Come Back, Little Sheba is a 1952 American drama film directed by Daniel Mann in his directorial debut and produced by Paramount Pictures.

Starring Burt Lancaster, Shirley Booth, Terry Moore, and Richard Jaeckel, the film tells the story of a marriage between a recovering alcoholic and his frumpy wife, which is rocked when a young college student rents a room in the couple's house.

Doc, now sober for one year, is polite but distant toward his wife, while a lonely and unhappy Lola sleeps late, dresses sloppily, and does not keep a tidy house.

One day Marie brings home Turk, a star on the track team, to model for an ad she is creating for a local athletic competition.

The next morning Doc takes the whiskey he has not touched for a year from the cabinet and disappears for hours, missing the elaborate dinner Lola has planned for Marie and Bruce.

Lola sets the table with the fine china she received from Doc's mother when they married, cleans up the living room, and changes into a fancy dress.

[2] Booth told a Life magazine interviewer in 1952 that she had developed the character of Lola from observing several women on the streets of New York City, "including an unkempt woman she had seen walking aimlessly one night on Sixth Avenue with a dirty white poodle".

[2] Wallis recalled in his autobiography that "in order to make the trim and muscular Lancaster appear older, his baggy, shapeless costume was padded at the waist and he was instructed to stoop, hollow his chest and shuffle his feet".

[2] Wallis said in an interview that studio executives were "[p]repared to accept glamorous men and women in melodramas of the seamy side of life, [but] they were shocked at the thought of making a picture with beaten, unkempt, depressing people".

[2] Paramount pre-released the film in New York City and Los Angeles during Christmas week of 1952 in order to qualify for the Academy Award nominations for that year.

The National Board of Review awarded Shirley Booth its Best Actress honor, having viewed the film in a screening room at Paramount Pictures.

[9] The Akron Beacon Journal noted in its review that the local theater delayed screening the picture until after the awards season, in order to take advantage of the resultant publicity.

[11] The Akron Beacon Journal noted the frankness of the script, in which the lead characters openly discuss the reason for their hasty marriage and the college students are seen as "sex-happy".

[13] The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette asserted that Booth's "is the kind of a performance that strikes a match to the screen, and endows the profession of acting with a towering dignity.

[15] Film critic John C. McCarten agreed with that sentiment, writing: "Her portrait of a loving, not too bright lady driving a sensitive man to drink looks so authentic it is unsettling".

[7] Crowther adds: "As the pretty and hot-blooded boarder, Terry Moore strikes precisely the right note of timeless and endless animalism and Richard Jaeckel is good as the boy who carnally pursues her".

Critics also praised Philip Ober's role as an Alcoholics Anonymous leader, and the A.A. meeting scene itself, which the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette described as "quite touching and revealingly illustrated"[14] and which Crowther called "one of the nicer bits of Americana in the film".

[13] Sociologist Norman K. Denzin writes that Come Back, Little Sheba was the first Hollywood production to depict an A.A. meeting along with organizational practices such as sponsors, 12-step calls to fellow alcoholics, slogans, and "birthday" parties celebrating years of sobriety.

[16] Unlike other reviewers who focused on the performances of the lead actors in what is obviously a dead marriage, Denzin believes that "the film's implicit thesis [is] that alcoholism is a family disease".

He explains: Their readings treated the film as being about something else, that something else being Inge's picture of broken dreams in middle-class family life in small town America.