The Burning Bed

The Burning Bed (1984) is an American TV film you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Robert Greenwald and starring Farrah Fawcett as Francine Hughes — a Michigan woman who endured thirteen years of beatings before setting fire to the bed with her husband asleep in it.

Fawcett strips out everything audiences expected from her: no glamour, no wit, just someone worn down to almost nothing by sustained violence and official indifference. Paul Le Mat plays the husband, and Greenwald gives him just enough recognizable humanity to make the situation more disturbing, not less. The real case went to trial in 1977; the jury acquitted Francine on grounds of temporary insanity. When the film aired on NBC in October 1984, roughly 75 million people watched — one of the most-seen TV movies of the decade — and it pushed domestic abuse legislation to the center of political debate in a way that reporting alone hadn't managed. Watch The Burning Bed online on iFILM.