Set in a small East Texas town in 1944, 'Raggedy Man' focuses on the life of Rita Longley (Sissy Spacek), a telephone operator who also happens to be an attractive single mother of two young boys. Shunned by the townsfolk because she's divorced, and lorded over by her petulant boss, Mr. Rigby (R.G. Armstrong), Rita feels trapped and oppressed. One rainy night along comes Teddy (Eric Roberts), a handsome young sailor on leave, who asks to use Rita's pay phone to make a long distance call to his sweetheart in Oklahoma. After discovering from the girl's father that she has since married another man, Teddy is suddenly bereft of a destination and with free time on his hands. He and Rita strike up a friendship that quickly evolves into romance. Rita's young kids, Harry (Henry Thomas) and Henry (Carey Hollis, Jr.), also take a strong liking to Teddy, and vice versa. But this faux family's idyll is short-lived; town gossip and enmity threaten to explode into something much worse and Rita asks Teddy to leave. At this point the film takes an odd, violent turn. Calvin (William Sanderson) and Arnold (Tracey Walter), two local good ole' boys who have been slavering over Rita, invade her house and threaten rape but Bailey (Sam Shepard)—the mysterious, lurking, silent "raggedy man" of the film's title—steps in to save the day and is himself killed in the process. Rita and her two boys take a bus out of town the next morning to start a new life in Corpus Christi and it is finally revealed that the raggedy man was, indeed, Rita's ex-husband. Though well acted and evocative, 'Raggedy Man' suffers from William D. Witliff's starkly bifurcated narrative, which is really two different movies that do not connect: a moving, folksy slice-of-life story about a struggling but noble young mother and, in its later stages, a rather generic suspense thriller à la 'Wait Until Dark'. VHS (1998); DVD (2004).
Review of Raggedy Man
