70s/80s, not as cultivated as motion pictures would handle the subject matter, but still capable of moving an audience.