Stanley Kauffmann

“If an actor—man or woman but more certainly a woman—has unkempt hair, has circles painted under the eyes, is tied in a a straitjacket, and is hauled screaming down thehall of a mental hospital by two burly guards, you can make book that his/he performance will be called marvelous. It may indeed by marvelous, of course, but it doesn’t need to be: the cheers will come, anyway. So they have come, without much reason, for Jessica Lange in this film derived from the life of Frances Farmer.

“Lange, who was in Tootsie and The Postman Always Rings Twice, is pretty, I suppose. I put it that way because, like Julie harris, she just doesn’t seem to have enough face: it looks like a pastry that has shrunk a bit. She tries hard in the part, but the best that can be said of her is that she is not bad. I was never taken. I was always watching her do her best. Sam Shepard, the premier American playwright who occasionally acts in films, fills the screen more with his mere presence—as a loyal hometown newspaper pal—than Lange does with all her strained Sturm und Drang.”

Stanley Kauffmann
The New Republic, February 7, 1983

Postscript. With Country in 1984, Kauffmann began to admire Lange, continuing through Far North, The Music Box, and Blue Sky.