The Man Who Cried

Let me start by saying Catherine Cookson was a very popular British novelist who sold something like 100 million books during her career. If her books had been like this boiler plate TV production she would not have sold 100 books.

Here is the story: A man abruptly leaves a failed marriage and travels with his son to Northern England where he eventually has to marry again (and thus commit bigamy). Wife finds him....soap twists and turns abound--second wife Hilda discovers she is not her father's daughter etc etc....

The first half is by far the best...the boy Dick is played by a charismatic child actor he makes the first half. The second half of the series is lousy from the 2 dimensional rendition of war time England to just the way the screen writers condensed and parsed the novel--a common problem with book/movies.

Another problem for me was the Appalachian type sound track...it is incongruous to the location.

This is an over dramatized soap with below average production values. I blame the writers and a couple miscast characters.

One measure I have of soaps is if they make make me care about the characters... in the second half of this film I grew to dislike all of them. Beware!