Raggedy Man

The movie was made with a lot of love and startingly fresh memories of the early 1940s, and reminds us once again that Spacek is a treasure.

(Fisk) gives us flowing, expressive images that linger in the memory. What also lingers in the memory are some of the performances Fisk gets: Spacek in particular, who seems grown up, and Roberts, who is unexpectedly simple and open.

A patchwork quilt of clashing colors, but it's cozy and warm. [10 Oct 1981]

A small, lovingly detailed story of wartime hardship and smalltown malice, Raggedy Man proceeds with a quiet, lyric, slightly sentimental charm, but it doesn't trust its own modest virtues. [05 Oct 1981, p.78]

A compelling but oddly empty film.

Raggedy Man is something like a country-and-western ballad that relates a supposedly sad, melodramatic story but whose simple, repetitive, upbeat rhythms effectively deny the awfulness of the events being sung about.

Raggedy Man is starved for scenes that might fill out our scanty store of information--for example, a little more about the marriage, the love affair, her identity as a mother. Even the location needs to be filled out, since one forms the misimpression that Gregory is not so much a small town as a ghost town. Next time, the Fisks owe it to themselves to bite off enough material to chew. [03 Jul 1982, p.B3]