The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds

Director Paul Newman and screenwriter Alvin Sargent bring Paul Zindel’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, to the screen in this 1972 adaptation starring Joanne Woodward as a struggling working-class widow, the disturbed mother of two girls. Oldest daughter Ruth (Roberta Wallach) is a rebellious adolescent, already in trouble; younger child Matilda (Nell Potts, daughter of Newman and Woodward) may still have a chance, like some of the flowers in her school science project, which lends the film its title.