Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff is a 1979

1979 in film

The year 1979 in film involved some significant events.- Major events :* March 5 - Production begins on Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back.* May 25 - Alien, a landmark of the science fiction genre, is released....

 American

Cinema of the United States

The cinema of the United States, also known as Hollywood, has had a profound effect on cinema across the world since the early 20th century. Its history is sometimes separated into four main periods: the silent film era, classical Hollywood cinema, New Hollywood, and the contemporary period...

 drama film

Drama film

A drama film is a film genre that depends mostly on in-depth development of realistic characters dealing with emotional themes. Dramatic themes such as alcoholism, drug addiction, infidelity, moral dilemmas, racial prejudice, religious intolerance, poverty, class divisions, violence against women...

 directed by Marvin J. Chomsky

Marvin J. Chomsky

Marvin J. Chomsky is an American television and film director. He has also worked as a producer. He is a cousin of academic Noam Chomsky....

. The screenplay by Polly Platt

Polly Platt

Mary Marr "Polly" Platt was an American film producer, production designer and screenwriter.-Early life:Platt was born Mary Marr Platt in Fort Sheridan, Illinois on January 29, 1939, later using the name Polly. Her father John was a colonel in the army while her mother Vivian worked in...

 is based on the 1970 novel of the same title by William Inge

William Inge

William Motter Inge was an American playwright and novelist, whose works typically feature solitary protagonists encumbered with strained sexual relations. In the early 1950s, he had a string of memorable Broadway productions, and one of these, Picnic, earned him a Pulitzer Prize...

.

The film was released on videotape with these alternate titles: The Sin, The Shaming and Secret Yearnings.

Characters and story

Set in Freedom, a fictional small Kansas town, in 1956, the film focuses on Evelyn Wyckoff, a lonely and depressed 35-year-old high school Latin teacher who no longer finds any satisfaction in her work. She is undergoing therapy with Wichita

Wichita, Kansas

Wichita is the largest city in the U.S. state of Kansas.As of the 2010 census, the city population was 382,368. Located in south-central Kansas on the Arkansas River, Wichita is the county seat of Sedgwick County and the principal city of the Wichita metropolitan area...

 psychiatrist Dr. Steiner but making little progress. One day she is accosted by Rafe Collins, an African American

African American

African Americans are citizens or residents of the United States who have at least partial ancestry from any of the native populations of Sub-Saharan Africa and are the direct descendants of enslaved Africans within the boundaries of the present United States...

 scholarship student who cleans classrooms at the end of the school day. When the young man makes lewd suggestions and begins to unzip his pants, Evelyn flees in a panic but decides to tell no one what transpired, hoping it was an isolated incident.

The following day, Rafe approaches Evelyn again and rapes her on her desk. Ashamed and fearful of the public disgrace she will suffer if she reports being violated by a black man, she chooses to remain silent. Rafe forces himself upon her on a daily basis, and eventually Evelyn, craving attention and mistaking their sadomasochistic relationship for true love, begins to look forward to their trysts.

Cast

• Anne Heywood
  Anne Heywood
  Anne Heywood is a British film actress. Born as Violet Pretty in Handsworth, Birmingham, England, she won the Miss Great Britain title under her real name in 1950,...
  
   ..... Evelyn Wyckoff
• John Lafayette ..... Rafe Collins
• Donald Pleasence
  Donald Pleasence
  Sir Donald Henry Pleasence, OBE, was a British actor who gained more than 200 screen credits during a career which spanned over four decades...
  
   ..... Dr. Steiner
• Robert Vaughn
  Robert Vaughn
  Robert Francis Vaughn, , is an American actor noted for stage, film and television work. His best known roles include the suave spy Napoleon Solo in the 1960s television series The Man from U.N.C.L.E., wealthy detective Harry Rule in the 1970s television series The Protectors, Albert Stroller in...
  
   ..... Dr. Neal
• Earl Holliman
  Earl Holliman
  -Early life:Earl Holliman was born at Delhi in Richland Parish of northeastern Louisiana. Holliman’s biological father died before he was born, and his biological mother, living in poverty with several other children, gave him up for adoption at birth...
  
   ..... Ed Eckles
• Carolyn Jones
  Carolyn Jones
  Carolyn Sue Jones was an American actress.Jones began her film career in the early 1950s, and by the end of the decade had achieved recognition with a nomination for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for The Bachelor Party and a Golden Globe Award as one of the most promising actresses...
  
   ..... Beth
• Ronee Blakley
  Ronee Blakley
  Ronee Blakley is an American entertainer. Though an accomplished singer, songwriter, composer, producer and director, she is perhaps best known as an actress...
  
   ..... Betsy
• Dorothy Malone
  Dorothy Malone
  Dorothy Malone is an American actress. Her film career began in 1943, and in her early years she played small roles, mainly in B-movies. After a decade in films, she began to acquire a more glamorous image, particularly after her performance in Written on the Wind , for which she won the Academy...
  
   ..... Mildred
• Doris Roberts
  Doris Roberts
  Doris Roberts is an American character actress of film, stage and television. She has received five Emmy Awards. She began her career in 1952, and may be best-known as Marie Barone on Everybody Loves Raymond from 1996–2005....
  
   ..... Marie
• Dana Elcar
  Dana Elcar
  Dana Elcar was an American television and movie character actor. Although he appeared in about 40 films, his most memorable role was on the 1980s and 1990s television series MacGyver as Peter Thornton, an administrator working for the Phoenix Foundation...
  
   ..... Havermeyer

Critical reception

Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times

Los Angeles Times

The Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California, since 1881. It was the second-largest metropolitan newspaper in circulation in the United States in 2008 and the fourth most widely distributed newspaper in the country....

called the film "perfectly dreadful" and added, "In their literalness, Polly Platt's script and Marvin Chomsky's direction compound each other disastrously... Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff expresses familiar truths about the painful conflict of the individual and society—but with a persistent sense of falseness and an utter lack of style."