East Side/West Side (TV Series) The $5.98 Dress (1964) User Reviews

The lady or the tiger?

[Paularoc · 7/10 · 17 July 2013]

Josephine Stuart is a mother of three who can't support her family on what she gets from welfare, takes a job and doesn't report the fact she's working to welfare services. The authorities find out and she's thrown into jail. One of the things against her was that she bought a dress for her daughter costing $5.95. Really? Part of the reason, but not all, that she needs extra money is that she has been helping financially, increasingly reluctantly, her husband. After suffering a back injury, he became addicted to pain killing drugs. Now that his family is in severe straights and the children may be put into foster care, he insists to his wife and to Social Worker Brock that he will quit drugs and get a job. Brock finds him a job and after Stuart gets his first paycheck, he gives the check to his wife. But he later steals it back. Still struggling with the temptation to buy drugs, he goes to Brock's office and gives the check to Brock to hold for him. Then Stuart tries to retrieve the pay check from Brock's office and in the end, Brock gives him the check and tells Stuart that it's his decision about what he will do with the check. Brock then goes to tell Mrs. Stuart, who no longer is in jail, what has happened. They speculate about whether Stuart will return with the check or use it for drugs. Story ends. Will he or won't he? We can but hope he will return to his family. There's an interesting and rather lengthy discussion between Brock and a colleague about the welfare system and what a society should do for its impoverished members, especially the children. A discussion that is yet to be resolved. Interesting to see Bonnie Bedelia in an early role as the sulky Linda Stuart.

She's in jail he's on drugs and the rent isn't paid!

[kapelusznik18 · 6/10 · 13 November 2015]

****SPOILERS**** Battling super social worker Neil Brock, George C. Scott, uses his legal skills to defend single mom, who's husband is estranged as well as on drugs, Linda Stuart,Bonnie Bedeli, from not only being evicted from her bug and rat infested lower east side apartment but thrown behind bars for collecting a monthly welfare check, of $98.00, that in her having a job off the books that she's not legally entitled to. On top of all that her good for nothing husband Greg, Billy Ayers, is sharking her down every 15th of the month for her welfare check to use for supporting his drug or pain killer addiction.

Having to support herself and her three children Linda is forced to bend the rules a little to have enough money to support her family that in her working off the books got her into this mess in the first place. Brock knowing that he's up against it in defending Linda tries to get her husband who's disability check, due to a job related injury, has been canceled due to his drug addiction. By doing that so the charges against his wife ,in him paying back all the welfare that she illegally received, will be dropped and let off in Linda being shown mercy by the court.

****SPOILERS**** A sad ending to a sad story with Brock despite his elegant plea to the civil court for Linda to be set free lost the case as well as her husband Greg, whom Brock got a job for, blowing his chance in redeeming himself and going back to drugs with Linda's three children ending up wards of the state. This is what was so good about the hard hitting TV series "East/side West/Side" in not having a happy ending in every one of it's ground breaking episodes. And the reason it was eventually canceled in it being so ahead of its time that the public had trouble accepting the true reality of urban life that it was shielded from. That until, when the economy of many of those watching it went south, they were in one way or another forced to confront it!