Accomplished documentarist Claudia Weill directed the features Girlfriends and It's My Turn before making her name with TV's thirtysomething. She shows here what can be done with a true-life TV movie if dramatic restraint is allowed to triumph over tabloid sensationalism. Steering clear of melodramatic excess, Beverly D'Angelo impresses as the mother determined to bring to book the woman who adopted her son 20 years earlier and is now suspected of his murder. Also known as The Jerry Sherwood Story, this is the kind of intelligent film that restores credence to that much misused term "woman's picture".

A teenage mother is forced to give up her baby for adoption and, 19 years later, when she tries to contact her son, she learns that he died, under questionable circumstances when he was three years old.