1976 brought us Carrie's mother and Sybil's mother. Now meet John's mother, coldly played by DeAnn Mears, a woman who can't understand that her son Lance Kerwin's bedwetting issue is a medical problem, not a case of laziness. She goes out of her way to humiliate him every chance she gets by hanging the stained sheets out of the window, add even more cruelly arranges for a sleepover for him at a friend's house, certain that if he doesn't wet the bed there it will prove her right that he's just lazy. Father Brian Keith is powerless to stop her, even after they go to see a doctor. Kerwin is desperate to keep his friends from finding out his problem, but the problem isn't the medical issue. It's the cruelty of the mother who psychological abuse is horrendous to watch.
Losely based on the childhood of Michael Landon, the film starts with Landon interviewed by a reporter after winning a running marathon, and flashing back to what use he had as a child. Rather than make the film about him, he fictionalize has the character yet in publicity for the movie indicated that he had the same issue that John has here. Landon cast Melissa Sue Anderson as Kerwin's girlfriend, and she is adorable here as she was as Mary Ingalls. Kerwin, a popular young actor in the mid-seventies, is very good as the troubled teen, and you get to see where his ambition to become a great Runner started. It was from desperately trying to get home before his parents discovered the wet sheets.
This is not a film about an issue dealt with your wife are dead, go away. It is a serious issue that has affected young people and finally diagnosed as something beyond the person's control. It is hard to watch mainly because of how the mother brings her own son, in complete denial, and refusing to accept the doctor's diagnosis. The presentation of the sheets outside of his window he comes more humiliating every time that it occurs, and Mears gives subtle indications regret in her eyes. Somehow, she's compelled to be that it takes a lot before Keith stands up to his wife. This was a movie we discussed in school when it first aired, and kids who teased those with the problem got to see the repercussions of what they did. Hopefully parents like Mears did too.
Losely based on the childhood of Michael Landon, the film starts with Landon interviewed by a reporter after winning a running marathon, and flashing back to what use he had as a child. Rather than make the film about him, he fictionalize has the character yet in publicity for the movie indicated that he had the same issue that John has here. Landon cast Melissa Sue Anderson as Kerwin's girlfriend, and she is adorable here as she was as Mary Ingalls. Kerwin, a popular young actor in the mid-seventies, is very good as the troubled teen, and you get to see where his ambition to become a great Runner started. It was from desperately trying to get home before his parents discovered the wet sheets.
This is not a film about an issue dealt with your wife are dead, go away. It is a serious issue that has affected young people and finally diagnosed as something beyond the person's control. It is hard to watch mainly because of how the mother brings her own son, in complete denial, and refusing to accept the doctor's diagnosis. The presentation of the sheets outside of his window he comes more humiliating every time that it occurs, and Mears gives subtle indications regret in her eyes. Somehow, she's compelled to be that it takes a lot before Keith stands up to his wife. This was a movie we discussed in school when it first aired, and kids who teased those with the problem got to see the repercussions of what they did. Hopefully parents like Mears did too.