BEFORE: Sally Field carries over again from "Spoiler Alert", and I'm taking it as a sign from the universe, or at least the Classic Movie-verse that my interests have aligned with the Turner Classic Movies "31 Days of Oscar" programming. The Sally Field part of my chain was set up to be here long before I knew that TCM would be playing "Places in the Heart" today. This is the film for which Ms. Field won her second Best Actress Oscar, the first was for "Norma Rae" in 1979, and I've been trying to link to that one for years. (Sure, I could just drop that one in here, too, but is that really a romance film, or primarily just a film about unionizing? It feels like cheating to include that one, too.).
I'm going to watch this one on Tubi, but remember it's airing TONIGHT at 8 pm on TCM. I did this last year with "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore", which synched up nicely with my February programming, I was already scheduled to watch two films connected by Ellen Burstyn and it just slid right on in-between. But what's playing tomorrow on TCM? Here's the line-up for Sunday, 2/9, Day 9 of 31 Days of Oscar:
Best Picture Winners and Nominees:
6:45 am "One Foot in Heaven" (1941)
8:45 am "The Good Earth" (1937)
11:15 am "Lady for a Day" (1933)
1:00 pm "Libeled Lady" (1936)
2:45 pm "Gigi" (1958)
5:00 pm "My Fair Lady" (1964)
Oscar Worthy Lawyers:
8:00 pm "To Kill a Mockingbird" (1962)
10:15 pm "Witness for the Prosecution" (1957)
12:30 am "Inherit the Wind" (1960)
2:45 am "Trial" (1955)
4:45 am "A Free Soul" (1931)
I was at 37 seen out of 94, and I've seen another 5 out of today's 11: "Gigi", "My Fair Lady", "To Kill a Mockingbird", "Witness for the Prosecution" and "Inherit the Wind" SO now 42 seen out of 105 is a dead-on 40%.
THE PLOT: In north Texas in the 1930's, a widow with two small children tries to save her small 40-acre farm with the help of a blind boarder and an itinerant black handyman.
AFTER: OK, I'm good with this choice because there's a LITTLE bit of romance in the subject matter of this film. Sally Field's character, Edna Spalding, only has a little quality time with her husband at the start before his sheriff job turns her into a widow, but there's a sub-plot with a love triangle for three other characters, one of whom is Edna's sister. It's an affair between two married (not to each other) people so I guess that makes it a quadrangle? The two couples are close, they go to community dances and play cards together, so yeah, they were kind of asking for it, naturally one person from one couple's going to fool around with someone from the other couple, that's just human nature, right?
But there's other stuff here about the Ku Klux Klan, and a handyman who's got experience picking cotton, which is going to come in really useful if Edna's going to try to raise enough money to keep her house and land. So there you go, I found the film that exists at the intersection of romance, Black History month, and Oscar season. It may be the perfect February film! Of course, it's the bad parts of Black History, with the KKK and the lynchings and such. Oh, well, I'll try to do a follow-up later in the year with the heroes of the Civil Rights movement, as per usual.
Tonight we're looking back at a much simpler time in U.S. History. A time when a dozen eggs cost a nickel, President Roosevelt had a plan to fix the economy, but it would take a World War to finally do that, and also Ed Harris had hair. People traveled from town to town by hopping on a boxcar and then begging for food once they got there, because there were simply NO jobs to be found anywhere. Sure, you could make money by farming, but it was nearly impossible to scrape together $13 so you could buy a few bags of seeds, but even then, where would you plant them? How would you even get the horses or mules you needed to pull the plow? And then what if it doesn't rain? Then you're really sunk. Look, I don't know farming, all I know is animation production - but I do know what it's like to work for a company that is deep in debt and has no spare money. So to me this is like a director who could make a new animated short and sell it, only he can't afford the paper to draw on, or that box of colored pencils. But you have to take that leap and put those supplies on your credit card, otherwise you'll never make the next film and get it out there on the festival circuit.
I wish I could have learned more about the complicated love triangle here - I guess one woman is the local teacher and the other is Edna's sister, who runs a beauty salon out of her house. Because in those days you didn't need a storefront, a business license, disability insurance, and promotions on social media, you only needed a sign hung outside your house. But who is Wayne, the man caught between Margaret and Viola? What does he do for a living, when he's not bouncing between these two women, who seem to be friends with each other, but they're breaking the girl code if Viola's sleeping with Margaret's husband and keeping that from her. How did they get into this situation, exactly? Is there a way out of this that doesn't destroy their friendship? Probably not. Is Viola seriously trying to upgrade from her husband to Wayne? Can she pull off the swap, leaving her husband for Margaret? Nah, it probably doesn't work that way - everybody just wants to keep what they have, plus have something else on the side. Well, it was the Depression, I guess you had to grab any little happiness you could find, even if it was with somebody else's spouse.
There's really no time to get into this, because we have to follow Edna's struggle to buy cotton seed, learn how to write a check, and take in a blind boarder who is the banker's brother-in-law, so that she can raise enough money to make the mortgage payment on her farm since she doesn't have her dead husband's sheriff income. (NITPICK POINT: They didn't have pensions back then? Death benefits?) It's really hard to tell what the banker's motivation is, because sometimes he seems to be on Edna's side and other times, not so much. (Did he REALLY suggest that she sell her house and get her family to raise one of her kids?) Maybe he just really wants to pawn off his blind brother-in-law on somebody else. And what's the deal with that guy, Mr. Will? He earns his money by making brooms and caned chairs, listening to audio books on his gramophone, and generally trying to keep to himself. Or, maybe he's a pervert pretending to be blind, just so he can walk into a room when Edna's taking a bath and get a good look. It's hard to say, but that seems a bit of a stretch.
There's really no time to get into any of this, because a tornado attacks the town and levels most of the houses. Well, it is north Texas, and that's pretty close to Oklahoma, which is noted for its tornadoes. Everybody seems to know what to do when a tornado strikes, however many of them are dead wrong. Living in your car certainly proves to be a bad idea, and one theory says to open all your windows and lie down on the floor, because if the wind doesn't go through the house, it's going to blow down the house. This also feels like terrible advice, I think maybe that house is coming down no matter what, whether the windows are open or closed. I wonder if families used to argue about this back in the day - but the only really safe place is the storm cellar, as we all know from watching "The Wizard of Oz".
Edna and her kids, plus Mr. Will and Moses all make it to the storm cellar, and their house is one of the few left standing - while this is the last straw for Viola, she wants to move away to someplace with fewer tornadoes, because this is going to keep happening again and again, and the town will always be poor because it's always recovering. Well, she's not wrong. But Edna has a chance to get her cotton picked if she can somehow hire 10 more people as temp workers, which will increase her costs, but there's a bigger payoff - if she can produce the first bale of cotton in the county, there's a $100 bonus. A bit of a contrivance, perhaps, and it's a wonder that the bank can afford to keep this tradition going, what with the Depression and all. But hey, whatever makes your crop profitable and gets the bank off your back is fair game. So even if you end up with sore knees and torn-up fingers, you got to keep your house and your land, that's a pretty big deal.
The only last problem is that the Klan doesn't really like the fact that a black man had some success growing cotton, and he didn't have the common decency to be a slave while he did it. He had the nerve to get paid for his efforts! So they come around to pay him a visit and explain why they can't let him get ahead and be successful, but he's saved by blind Mr. Will, who somehow knows where Edna's dead husband's gun is, and has a system for navigating his way out to the barn, where Moses is getting beaten. Also, his uncanny ear for voices enables him to identify the six Klansmen, they're all people he's made brooms for, or something. Why these Klansmen don't just kill Mr. Will, who can identify them all, is a bit harder to understand, maybe they just won't kill a white guy and it's as simple as that.
There's a weird cop-out ending, because really, how do you end a film like this? We see a church service and everyone's there, even the people who moved out of town or died or something. Most likely this is a metaphor for how we'll all be together again in that great big Dustbowl, Depression-era town in the sky someday, but it's still a bit odd. But with the similarly weird endings of "Safe Haven" and "Spoiler Alert" where death is concerned, this kind of fits right in with other recent films. It couldn't possibly be that we die and then nothing happens after that, right?
Directed by: Robert Benton (director of "Feast of Love")
Also starring Lindsay Crouse (last seen in "Mr. Brooks"), Ed Harris (last seen in "Pain & Gain"), Amy Madigan (last seen in "Antlers"), John Malkovich (last seen in "Fool's Paradise"), Danny Glover (last seen in "American Dreamer"), Yankton Hatten, Gennie James, Lane Smith (last seen in "Frances"), Terry O'Quinn (last seen in "Primal Fear"), Bert Remsen (last seen in "Miss Firecracker"), Ray Baker (last seen in "Sweet November"), Jay Patterson (last seen in "Hard Rain"), Toni Hudson, De'voreaux White, Jerry Haynes (last seen in "Sweet Dreams"), Lou Hancock (last seen in "The Grifters"), Shelby Brammer (last seen in "Kramer vs. Kramer"), Norma Young, Bill Thurman (last seen in "The Sugarland Express"), Jim Gough, Cliff Bruner, Arthur Pugh, Matthew Posey (last seen in "The Magnificent Seven" (2016)), Shanna Shrum, Lynn D. Lasswell Jr., Paul Goodwin, Connie Grandell, and the voice of William J. Welch.
RATING: 6 out of 10 verses of "Cotton Eye Joe" (see, kids, that song's been around a LONG long time...)
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