By Erin Free
In this regular column, we drag forgotten made-for-TV movies out of the vault and into the light. This week: the 1979 drama The Cracker Factory, starring Natalie Wood, Perry King, Shelley Long and Juliet Mills.
With its considerable female audience – a large subset of which could be safely referred to as “women of a certain age” – the vintage telemovie format of the seventies and eighties unsurprisingly proved a popular platform for not just stories about women, but also for the actresses appearing in said stories. We’ve previously discussed “telemovie queens” like Jaclyn Smith, Valerie Bertinelli and the like in this column before, but have not addressed another important telemovie trend: namely, the move onto the small screen of actresses previously big in feature films experiencing something of a mid-career lull.
While “older women” infamously do it tough in terms of decent big screen work, many have thrived on television while at the back-end of their respective careers. One-time major players like Raquel Welch, Katharine Ross, Joanne Woodward, Elizabeth Taylor and many more all crossed over with great success into the less glamourous world of network telemovies, and subsequently did some impressive acting work, taking on challenging characters and projects that often boasted more depth and nuance than those they’d involved themselves with in the world of features.
Another actress in this mix was Natalie Wood, who blazed a trail in the fifties and sixties with essential works like Rebel Without A Cause (1955), Splendor In The Grass (1961), West Side Story (1961) and Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969), and then experienced a career slide in the seventies, at which point Wood turned to television. A stunning beauty and gifted performer, Wood delivered impressive turns in small screen projects like The Affair (1973), Cat On A Hot Tin Roof (1976) and From Here To Eternity (1979), but got her best TV role with The Cracker Factory (1979), a true actor’s showcase in every sense of the world.
Directed by hard-working TV vet Burt Brinckerhoff, The Cracker Factory is penned by equally hard-working TV vet Richard Alan Shapiro and is based on the same-named semi-autobiographical novel by Joyce Burditt, a longtime TV writer and producer who eventually went on to create the popular Dick Van Dyke-starrer Diagnosis: Murder. A punchy, pithy, darkly humorous meditation on mental illness, The Cracker Factory treads similar territory to the likes of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) and I Never Promised You A Rose Garden (1977), but winningly creates a mood and feel all of its own.
Natalie Wood is Cassie Barrett, a suburban housewife prone to bouts of depression and anxiety who salves her emotional wounds with lashings of alcohol, which has led to multiple stays in various psychiatric institutions. As The Cracker Factory begins, Cassie experiences a noisy nervous breakdown in a supermarket, and then once again finds herself under professional care. In a familiar institution, the sharp-tongued Cassie engages in a series of heated, amusingly biting verbal battles with her psychiatrist Dr. Edwin Alexander (played by Perry King, discussed previously in our review of Inmates: A Love Story), a handsome shrink constantly at odds with Cassie’s headstrong ways and longtime inability to identify her own issues.
Though the doctor-patient connection forms the central relationship of the film – with Wood and King enjoying a real sense of chemistry – Cassie also has fraught dealings with her husband Charlie (Peter Haskill), who she blames for many of her problems, and her beloved brother Bobby (Robert Perault), who she eventually accuses of siding with other family members against her. Greater kindness and warmth comes from big-hearted nurse Tinkerbell (Juliet Mills at her loveliest) and loopy, lovelorn roommate Cara, played with wondrous verve by a pre-Cheers Shelley Long.
Surrounded by strong performers (Sydney Lassick, Art Evans, Donald Hotton and Marian Mercer all appear as fellow patients) and gifted with reams of barbed dialogue, Natalie Wood really delivers here, throwing down withering put-downs with deft skill while unravelling before our very eyes, a mess of raw emotion and barely fettered desperation. No mere “look at me” performance, Wood really captures Cassie’s fiery brand of self-determination while also cleanly revealing the pained sense of self-loathing and vulnerability that lie beneath it.
It’s a terrific performance from Natalie Wood, and had this fine actress not tragically passed away a mere two years later in 1981 at the age of just 43, she may very well have become something of a “telemovie queen”…
Availability: The Cracker Factory is easy to find online, though the copies are from old VHS dubs, meaning that the audio and visual quality is a little ropey, but certainly watchable.
If you liked this story, check out our features on other unsung auteurs Nancy Savoca, Robert Vincent O’Neil, Marvin J. Chomsky, Sam Firstenberg, Jack Sholder, Richard Gray, Giuseppe Andrews, Gus Trikonis, Greydon Clark, Frances Doel, Gordon Douglas, Billy Fine, Craig R. Baxley, Harvey Bernhard, Bert I. Gordon, James Fargo, Jeremy Kagan, Robby Benson, Robert Hiltzik, John Carl Buechler, Rick Carter, Paul Dehn, Bob Kelljan, Kevin Connor, Ralph Nelson, William A. Graham, Judith Rascoe, Michael Pressman, Peter Carter, Leo V. Gordon, Dalene Young, Gary Nelson, Fred Walton, James Frawley, Pete Docter, Max Baer Jr., James Clavell, Ronald F. Maxwell, Frank D. Gilroy, John Hough, Dick Richards, William Girdler, Rayland Jensen, Richard T. Heffron, Christopher Jones, Earl Owensby, James Bridges, Jeff Kanew, Robert Butler, Leigh Chapman, Joe Camp, John Patrick Shanley, William Peter Blatty, Peter Clifton, Peter R. Hunt, Shaun Grant, James B. Harris, Gerald Wilson, Patricia Birch, Buzz Kulik, Kris Kristofferson, Rick Rosenthal, Kirsten Smith & Karen McCullah, Jerrold Freeman, William Dear, Anthony Harvey, Douglas Hickox, Karen Arthur, Larry Peerce, Tony Goldwyn, Brian G. Hutton, Shelley Duvall, Robert Towne, David Giler, William D. Wittliff, Tom DeSimone, Ulu Grosbard, Denis Sanders, Daryl Duke, Jack McCoy, James William Guercio, James Goldstone, Daniel Nettheim, Goran Stolevski, Jared & Jerusha Hess, William Richert, Michael Jenkins, Robert M. Young, Robert Thom, Graeme Clifford, Frank Howson, Oliver Hermanus, Jennings Lang, Matthew Saville, Sophie Hyde, John Curran, Jesse Peretz, Anthony Hayes, Stuart Blumberg, Stewart Copeland, Harriet Frank Jr & Irving Ravetch, Angelo Pizzo, John & Joyce Corrington, Robert Dillon, Irene Kamp, Albert Maltz, Nancy Dowd, Barry Michael Cooper, Gladys Hill, Walon Green, Eleanor Bergstein, William W. Norton, Helen Childress, Bill Lancaster, Lucinda Coxon, Ernest Tidyman, Shauna Cross, Troy Kennedy Martin, Kelly Marcel, Alan Sharp, Leslie Dixon, Jeremy Podeswa, Ferd & Beverly Sebastian, Anthony Page, Julie Gavras, Ted Post, Sarah Jacobson, Anton Corbijn, Gillian Robespierre, Brandon Cronenberg, Laszlo Nemes, Ayelat Menahemi, Ivan Tors, Amanda King & Fabio Cavadini, Cathy Henkel, Colin Higgins, Paul McGuigan, Rose Bosch, Dan Gilroy, Tanya Wexler, Clio Barnard, Robert Aldrich, Maya Forbes, Steven Kastrissios, Talya Lavie, Michael Rowe, Rebecca Cremona, Stephen Hopkins, Tony Bill, Sarah Gavron, Martin Davidson, Fran Rubel Kuzui, Elliot Silverstein, Liz Garbus, Victor Fleming, Barbara Peeters, Robert Benton, Lynn Shelton, Tom Gries, Randa Haines, Leslie H. Martinson, Nancy Kelly, Paul Newman, Brett Haley, Lynne Ramsay, Vernon Zimmerman, Lisa Cholodenko, Robert Greenwald, Phyllida Lloyd, Milton Katselas, Karyn Kusama, Seijun Suzuki, Albert Pyun, Cherie Nowlan, Steve Binder, Jack Cardiff, Anne Fletcher ,Bobcat Goldthwait, Donna Deitch, Frank Pierson, Ann Turner, Jerry Schatzberg, Antonia Bird, Jack Smight, Marielle Heller, James Glickenhaus, Euzhan Palcy, Bill L. Norton, Larysa Kondracki, Mel Stuart, Nanette Burstein, George Armitage, Mary Lambert, James Foley, Lewis John Carlino, Debra Granik, Taylor Sheridan, Laurie Collyer, Jay Roach, Barbara Kopple, John D. Hancock, Sara Colangelo, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Joyce Chopra, Mike Newell, Gina Prince-Bythewood, John Lee Hancock, Allison Anders, Daniel Petrie Sr., Katt Shea, Frank Perry, Amy Holden Jones, Stuart Rosenberg, Penelope Spheeris, Charles B. Pierce, Tamra Davis, Norman Taurog, Jennifer Lee, Paul Wendkos, Marisa Silver, John Mackenzie, Ida Lupino, John V. Soto, Martha Coolidge, Peter Hyams, Tim Hunter, Stephanie Rothman, Betty Thomas, John Flynn, Lizzie Borden, Lionel Jeffries, Lexi Alexander, Alkinos Tsilimidos, Stewart Raffill, Lamont Johnson, Maggie Greenwald and Tamara Jenkins.
