Lynne Littman Movies
- 1999
A young woman with multiple sclerosis (Samantha Mathis) is placed in an assisted care facility by her family. While at first she feels abandoned and hopeless, she learns to develop a new confidence, self-respect and independence by bonding with her fellow patients, who learn important lessons from each other about growing as a group and as individuals. Supporting cast includes Natalie Cole as a blues singer who has been severely injured in an accident. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Samantha Mathis, Jonathan Silverman, (more)
- 1999
- NR
Based on the best-selling book by Sarah L. Delany and A. Elizabeth Delany with Amy Hill Hearth, which was later adapted into a Broadway play, Having Our Say tells the true story of the Delany Sisters, two African-American women who were fathered by a former slave, went on to attend college, and witnessed the slow but steady advance of civil rights in America before a reporter for The New York Times sat down with them to record their story. In the film version, 103-year-old Sadie (Diahann Carroll) is a polite and soft-spoken woman who deals cheerfully with the questions of journalist Amy Hill Hearth (Amy Madigan). Sadie's considerably more feisty 101-year-old sister (and housemate) Bessie (Ruby Dee) grumbles about "white people who ask you to explain the obvious to them," but soon adds her own stories as the Delanys discuss their quietly remarkable lives as career women and racial pioneers who not only survived Jim Crow laws, they outlived Jim Crow, as well. Produced for CBS Television, Having Our Say was first aired April 18, 1999. Incidentally, Bessie Delany died in 1995 at age 104, while Sadie, at 110, passed on in 1999, only a few months before this was first aired. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Diahann Carroll, Ruby Dee, (more)
- 1985
In a tragic twist of fate, the protagonist here -- anthropologist Dr. Barbara Myerhoff -- contracted cancer after filming began and did not survive to see the release of this documentary. Myerhoff's investigation into the spiritual and cultural meaning of the Jewish Hasidic community in the Fairfax district of Los Angeles is the focus of the film. As a result of her own negative prognosis, Myerhoff's interviews and interactions with the Hasidic community and its spiritual leaders acquired added meaning. What emerges is a broad view of a cultural and religious enclave that is not well-known outside its boundaries. Director Lynne Littman previously filmed an excellent post-holocaust drama, Testament (1983). ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide
Director Lynne Littman has created an effective, understated portrayal of the cost of a nuclear war in human terms, in a film as far removed from the fake hyperbole of action and disaster movies as the natural world is from cartoons. Set in the small California town of Hamlin, the Wetherly family and their everyday concerns open the story. The trivia that fills their secure, ordinary existence disappears when a TV show is interrupted with the announcement that nuclear bombs have exploded in the major cities on the East Coast, and then the entire scene is erased in an increasingly white, blank movie screen -- meant to show that nuclear blasts have been detonated in California as well. Over 1000 people die in the first month from radiation sickness, but the mother in the Wetherly family (Jane Alexander) displays great inner strength as she cares for orphaned children the family has taken under its wing and goes on sustaining those that remain in her own family. At one point, she quietly conveys to her daughter the happiness of intimacy between two adults, knowing her daughter will not live to experience adult love. As these individuals and the children cope with day-to-day existence, there is never any intrusion of overt horrors, the focus remains on the individuals and the way in which they adjust to the inevitable. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Jane Alexander, William Devane, (more)
