Murphy's Romance (1985) on Netflix
PG-1319851h 47mComedyDramaRomance
Emma Moriarity moves with her son Jake to a small Arizona town and starts boarding and training horses. She befriends Murphy Jones, the local pharmacist, and her ex-husband Bobby Jack returns.
- Netflix3.6/5
- IMDb7.0/108,080 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes72%
Trailer
Plot summary
Divorced and short of money, Emma Moriarity brings her twelve-year-old son, Jake, to a farmstead outside a small Arizona town, where she plans to board and train horses. In town she gets to know Murphy Jones, the pharmacist, a widower close to retirement who takes up new skills simply because he can. He will not lend her money, yet he finds other ways to help: he gives Jake a part-time job and keeps a horse of his own at her stable, and other owners follow. Murphy grows fond of Emma, who does not read his attention as courtship. Then her ex-husband, Bobby Jack Moriarity, arrives promising he has changed, and Jake's need for a father in his life keeps Emma from sending him away.
Cast
- Michael Prokopukas Albert
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Murphy's Romance (1985)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Part of the deal from the studio, which at that time was owned by The Coca-Cola Company, included an eight-line sequence of Sally Field and James Garner saying the word “Coke”, and having Coke products and signs appear prominently in the film.
- Columbia wanted Marlon Brando, or someone with “greater box-office allure”, to play Murphy; Field and Martin Ritt had to fight the studio to cast Garner, whom it viewed at that point as primarily a television actor.
- Columbia did not want to make the picture at all because it had no “sex or violence” in it, and only agreed because of the success of Norma Rae (1979), which had the same star in Sally Field, the same director and the same screenwriting team.
- Married screenwriting team Harriet Frank Jr. and Irving Ravetch, who had worked on Hud (1963) with Martin Ritt and Paul Newman, wanted Newman for Murphy's Romance; he declined, and Garner was the only other actor Ritt and Field asked.
- James Garner's performance earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor, the only Oscar nomination of his entire career.
