The Subject Was Roses

“The Story of Three Strangers...A Mother...A Father...And a Son.”

Timmy Cleary (Martin Sheen) comes back to the family apartment in the Bronx at the end of World War II, expecting the home he left. Instead he finds his parents, John (Jack Albertson) and Nettie (Patricia Neal), trading quarrels and old grudges across the same table. Ulu Grosbard adapts Frank D. Gilroy's Pulitzer-winning play, and what it shows plainly is how love between parents and child can survive in the things they cannot say aloud.