Great visuals, story delivers no surprises

Good story, Not enough for a whole film

It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

When the film begins, a group of Asian kids find an emaciated American soldier on the beach. Apparently, Lt. Joe Hardy (Dennis Weaver) had been in a North Vietnamese prisoner of war camp for five years and had just escaped. But this does NOT mean life is great for Joe, as when he's rescued, he soon learns that not only has his wife remarried but his father is dead! Apparently, Joe was declared dead and the wife naturally had to get on with her life. What follows is an interesting film for many reasons. First, it's one of the earlier films to really address PTSD, as Joe naturally is a screwed up guy considered what he'd been through as well as his adjustment to civilian life. Second, although very rare, I am sure such situations must have occurred--with men returning home to find their families had gotten on with their lives after they'd been mistaken for dead. And, third, the actors did a really nice job here and the problems were not overly sensationalized---with the actors and director doing a fine job in conveying an excellent tale. Overall, well worth seeing and one of the better installments of the "ABC Movie of the Week". And, if you want to see the film, it's currently on YouTube.By the way, if Joe's daughter sounds familiar, it's because Pamelyn Ferdin played Lucy Van Pelt in several of the Charlie Brown films (including "A Boy Named Charlie Brown"). She also played Felix Unger's daughter on the old "Odd Couple" television show. Wonder what she's up to today...

This fine drama is about Joe Hardy (Dennis Weaver), a former Vietnam P.O.W. who manages to escape from captivity, only to return home to find that, because he had been reported dead, his wife (Anne Francis) has remarried in the intervening five years, his father has died, and his father's business partner has sold the business his father worked years to build for half its value in exchange for a guaranteed position with the company. The one relatively constant benchmark in his life is his daughter, Sharon (Pamelyn Ferdin), who, although twice the age she was when he was captured, at least is thrilled to see him and hasn't made the life-altering changes that his wife has.Unfortunately, Joe has great difficulty accepting that his life has changed so dramatically, and he also suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder-like symptoms that have him confusing the people and events around him with the scenes from his long years of captivity -- to the point that he occasionally dissociates from reality and believes that he's back in Vietnam either in captivity or on the run after his escape. His ex-wife panics and tries to separate him from his daughter -- which, under the circumstances, is about the worst thing that could happen to him.On the bright side, Joe gets lots of support from his former debating partner from college, Anne (Lois Nettleton), who lost her fiancé to the war shortly after Joe was reported missing and presumed dead. He follows her to the school where she teaches in Arizona and where, coincidentally, his wife and her new husband send Sharon to get her away from him. Joe, unfortunately, is terrified that he'll end up in another cell -- this time a jail cell -- and that he'll lose that last remaining constant in his life, so he, too, panics and takes Sharon on an odyssey that it seems likely is going to end badly.Dennis Weaver does a fine job portraying the miasma of emotions swirling around in a man who went off to serve his country and returns home to find the entire world he remembered has been swept away; he conveys a lot with just a flicker of his face or a furtive glance. Lois Nettleton likewise is excellent as Joe's best friend in this brave new world that he faces. Mention must also be made of Percy Rodriques, giving a typically smooth and believable portrayal of a Marine officer who acts as a kind of escort for Joe back into his bewildering new life.What's remarkable about watching this made-for-television drama 40 or so years on was both how accurate and how prescient it was when it was released in 1971, two years before the real Vietnam P.O.W.s actually came home. Their experiences would have been difficult enough, because even with family members waiting to embrace them, they often found themselves in a kind of Rip Van Winkle world -- their children had aged, loved ones had died, and the world they remembered existed only in a mental time capsule, and was not the world to which they returned. But Joe Hardy's experience is even worse, because no one was waiting for him, and he must instead deal with the awkwardness created by the "good news" that he's still alive.One point of correction -- another review suggests that the plot summary here is wrong, and that the main character's experiences were all in his mind. That was indeed the plot of a made-for-TV movie of this era, but it was "Welcome Home, Johnny Bristol," which was released just a few months after "The Forgotten Man," and starred not Dennis Weaver but Martin Landau. Because both involved PTSD-haunted P.O.W.s, and were released at almost the same time, it's an easy mistake to make, but this is definitely the movie described in the plot summary you'll find on IMDb's title page for this film.

Dennis Weaver plays a veteran who returns to what he remembers is his home town. Only when he gets there, there is no there there. SPOILERThis film is actually like a extended version of a good Twilight Zone episode. Weaver's character is certain something happened to the town and the government is covering it up. The twist is the town never existed except in Weaver's mind. He created the happy memory to get him through torture at a Vietnamese prison camp, until his mind finally accepted it as reality. An excellent film that is quite different than what the IMDb plot summary says about it.

Dennis Weaver is excellent as a P.O.W. thought missing in action, who turns up years later to find his life changed. Anne Francis plays the same kind of role she did in "Hook Line, and Sinker". Weaver really shows the confusion and frustration that returning home from war can bring.