Life on the Farm
5 Movies | January 26, beginning 8 p.m.
Farm life can be a rewarding but exhausting experience, full of both satisfaction and hardship, as the folks in these movies find out.
In a kind of proto-Green Acres mode, Fred MacMurray decides to chuck the urban rat race for the simple life of a chicken farmer in The Egg and I (1947). Claudette Colbert is his new bride, determined to help her husband make a go of it in this blockbuster hit based on a best-selling novel. The film introduced the characters Ma and Pa Kettle, who got their own nine-picture spinoff.
The Southerner (1945) is one of a handful of films made in Hollywood by cinema great Jean Renoir during his exile from Nazi-occupied France. It’s another story of the search for a better life, this time with farm hand Zachary Scott and hard-working wife Betty Field determined to start their own cotton farm in spite of disease, a flood and a jealous neighbor. New York Times' critic Bosley Crowther called it "a rich, unusual and sensitive delineation of a segment of the American scene well worth filming and seeing."
Sally Field won her second Academy Award as a newly widowed Texas woman in the 1930s who must raise her children and keep her family farm from going under in Places in the Heart (1984). Director Robert Benton (Kramer vs. Kramer, 1979) set his story and filmed it in his native Waxahachie, Texas, getting strong performances from Field and an excellent supporting cast that includes Danny Glover, John Malkovich, Ed Harris, Lindsay Crouse and Amy Madigan.
Margaret O’Brien had emerged as the leading child actress of the 1940s when she was cast as the daughter of a Norwegian farmer (Edward G. Robinson) in Our Vines Have Tender Grapes (1945). Scriptwriter Dalton Trumbo drew on his small-town roots for this warm Wisconsin-set drama.
Made as a sequel to his silent classic The Crowd (1928), director King Vidor cast new actors as the same characters in Our Daily Bread (1934) about a down-on-their-luck couple who leave the city to make a living off the land. Banks were reluctant to back a film so strongly reflecting collectivist values. Vidor financed it himself and Charlie Chaplin was able to secure distribution from United Artists.
