The 1983 film, Tender Mercies, with a screenplay by Horton Foote, is the finest Bruce Beresford picture I’ve seen.  It’s certainly better than his Black Robe (1991) with its indefensible pseudo-religious conclusion. 

The earlier film tells the story of Mac Sledge (Robert Duvall), an alcoholic ex-country singer, who meets and marries a Texas widow called Rosa Lee (Tess Harper), who has a young son.  Much vexed by his past, Mac sometimes expresses neurotic frustration and feels expected grief—he even has a brief conflict with his ex-wife—but he also gradually gives up drinking and is considerably happy with Rosa Lee.  He even returns to singing and recording country ditties.  The film concerns a trek to personal betterment, to spiritual promise, to God in fact.  Mac gets baptized.  Thereafter we do not hear him use the Lord’s name in vain, as we do earlier in the movie.  Instead he sings the hymn “Wings of a Dove,” even after after a particular calamity befalls him.  One can safely assume he is a convert.

TM‘s characters have difficulty explaining their feelings and motivations, and ambivalence is everywhere.  Clearly there is plenty of it in Mac’s daughter Sue Anne (Ellen Barkin), who was raised mostly by Mac’s ex-wife Dixie, a woman foolish and spiteful and wounded.  Indeed, we get a glimpse at how parental woundedness, that of Mac and Dixie, can render a child a lost soul.  And yet Foote’s screenplay leaves us in no doubt that, for a man, to have God and a good woman is to make a true progress in light.  We never could have doubted it.

Beresford has always been an expert filmmaker, knowing how to do a lot with open spaces.  Many people, myself included, have enjoyed his secular heart-warmer Driving Miss Daisy (1989).  Even so, I prefer the Foote-written heart-warmer.

Cover of Tender Mercies

Former baseball pro Crash Davis (Kevin Costner) is hired as a catcher for the minor-league Durham Bulls, but only so he can help to shape player Nuke LaLoosh (Tim Robbins) into a more self-controlled pitcher. Perfectly loyal to the oft-defeated Bulls is unmarried Annie (Susan Sarandon) to whom baseball is a religion. In point of fact, she is a spiritual force for the team, though with a spirituality affiliated with sex (as well as poetry). Every year she gets intimately involved with a different Bulls player and, as it happens, Crash is interested. Currently, however, Nuke is enlisted to be her partner.

Thus on the one hand in Ron Shelton‘s Bull Durham (1988) there is baseball, and on the other hand, sex. The only thing they have in common is that they are not religions. But, although baseball in the late ’50s remains pretty much the same, the country itself is slowly changing philosophically and sexually, not without quirkiness.

Durham is intelligent without being profound. Seldom hokey, it is also sensual nearly to the point of vulgarity, and it has an appealing cast. Robbins is memorably convincing as a pitcher based on the real-life Steve Dalkowski, who died recently at 80. Like Nuke, Dalkowski had an often wayward power pitch—one that likely reached speeds of over 105 mph.

Former baseball pro Crash Davis (Kevin Costner) is hired as a catcher for the minor-league Durham Bulls, but only so he can help to shape player Nuke LaLoosh (Tim Robbins) into a more self-controlled pitcher. Perfectly loyal to the oft-defeated Bulls is unmarried Annie (Susan Sarandon) to whom baseball is a religion. In point of fact, she is a spiritual force for the team, though with a spirituality affiliated with sex (as well as poetry). Every year she gets intimately involved with a different Bulls player and, as it happens, Crash is interested. Currently, however, Nuke is enlisted to be her partner.

Thus on the one hand in Ron Shelton‘s Bull Durham (1988) there is baseball, and on the other hand, sex. The only thing they have in common is that they are not religions. But, although baseball in the late ’50s remains pretty much the same, the country itself is slowly changing philosophically and sexually, not without quirkiness.

Durham is intelligent without being profound. Seldom hokey, it is also sensual nearly to the point of vulgarity, and it has an appealing cast. Robbins is memorably convincing as a pitcher based on the real-life Steve Dalkowski, who died recently at 80. Like Nuke, Dalkowski had an often wayward power pitch—one that likely reached speeds of over 105 mph.

No Man’s Woman (1955) stars Marie Windsor as Carolyn Grant, a very unsympathetic character even more immoral than Christine Blasey Ford. After wronging several men, she ends up murdered. The police have their suspects. . . Unlike such actors as Patric Knowles and Nancy Gates, Windsor and Jil Jarmyn (Carolyn’s co-worker) are effective. They’re also marvelously attractive (as is Gates).

As a mystery tale, Franklin Adreon’s film is lacking but it doesn’t matter. The pic is meant to be noir, but it is further interesting for its Douglas Sirkian soap-opera drama during the first 35 or 40 minutes. Windsor is sort of the anti-Lana Turner of “Imitation of Life.”

“No Man’s Woman” is only an hour and ten minutes long—not a bad length if the movie was boring. It isn’t, though. I hurried to see it on Amazon Prime lest it become unavailable, and it rather pleases me that I did.

A primary character in the Wes Anderson film, Moonrise Kingdom (2012), 12-year-old Sam (Jared Gilman) is the least popular boy in his Khaki Scout troop, and he’s an orphan.  Infatuated with the troubled Suzy (Kara Hayward), also 12, Sam makes plans to meet and run away with her after abandoning his troop.  This he does, after which there is a search party dispatched to find the two kids, who now claim to love each other.

The action in this whimsical work takes place in 1965, and at least one implication about the Sixties in America pops up.  It was, as James Bowman tells us, “a period in which it was common for children to pretend to be adults and adults to pretend to be children”—and so it is here.  The Sixties were also a period in which Charles Schulz’s Peanuts was going strong.  Anderson, who directed MK and co-wrote the script with Roman Coppola, admires Peanuts enough for his film to have been influenced by it.  For example, Suzy wears a dress which looks a lot like the one the Little Red-Haired Girl wears in the 1977 TV special, It’s Your First Kiss, Charlie Brown.

There is no surprise here.  Moonrise Kingdom is a comic-strip movie, PG-13 rated.   In essence it is about nothing but itself, with its fey foursquare visuals and Britten music.  It’s the straight-play counterpart to Moulin Rouge.   It’s entertaining.