Molly Haskell

“Frances Farmer, the Hollywood actress of the tragically aborted career, and Sophie Zawistowska [in Sophie’s Choice]… are not only the biggest and most important roles for women to come along in some time, they are also the darkest. Jessica Lange’s gallant but reckless Frances and Meryl Streep’s ill-fated Sophie may reflect a new mood of pessimism among women, the future seen as a series of impossible choices rather than as one of limitless possibilities.

“Nonetheless I urge you to overcome your misgivings and see and savor these films for—if nothing else—two astonishing performances. Utterly unlike as they are, Lange and Streep are uncanny in the way they evoke existing legends while creating new ones of their own….

"Frances is a distinctly inferior film—a wearying dirge to ugly Americana in which a succession of gargoyles do in a beautiful woman, yet Jessica Lange grabs one by the short hairs in a way Streep never does.

“’Frances Farmer, you’re going straight to hell,’ a Seattle woman warns the young rebel in the beginning of the film, and she does ….

“It would be a mistake to see Frances as a classic martyr, a woman-as-victim. She was a creature of uncontrollable violence, who couldn’t make her way through a cocktail party without offending someone. Yet there was something emblematic about her too, and Jessica Lange, blonde, nervy, witty, with great huge restless hands, captures, without self pity, the haunting quality of the eternal misfit. Farmer wasn’t a great actress, but she was too talented, too smart, and too beautiful to fit into any of the less-than-great roles that life had made available.”

Molly Haskell
Vogue, date?

“Except for a great female performance at its center—Jessica Lange as the legendary Frances Farmer—Frances is the antithesis of Sophie’s Choice [which had the effect of “walking through a museum in which Styron’s images have bben placed under glass: exquisite, faithful to the letter, but without a life of their own”]: broad, flat, obvious, a waxworks gallery of American Gothic types trotted out to show how terrible life was to poor Frances. Her life was hideous, a series of bouts with pills, alcohol, jail and loony bins, but who’s to blame?….

“All of this would make a depressingly banal story of victimization were it not for the magic, the charm, the airy recklessness of Jessica Lange. As haunting in her own way as Frances Farmer was in hers, she conveys the inexpressibl poignancy of a woman who never quite fits in—who is too smart to be a beautiful plaything, and too beautiful to be just smart. Thanks to Lange and Sam Shepard…, Frances is not only worth seeing, it is a must!”

Molly Haskell
Playgirl, March 1983

See Haskell’s other reviews of Frances in Psychology Today