Raggedy Man

A compelling but oddly empty film. Read full review

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]

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. Read full review

This is standard stuff and hardly worth Spacek’s talents. Read full review

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]