Places in the Heart (1984) on Netflix
In 1935 Texas, Edna Spalding, recently widowed, refuses to sell her struggling cotton farm. A drifter named Moze offers to farm it, and a blind veteran, Will, becomes her boarder.
- Netflix3.8/5
- IMDb7.4/1015,944 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes89%
Trailer
Plot summary
Waxahachie, Texas, 1935. After her husband Royce, the sheriff, is accidentally shot, Edna Spalding has two children, Frank and Possum, a mortgaged cotton farm and almost no money. The banker Albert Denby tells her to sell up; she will not. A Black drifter, Moze, appears at her door asking for work and claiming he knows cotton. She feeds him and sends him away, then finds him chopping wood in her yard, and when he is caught with her silverware she declines to press charges and hires him instead. Denby lodges his blind brother-in-law, Will, a World War I veteran, with her. Her sister Margaret, a beauty operator, has a husband and daughter of her own and little to spare.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Places in the Heart (1984)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- When Sally Field accepted her second Academy Award for Best Actress in 1985, the first having been for Norma Rae, she uttered the much-mocked line "I can't deny the fact that you like me - right now, you like me!", commonly misquoted ever since.
SPOILER
Writer-director Robert Benton ended an otherwise realistic film with a fantasy scene, saying there is something in the image of the man who has been killed handing the communion plate to the boy who killed him that he cannot explain; he knew audiences would be confused by it.- The February 2020 issue of New York magazine lists Places in the Heart as among "The Best Movies That Lost Best Picture at the Oscars".
- Places in the Heart premiered at the 35th Berlin International Film Festival, where Benton won the Silver Bear for Best Director.
