I began to pay attention to Horton Foote’s work about forty years ago. I was in the military and the movie Tender Mercies was playing at a naval base theater. The plot concerns a washed-up country singer named Mac Sledge (Robert Duvall) whose life begins anew after he meets and marries a devoutly religious widow named Rosa Lee (Tess Harper) who runs a motel on a lonely Texas highway. What initially drew me into the theater was Duvall, an actor I admired, but it was the movie as a whole that affected me. It has a beautiful quietness about it but also elements of foreboding—in that one is uncertain if Mac will be able to hold fast to the new life he has been given.
Thankfully Tender Mercies received the recognition it deserved. The writer, Horton Foote, won the Academy Award that year for best original screenplay (and Duvall won for best actor).
But Foote had been around for a long time already. He wrote the screenplay to the 1962 classic To Kill a Mockingbird, adapting the material from Harper Lee’s novel. Other adaptations were drawn from the works of Faulkner, Steinbeck, and Flannery O’Connor. One of the Faulkner adaptations is a rather rough-hewn film called Tomorrow (1972) in which Duvall plays a backwoodsman caring for a pregnant woman whose family has rejected her. I think of this movie as a kind of hillbilly variant of Kramer vs. Kramer, at least as regards the trauma that is often involved in custody battles. As far as I’m concerned, Tomorrow is the more powerful film.
Foote wrote a novel and play in the 1950s called The Chase that was made into a movie in 1966 (starring, among other notables, Marlon Brando). The screenplay was written by Lillian Hellman who, apparently having other fish to fry, altered the original material considerably. According to Leonard Maltin’s Movie & Video Guide, there were serious behind-the-scenes conflicts between Hellman and others. I don’t know but I suspect that Foote himself was not happy with the end result. In any case, while the movie has a certain power, the play is simpler and better. There is also an element of hope that is lacking in the film.
I return now to Tender Mercies because it too ends on a hopeful note. In this case, it is a religiously hopeful note. Mac, in the throes of grief over the death of his daughter (from a previous marriage), says to Rosa Lee: “See, I don’t trust happiness. I never did, I never will.” These bitter words seem to express a longstanding distrust in God. And yet, at the film’s climax, we hear him singing a hymn that he used to sing to his daughter when she was a baby. The significance of this easy-to-overlook detail is that he is singing, belatedly but not in vain, to his daughter. He can do so because, in the God whom Mac has come to believe in, his daughter is not dead.
Photo credit and license attribution: The Huntington
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