Word: edna
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...Edna Spaulding, played with wonderful strength and control by Sally 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...
...outline, the story is inescapably reminiscent of a sentimental silent film or of 19th century theatrical melodrama, telling as it does the simple tale of a plucky Texas widow attempting to save her farm from foreclosure and her family from being broken up should the old homestead go. Indeed, Edna Spalding, as luminously portrayed by Sally Field, is as good as she is brave: churchly, compassionate, guileless. Her sense of social responsibility is informed by unimpeachable instinct, not by suspect ideology...
...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...
...Benton, 51, who wrote and directed Kramer vs. Kramer among other films, evocation is not quite autobiography. The events in Edna Spalding's life, for instance, may be based on what happened to his great-grandmother, but her character contains aspects of his mother, his wife and, as he has carefully pointed out, some of Sally Field's background. The same is true of Glover's Moze, who developed out of a black man who worked for Benton's family, but whose magnetic presence is a tribute to the performer. Similarly, Malkovich's blind boarder...
...Edna Homa, chairman of the Cambridge Health Policy Board which oversees the city-owned hospital said yesterday. "Cambridge is relatively under-served by what I would call everyday run-of-the-mill primary health care...