The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds

The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (1972) is available to watch online on iFILM — an American drama directed by Paul Newman, based on Paul Zindel's Pulitzer Prize–winning play, with Joanne Woodward in the lead.

Beatrice Hunsdorfer (Woodward) is a middle-aged widow who has absorbed a lifetime's worth of disappointment and distributed it liberally to her daughters. She talks about opening a tearoom. She does not open a tearoom. Her older daughter Ruth is an epileptic teenager running on resentment. Her younger daughter Matilda — Tillie — is quietly growing marigolds irradiated with small amounts of radium for a school science project. Her hypothesis: that exposure to radiation, in measured doses, might produce something that blooms rather than withers.

Newman directed his own wife and cast his daughter Nell Newman in a supporting role — a genuinely family production that carries none of the warmth that phrase usually implies. Woodward claimed Best Actress at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival, and the performance earns it: Beatrice is recognizable, exhausting, and impossible to look away from. Stream The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (1972) online on iFILM.