The Burning Bed

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''The Burning Bed'' has been adapted by Rose Leiman Goldemberg, from Faith McNulty's book of the same name. The film, directed with a gripping sense of menace by Robert Greenwald, begins on the night of March 9, 1977, as Francine Hughes tells her four young children to wait in the car as she sets fire to the gasoline-drenched home that contains her sleeping husband, Mickey. Turning herself into the police and confessing that she committed murder, Francine would later make national headlines in a trial that ended with a verdict of not guilty by reason of temporary insanity, which is about as close to justifiable homicide as is legally possible. In prison before the trial, Francine begins telling her story to the court- appointed lawyer, Aryon Greydanus. A series of chronological flashbacks begins in 1963 when 16-year-old Francine, looking like a brand-new Barbie doll, is first attracted to Mickey Hughes, a slightly older guy who has a reputation for being ''kind of wild.'' Their hometown is Danville, Minn., and they are both from ''mountain folk'' families, living on the drab, uneducated, underemployed fringes of life. Finding Mickey ''real powerful,'' Francine marries him, moves in with his parents, who accept her passively as another object in the house, and settles down to an existence of almost unrelieved horror. Mickey's violence explodes early on as, unemployed and restless, he begins finding his wife's clothes too sexy or her attitudes too independent. A pregnant Francine flees to her own home but gets little support from her once-battered mother, who is fatalistic about such things: ''Women have to put up with their men, especially if there's children. And mostly men don't mean it. If you make a hard bed, you got to lay in it.'' Over the next 12 years, Francine will be subjected to repeated brutal beatings. Making several attempts to escape, she runs

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