The Loneliest Runner

Interesting. Unique. Touching. Inspiring. Most memorable moments: when the mother expects a smell in the bathroom as the son hides out, when the son is amazed that lifting weights makes him bigger, and how the son grows up overnight.

There's no way I would have ever come across this movie but for belonging to a film club that views movies dealing with the theme of running. Landon has admitted that this poignant bed wetting story was autobiographical; frankly I doubt the squeamish subject matter would have ever been broached (let alone made into a feature length TV movie) without the backing of someone as powerful in television as Landon was in the 70s. Obviously the pain of the experience stayed with Landon because there are strong psychological conflicts and images at work here that seem likely to have come from real life, including the stained bedsheets hanging out the window and the pained, carefully modulated performance by Brian Keith as the father who can't quite stand up to his castrating and selfish wife or his own private demons.

Is it credible and well acted? Definitely. Does Landon demonstrate startling balls and emotion in his blazingly frank depiction of the material? Unquestionably. Is this studiously observed treatise on the ultimate in childhood embarrassment and ridicule going to be uncomfortable and maybe even a bit of a bummer for you? Probably.

The mother and ostensible villain of the piece is overly caricatured and some of the attitudes of the 1940s are oversimplified but still, I have to admit I was moved by the story. The ending packs power and Landon the writer provides Landon the actor (looking very Bruce Jenner-like in his Olympics clothing) with a wonderful line when Rafer Johnson asks him how he got into running and Landon responds by saying he owes it to his parents. That line cuts in several directions at once. Good movie for fans of Landon or Keith, who both turn in excellent work and whose lives were both ironically cut short years later.

Very sweet film about the humiliating beginnings of a marathon runner (adult played by Michael Landon). Young Michael, played by Lance, was a bedwetter. As he grew, his mother, a dominating woman, would humiliate him by hanging his sheets out the window to dry, so Lance would run home as fast as he could to pull them in before any of his school chums saw it. Movie expresses the hidden humiliation behind teenagers who are bedwetters, and makes an important statement on the longlasting affects of handling this problem in an unhealthy way.

This is one of those movies I've never forgotten. It's been stuck in my head since I saw it a long time ago. The agony of a child being embarrassed by his mother for wetting his bed, when he so desperately wanted to stop, is a heart-breaker.

How many times have we, as parents or just people, criticized another person without thinking of how our criticism can hurt? Maybe it's something the person can control and maybe it's not. But our criticism can last and hurt for years, as has my memory of this movie.

I don't remember if the mother in this film took her child to a doctor. Even if she had, she wouldn't have gotten much help. Fortunately now, medical science can relieve the problems of bed-wetting in adolescents and adults with a simple nasal spray of the hormones lacking in the person, hormones which shut down the kidneys when sleeping.

Turns out it is and it isn't.

It's a good small simple 70s movie. It was produced by that boring Prairie show actor.

Overall a nice nugget of a film that explores bed wetting, self-esteem and parenting.

The sound track put me to sleep. That's good though because if you can put me to sleep then you are a good movie exceptional to DC movies.