[1][6] In 1954 in Freedom, a fictional small Kansas town, Evelyn Wyckoff, a lonely and greatly depressed 35-year-old high-school Latin teacher, no longer finds any satisfaction in her work, in spite of being well-liked by students and colleagues.

Attractive but still a virgin, on the verge of premature menopause, she learns her physician Dr. Neal thinks her problems would be solved if she were to begin a romantic relationship.

When the young man boldly makes lewd suggestions and begins to unzip his pants, Evelyn flees in a panic but decides to tell no one what has happened, hoping it was an isolated incident.

Ashamed and fearful of the public disgrace she will suffer if she reports being violated by a black man, she chooses to remain silent.

When Rafe forces Evelyn's body against a hot radiator during sex, her screams alert two other janitors, who enter her classroom and see what is going on.

Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times called the film "perfectly dreadful" and added, "In their literalness, Polly Platt's script and Marvin Chomsky's direction compound each other disastrously... Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff expresses familiar truths about the painful conflict of the individual and society—but with a persistent sense of falseness and an utter lack of style.