The focus would have been on the liberalism of the white woman and the courage of the black woman, and most of the scenes would have involved the white family. This movie would not have been made quite the same way 10 or 20 years ago. What involved me was the way John Cork's screenplay did not simply paint the two women as emblems of a cause, but saw them as particular individuals who defined themselves largely through their roles as wives and mothers. We know going in more or less what will happen, both with the boycott and with these characters. But the general lines of the plot are not what make the movie special. The movie leads up to an inevitable confrontation between the white husband and wife, and to a climax of surprising power. Her husband is taken by a relative to a White Citizen's Council meeting, where rabble-rousers depict the boycotters as dangerous subver sives (any true American would of course prefer to stand in the back of the bus than sit in the front - if he were black, that is). Miriam is no activist, but can see as a wife and a mother what the boycotting black women are going through, and begins to sympathize with them. In the meantime, she and her husband grow in different ways because of the boycott. This decision of course would enrage Miriam's husband, a self-satisfied bigot named Norman ( Dwight Schultz), but Miriam doesn't tell him, and when he finds out, she defends her action as part of her job as a dutiful housewife. Odessa is not eager for her employer to discover she is honoring the boycott - she doesn't want to risk losing her job - but one day Miriam finds out, and decides that she will give the maid a ride in her car a couple of days a week. It also meant inconvenience for her employer, Miriam Thompson ( Sissy Spacek), who had a house to keep and a husband to feed, and who took her duties as a wife very solemnly - suppressing the obvious reality that she was married to a jerk. That meant getting up a couple of hours earlier in the morning, and getting home long after dark at night, and it meant blisters on her heels. She simply knew how she felt, and acted on it, and started to walk to work every day. Her action, born out of a long weariness with the countless injustices of discrimination, inspired the Montgomery bus boycott, which was led by a young local preacher named Martin Luther King Jr., and which grew into the civil rights movement.įor a woman like Odessa Cotter ( Whoopi Goldberg), however, the eventual verdict of history could not have been easily guessed on the day she decided to join thousands of other Montgomery blacks in refusing to take the bus. One day in Montgomery a black woman named Rosa Parks, who had worked hard and was tired, refused to stand up in the back of the segregated bus when there was an empty seat in the front. The film received reviews from sources including Tom Shales of The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, and The New York Times.These characters are confronted by a historic moment. Brendan Klinger as David Branch (Child).A female counselor at the foster care breaks the rule and assists Donald in finding his long separated brother and sister who are now full adults. About a decade later, Donald becomes determined to find his missing siblings. The film was nominated for two awards at the 40th Golden Globe Awards in 1982.Īs children, Donald, David and Carolyn are abandoned by their parents and placed in foster care by the government. A Long Way Home is a 1981 American made-for-television drama film directed by Robert Markowitz, written by Dennis Nemec, and starring Timothy Hutton, Brenda Vaccaro, and Rosanna Arquette.
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