Not Without My Daughter

Central to the effectiveness of the film is the performance of Sally Field as Betty. She is magnificent. No star is more proficient at portraying the American woman beset by woes not of her own making. In her unadorned face are reflected the compassion, the sense of betrayal, the suffering, the maternal love and the gumption to escape her bondage. [07 Jan 1991]

Not Without My Daughter creeps up on you like an icy chill. Not since Midnight Express in 1978 has imprisonment in a foreign country been so alarmingly and intimately conveyed on film. [11 Jan 1991, p.69]

While careful not to denounce the religion, the film fires a powerful broadside at fundamentalist Islam in general and revolutionary Iran in particular. [11 Jan 1991]

Not Without emerges as a remarkably compelling, timely biographical melodrama about as painful a case of sexual and marital betrayal as one can imagine.

Field captures the sense of outrage to perfection, puffy-eyed, screaming and plotting escape. Appropriately enough, the film is strictly deglamorised; combined with the lack of sympathetic characters, it all adds up to difficult, compelling viewing as we're drawn into the deepening nightmare. Read full review

Here is a perplexing and frustrating film, which works with great skill to involve our emotions, while at the same time making moral and racial assertions that are deeply troubling. Read full review

Field is at her best, downtrodden and determined as ever, and Sheila Rosenthal as Mahtob, Betty and Moody's little daughter, is adorable. [11 Jan 1991, p.E1]

By film's end, the husband's reasons and rationalizations seem all but incomprehensible. That doesn't, however, prevent this from being a thoroughly engrossing tale. [11 Jan 1991, p.24]

Not Without My Daughter, based on the true story of Betty Mahmoody, presents a strong picture of the struggle of a mother and daughter trying to leave Iran together. The film succeeds very well in creating suspense over their situation without coating it with undue sentimentality. [12 Jan 1991, p.5D]

Sally Field has the stage to herself to engage the audience’s sympathy, and this she does with an earnest, suitably emotional performance as a rather typically sincere, middle-class American. Read full review

Not Without My Daughter ultimately does what it's supposed to do. It makes us care, it keeps us interested (mostly), but it rarely delivers more -- despite what the producers might think. [11 Jan 1991, p.G13]

Time to get out your flood pants and economy-size Kleenex. Sally Field has the weepies again. But unlike the hoked-up waterworks that turned Field's Steel Magnolias into rust, Not Without My Daughter has an iron-clad plus going for it - harrowing reality. [11 Jan 1991, p.1D]

This real-life case of Misery sets your teeth on edge, your blood boiling, your adrenaline surging with the subtlety of a World War II propaganda film. Read full review

What's surprising about Not Without My Daughter (which was adapted from a book that Betty Mahmoody wrote with William Hoffer) is how effective it is despite its obvious shortcomings. As a conventional thriller along the lines of, say, a Mission: Impossible episode, the movie actually manages to be borderline entertaining. [11 Jan 1991, p.9]

Not Without My Daughter is so patriotic that it plays like propaganda from the U.S. Defense Department. [11 Jan 1991, p.7]

It is Field's bursting, big-eyed American-ness - a commodity she has carefully banked since her days as TV's "Gidget" - that generates the film's lurid fascination. [11 Jan 1991, p.K]

Not even Seth's elegance and worldly warmth, nor his short speech about the virtues of his country's culture, is enough to give balance to the film's nearly two-hour portrayal of harassment, inequality and suppression. [11 Jan 1991, p.F1]

While not wishing to be facetious about women and children held against their will in any country, this tearjerker is strictly TV movie for a wet Wednesday stuff. Read full review

By enlisting jingoism and reducing an entire culture to caricature, Not Without My Daughter defeats any progressive point it may have intended to make. Read full review

It's a seriously intended movie that goes grossly comic when it means to be most solemn. It's a tale of mother love and freedom that is both mean and narrow. Read full review

It would all be worth getting mad over were the film not so plodding or so obvious in its tactics. Read full review