This fine drama is about Joe Hardy (Dennis Weaver), a former Vietnam P.O.W. who manages to escape from captivity, only to return home to find that, because he had been reported dead, his wife (Anne Francis) has remarried in the intervening five years, his father has died, and his father's business partner has sold the business his father worked years to build for half its value in exchange for a guaranteed position with the company. The one relatively constant benchmark in his life is his daughter, Sharon (Pamelyn Ferdin), who, although twice the age she was when he was captured, at least is thrilled to see him and hasn't made the life-altering changes that his wife has.
Unfortunately, Joe has great difficulty accepting that his life has changed so dramatically, and he also suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder-like symptoms that have him confusing the people and events around him with the scenes from his long years of captivity -- to the point that he occasionally dissociates from reality and believes that he's back in Vietnam either in captivity or on the run after his escape. His ex-wife panics and tries to separate him from his daughter -- which, under the circumstances, is about the worst thing that could happen to him.
On the bright side, Joe gets lots of support from his former debating partner from college, Anne (Lois Nettleton), who lost her fiancé to the war shortly after Joe was reported missing and presumed dead. He follows her to the school where she teaches in Arizona and where, coincidentally, his wife and her new husband send Sharon to get her away from him. Joe, unfortunately, is terrified that he'll end up in another cell -- this time a jail cell -- and that he'll lose that last remaining constant in his life, so he, too, panics and takes Sharon on an odyssey that it seems likely is going to end badly.
Dennis Weaver does a fine job portraying the miasma of emotions swirling around in a man who went off to serve his country and returns home to find the entire world he remembered has been swept away; he conveys a lot with just a flicker of his face or a furtive glance. Lois Nettleton likewise is excellent as Joe's best friend in this brave new world that he faces. Mention must also be made of Percy Rodriques, giving a typically smooth and believable portrayal of a Marine officer who acts as a kind of escort for Joe back into his bewildering new life.
What's remarkable about watching this made-for-television drama 40 or so years on was both how accurate and how prescient it was when it was released in 1971, two years before the real Vietnam P.O.W.s actually came home. Their experiences would have been difficult enough, because even with family members waiting to embrace them, they often found themselves in a kind of Rip Van Winkle world -- their children had aged, loved ones had died, and the world they remembered existed only in a mental time capsule, and was not the world to which they returned. But Joe Hardy's experience is even worse, because no one was waiting for him, and he must instead deal with the awkwardness created by the "good news" that he's still alive.
One point of correction -- another review suggests that the plot summary here is wrong, and that the main character's experiences were all in his mind. That was indeed the plot of a made-for-TV movie of this era, but it was "Welcome Home, Johnny Bristol," which was released just a few months after "The Forgotten Man," and starred not Dennis Weaver but Martin Landau. Because both involved PTSD-haunted P.O.W.s, and were released at almost the same time, it's an easy mistake to make, but this is definitely the movie described in the plot summary you'll find on IMDb's title page for this film.
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