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I'm not sure why other reviewers have dissed this one, because I found it emotionally gripping start-to-finish. It's a superbly told tale of a young woman, Rachel Albrecht (Dylan Ratzlaff), torn between her Amish upbringing and her awareness of an outside world. Most depictions of the Amish portray them as relatively benign eccentrics - there are even tourists who take trips to Amish country just to gawk at them and their rejection of modern technology like cars and telephones - but in this film they come off as a Christian version of the Taliban. Co-writers. Michael Nankin (who also directed) and Barbara. Nance do a wonderful job of portraying Rachel's culture shock on encountering the non-Amish world, and Ratzlaff's performance is pitch-perfect as a woman torn between two worlds and not sure where she belongs. A rare diamond-in-the-rough triumph for Lifetime!

This film was a remake of Paramount's 1933 programmer "White Woman," directed by Stuart Walker and with Charles Laughton and Carole Lombard in the roles played here by J. Carrol Naish and Anna May Wong. Obviously they weren't going to cast Wong as the titular white woman! The story began life as a 1933 play by Norman Reilly Raine and Frank Butler called "Hangman's Whip" (a better title than either "White Woman" or "Island of Lost Men"), and despite John Howard Reid's comment that it might have been better with a stronger male lead, Laughton and Naish seemed to be engaged in a competition as to who could overact more and do more beaver imitations on the scenery. For the first few moments it seems like Anna May Wong might just be getting a more multidimensional character than usual, but she soon sinks back into the usual "inscrutable" sludge that was her stock in trade as the first Asian-American movie star. Anthony Quinn and Broderick Crawford are so much in the typical character-actor mold you'd never guess from this film that both of them would go on to win Academy Awards. Eric Blore is delightful as usual, though it looks like he got lost on his way to the set of a Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers film and would dearly like to get back. The script by William R. Lipman and "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?" author Horace McCoy is serviceable (without the creativity they showed in their previous script for Wong, "Dangerous to Know," in which they gave Akim Tamiroff a truly complex character instead of an unredeemable boor), and so is Kurt Neumann's direction.

I think the negative reviewers were really being unfair to this film. Director. Darin Scott and writers Jennifer Edwards and. Amy Katherine Taylor delivered an impressive piece of suspense filmmaking with bits of Gothic horror. Tamala Jones is excellent int he role of Jules Baker, an abused wife finny coming out of her shell after losing her husband six months previously, and Lamon Archey is equally impressive as the new man in her life. It's hardly a great. Movie, but it's first-rate within the limits of Lifetime's formulas and the surprise ending is quite credible. I found it entertaining and a lot of fun.