Judith Martin of The Washington Post wrote the film seemed 'especially cruel' to kill Sylvia Plath again 'by reputation,' by making the heroine of her story 'an elitist hysteric.' Luckily, Marilyn Hassett's Esther is involving and thoroughly convincing-if you're prepared to share her frequent pain at merely being alive.' It cries for imagery and stylization-some kind of visual expression of Esther's perceptions and torments, but Peerce's approach is resolutely literal. Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times wrote that the film 'would be ideal material for Ingmar Bergman, or more appropriately, since it is an American work, for the Woody Allen of Interiors.

It's a bad movie based on a book that has meant much to many, and they will be bitterly disappointed.' The Bell Jar is more than just a bad movie. Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune awarded the film one star out of four and called it 'downright laughable, a stormy TV soap opera without that genre's sense of humor.

As played by Marilyn Hassett, who has a cool, Seventeen magazine kind of prettiness, Esther emerges as a selfish, morbid little prig.' Variety wrote: 'Despite some decent performances, 'The Bell Jar,' based on the late poet Sylvia Plath's autobiographical novel, evokes neither understanding or sympathy for the plight of its heroine. It all simply plods along, en route to a nervous collapse that manages to seem perfectly unwarranted by the time it finally occurs.' The audience isn't given the slightest clue about Esther's quirks, her fears, her peculiarly distorted notion of herself.' The film has a 'way of spelling things out ad nauseam and still not making them clear.' Even where it should have flourished, like in descriptions of Esther's life in New York, 'there's no satirical edge to any of this, and no dramatic edge either. Janet Maslin of The New York Times was unimpressed, stating that the film's portrayal of Esther was 'disastrous because it is the character's imaginative life that leads her to a collapse, and the movie barely even goes skin-deep. The fashion-show scenes were shot on the seventh-floor terrace of the International Building in New York. The film was shot in June and July 1978 at Rutgers University in New Jersey, Four Winds Hospital in Katonah, New York and at various locations in New York City.

Production įilmmakers had been trying to adapt the novel for the screen since the early 1970s. Mia Farrow had been approached for the lead role at one point.

The belljar