Word: cottons
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...SUCCESS of "Places in the Heart," Robert Benton's new film about life in the South during the Great Depression, lies with its ability to give heroic proportions to everyday events. Sunday chicken dinners, cotton harvesting, and spring storms are the stuff of this small town tragedy, and in an era when a film's success can depend upon the size of its special effects budget, such intimacy is a welcome change...
...Field, is a sheriff's wife who suddenly finds herself a widow when her husbands is shot by a drunken black youth. Edna, long accustomed to playing the deferential wife, must bow assume the responsibilities of keeping her family together in a decidedly masculine world of bank mortgages and cotton farming...
...best novel of 1983." "Congratulations. Ironweed has been awarded a Pulitzer Prize." Callers from the West Coast snatched up the film rights to earlier novels, Legs and Billy Phelan's Greatest Game. Francis Ford Coppola hired the author to write the script for his $45 million movie The Cotton Club; and the public library of Albany, New York State's capital and the author's home town, proclaimed a William Kennedy Day to honor its first native literary star since Bret Harte...
...that the end of this picture's celebration of the traditional American verities. Struggling on against the ravages of the Great Depression, the elements (a devastating tornado) and the wickedness of the unenlightened (a hypocritical banker, a crooked cotton merchant, even the Ku Klux Klan), Edna is comforted and aided by her two utterly winning children (Yankton Hatten and Gennie James), by a shrewd, gentle, black man (Danny Glover) whom she redeems from rootlessness and petty crime, and by a blind man (John Malkovich) whom she redeems from bitterness. As these archetypes of disenfranchisement assemble in her kitchen...
...that never wanders toward pure realism or toward sentimentality either, that Places in the Heart derives much of its strength. The dust rising from the wheels of a hurrying flivver, the chilly darkness of a cavernous bank, the way the early morning sun strikes a field of cotton, and the camera's simple crane up to reveal the immensity of the field and of the task before the little band of pickers toiling in it are palpable. Ultimately, it is the play of light more than the play of actors and of words that imparts to movies like this...