The directorial debut of Jack Fisk, husband of the star, Sissy Spacek, and production designer on such things as Badlands, Carrie, Days of Heaven, and Heart Beat. An auspicious debut and a fine performance, but the achievements of director and star should not overshadow that of scriptwriter William Wittliff, who is largely responsible for how expertly constructed the movie is, how carefully and efficiently laid out are the setting of WWII Texas and the situation of the central character: divorcée, mother of two, lone telephone operator -- a job that quite literally doesn't let her out of the house for a minute -- in the small town of Gregory (having left her husband behind in the equally small town with the equally homey name of Edna). The small and continual delights of language and of human observation hardly need pointing out or insisting upon. The overall shapeliness of the script perhaps needs to be insisted upon a little more, especially in light of an ending which many are apt to find jarring. This ending, though, is out of key with the rest of the movie mainly in the sense that it seems so much less spontaneous, seems instead to have made up its mind what sort of scene it wanted to be and how it was to go about becoming that (something almost in the Halloween mode, only really closer to the Halloween sequence of To Kill a Mockingbird). However much you might care to quarrel with the fittingness of the ending, you can hardly fault how well it has been prepared for, how many of the elements that go into it have been made familiar to us earlier: the nightly, flashlight-guided trips to the outhouse, the occasional, short-lived electrical blackouts (these occurrences have been set up for us in a funny scene at the kitchen table when conversation dies with the light), and the entire procedure for handling a customer who needs to use the "public" phone in the heroine's foyer (the earlier scene here turns into a lovely, laconic bit of poetry when a sailor puts in a call to his fiancé, only to get the girl's father on the line and be told she has married somebody else). With Eric Roberts and Sam Shepard. (1981) — Duncan Shepherd