Listen to the conversation between Frances and Betty, and listen later to how it is recycled in the book Betty writes, which glimpses the love of Bob and Frances from outside. This smile replaces 20 minutes of exposition. I have seen Seymour Cassel in countless roles over the years but did not guess he had a smile like the one he uses to greet Frances at the airport-the smile of a happy man who is happy as a puppy dog to see her. That Bob still loves Frances is clear from the first time we see him, in an extraordinary closeup.

She doesn't know they had a daughter, but she senses their feeling for each other and feels no jealousy. But always Betty has known that Frances occupies emotional ground in her husband's mind.

Bob and Betty ( Seymour Cassel and Peggy Gormley) have been happily married for 30 years. Frances has led an interrupted life and her death will not be tidy, either.Д¬onsider one of the most beautiful and mysterious scenes in the movie, where Frances visits the Pennsylvania farm of a former lover and his wife. Movies are fond of deathbed scenes in which all matters are sealed and wounds cured, but sometimes, with plain bad timing, people just die and leave matters undetermined. He shows us a story that is not completed and, because of death, will never be completed. In 'Sleepy Time Gal,' he does an unexpected thing. The film is written and directed by Christopher Munch, who made 'The Hours and Times' (1991), about a trip to Spain during which John Lennon experiments with homosexuality. That night Rebecca sleeps with Jimmy, who has no way of knowing she is the daughter of the Sleepy Time Gal. Rebecca, looking at her photograph, has no way of knowing it is her mother. He loved the announcer who was known as the Sleepy Time Gal. There were a lot of reasons, he says, and one of them was love.

Rebecca asks him why he never moved to a bigger market. 'I'll be damned if I know what it is that makes this deal so sad,' Rebecca says, but Jimmy is not sad he plans to travel with his wife, maybe to Malaysia. He wants to give its record collection to the local community college. The radio station for many years played rhythm and blues it was a 'race station' when such stations were unknown, says its proud owner, Jimmy ( Frankie Faison). She looks at it, but what can it tell her? Drive on. She travels to Daytona Beach to buy a radio station for her employer and has the taxi stop outside a hospital there-the hospital, she knows, where she was born. She is Rebecca ( Martha Plimpton), raised by foster parents in Boston, now a corporate lawyer. She wishes she could contact the daughter. The other son phones in from London but will not supply a return number. One of the sons faithfully attends her bedside, but he observes, 'She doesn't really know very much about me'-perhaps not even that he is gay. She was married twice, had a son by each marriage-and she also, we learn, had a daughter by a third man and gave her up for adoption. Very early, she was the late-night disk jockey on a Florida radio station, and her later jobs reflected various causes or passing fancies. 'Sleepy Time Gal' stars Jacqueline Bisset as Frances, a woman who in some ways has led an admirable life. We think we'll have enough time to tidy up the loose ends, and then death slams down. Now she is dying, and in her quiet and civilized way is trying to double back and see what can be retrieved. Oh, what a sad story this is, about a woman who never accepted anything good in her life because she was hoping for something better.

Time gal