SOURCE: “Women in Crisis,” in New Leader, January 8, 1990, pp. 22-3.

In the following excerpt, Morrone offers an unfavorable assessment of Strapless, finding fault with the film's casting and characterizations.

Four films concerning women that were presented at this fall’s New York Film Festival are now scheduled for general release. …

Strapless is playwright David Hare’s first film as writer-director to be shown in this country since Wetherby in 1985. The two films are so much alike, however, that you could call the new offering a clone of the earlier one.

Heroine Lillian (Blair Brown) is an American doctor who practices in London because she admires the orderliness of the Socialist medical system. A highly accomplished diagnostician, her respect for facts and procedures masks her dislike of emotionalism—she tends bodies with all the severity that Vanessa Redgrave’s schoolteacher educated minds in Wetherby. Indeed, Lillian’s hospital not...