Katherine

although not a very full featured one. I got it at a bargain shop for $1.00. I bet that you would be hard pressed to find it at a higher price. It is not a particularly good transfer, but still better than most VHS. It is published by Digiview Productions (www.digiviewus.com).

I liked this film. It was thoughtful, unpretentious and well acted. I must admit that I had forgotten what a great beauty Sissy Spacek was in her youth and what a terrific actress she was from almost the very beginning.

I guess this was right around the time Henry Winkler was playing Fonzie and some of those mannerisms come out in his performance.

It's been many years since I saw this, but I do recall enough details to know this was not based loosely on the Patti Hearst case, as has been stated, but on Dwight, Illinois's Diana Oughton, who got involved with the Weathermen and was one of three "urban commandos" killed when a bomb they were working on went off in their NYC townhouse, in May of 1970. Diana was the daughter of an important landowning family, and was brought up in the "lap of luxury", such as it can be in rural Illinois, who became socially conscious while teaching school in Guatemala, circa 1962, then joined the SDS and its Weathermen offshoot in the late 60's.

Given that this is fictionalized, the performances are wonderful and the writing and direction (given that it's a TV movie) are above average.

I saw this only once--when it was on TV in 1975. I was 20 years old. It left a powerful impact on me. I hadn't yet heard of Sissy Spacek or Henry Winkler. I deeply "identified" with Katherine as the movie began. I kept thinking "Yes, she's doing the right thing!" Then in the end... I felt the way a balloon must feel when it's popped. I realized the error of her ways--and mine. I realized I too could've been sucked right into all that. I've never, ever forgotten this story. Someday I'll try to get my granddaughters to watch it with me.

Saga of the well-meaning teenager gone awry during those turbulent political years 1965-1972. In flashbacks to her girlhood, Sissy Spacek's Katherine, the daughter of wealthy Capitalists, is revealed to be a political hothead from the start (she was never an innocence lost). As she describes to us her reasons for becoming a radical (in an unpretentious, direct-to-the-camera way), we see Katherine move from the Society Column to the Most Wanted pages...and a living, breathing character begins to take shape. Smart, perceptive made-for-television drama with yet another remarkable performance from young Spacek; also good, Henry Winkler as a non-conformist love-interest and Emmy-nominated Art Carney as Katherine's father. Jeremy Paul Kagan directed (he also directed Winkler in 1977's "Heroes") and his work is stark and focused. At the finale, when Kagan shows us that unoccupied stool, we've come away with a lot more than a glimpse into the radical mind--we're aware of a promising life misbegotten.

Though a low budget TV movie of the 1970's, Katherine hits a nerve today because it sends a message to a complacent society that has gotten caught up in pop culture and comfort food that injustices are committed everyday by our government with most of us barely noticing. It's a good film for young people who are beginning to grapple with the world around them to learn that things aren't as good as they always seemed in their cocoon of upbringing and schooling. And it is a wake-up call, like a lot of today's new indie films (Syriana, Goodnight and Good Luck and The Constant Gardner) for the rest of us who live for the next episode of The Sopranos or Desperate Housewives between days at work. Despite some drawbacks of the production, Sissy Spacek's impassioned performance effectively sends the movie's message home.