Unstrung Heroes (1995) and Ovarian Cancer

Los Angeles in the early 1960s. Twelve-year-old Steven Lidz lives with his mother Selma, warm and steady, and his father Sid, an inventor who believes logic can solve anything. Selma is diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Sid cannot cope, oscillating between denial and collapse, and the household stops functioning. Steven goes to live with his two uncles, Danny and Arthur, who share a room in a decaying hotel: Danny a conspiracy-minded talker, Arthur a hoarder who keeps everything from balls of string to newspapers. They rename him Franz, take him to synagogue against his father's rationalist objections, and give him a version of childhood his parents can no longer supply. Steven quietly assembles a box of his mother's belongings - a memorial made before she has died. Selma dies. Steven rescues the home movies his father has thrown out, and father and son watch them together, which is where the film chooses to end: not on recovery, but on what a family keeps.

Spoilers throughout. Discussing the cancer storyline means discussing how this ends.

The film's real subject is a child displaced by a parent's illness, and that is drawn precisely. Steven is not told very much, works out most of it himself, and is sent away in the name of protecting him. The disintegration of the surviving parent is unusually honest - Sid's denial is not villainy but a man out of his depth. The uncles function as what would now be called informal kinship care, absorbing a child that no service is going to help. Steven's memory box, made while his mother is still alive, is exactly the sort of anticipatory grieving children do. And the film understands that after a death the useful thing is often not words but the physical remnants: photographs, objects, film reels.

Selma's illness is almost entirely undramatised as illness. There is no diagnostic story, no surgery, no chemotherapy, no oncologist; she is well, then unwell, then gone. She remains lucid, gentle and composed to the last, dying in an armchair after a round of affectionate goodbyes - a scene the real Franz Lidz, whose memoir this is, publicly criticised as sentimentalised. Advanced ovarian cancer more often involves abdominal distension, bowel obstruction, repeated hospital admissions and heavy symptom control. The film's tastefulness costs it the truth of the deathbed.

Ovarian cancer is the one on this list where the absence of screening is the headline fact. The US Preventive Services Task Force recommends against screening for ovarian cancer in women without symptoms who do not have a known high-risk inherited syndrome - a grade D recommendation, meaning the harms outweigh the benefits. Transvaginal ultrasound and the CA-125 blood test have not been shown to reduce deaths from ovarian cancer, and they produce false alarms that lead to unnecessary operations. A cervical screening test does not detect ovarian cancer; this is a common and consequential misunderstanding. The National Cancer Institute notes that ovarian cancer often causes no early symptoms, which is the main reason it is frequently found late. When symptoms do appear they are easy to dismiss: bloating or a swollen abdomen, pelvic or abdominal pain or pressure, feeling full quickly or difficulty eating, and needing to pass urine urgently or often. The pattern that matters is symptoms that are new, persistent and happening most days over several weeks - that warrants a doctor's appointment. Women with a strong family history of ovarian or breast cancer, or a known BRCA1 or BRCA2 change, should be referred for genetic counselling, as different management applies to them.

A film is not a diagnosis, and a dramatised illness is not a guide to your own. What a story like this is genuinely good for is lowering the barrier to a conversation you might otherwise put off.

If something in your body has changed and stayed changed for a few weeks, that is worth raising with a doctor — not because it is likely to be cancer, but because most of the time it will not be, and finding that out is the point. Where screening exists for a cancer, it is the one thing you can do before anything is wrong at all. See screening and possible warning signs.

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Unstrung Heroes is worth watching as a film. It is not a guide to the disease it portrays. The gap between the two is what this page is for — and the thing worth carrying away is that a change which persists is worth a conversation, whatever a story led you to expect.

This page describes a work of film or television for education. It is not medical advice, and nothing here is a judgement of anyone's real medical care. Spotted an error? Please email [email protected].