H.T. Bookwright (Jeff Williams) was on trial for the
shooting death of a young no-account named Buck Thorpe (Dick Dougherty), who
was shot while attempting to run off with Bookwright’s daughter. Bookwright’s lawyer (Peter Masterson), a man
named Douglas, was fairly sure the jury would acquit his client on self-defense
(gotta stand your ground where family is concerned, son) …but he hadn’t counted
on one holdout—a cotton farmer named Jackson Fentry (Robert Duvall), who
refuses to vote for acquittal. Why? Douglas looks further into the matter, and
learns that Fentry should never have been seated as a jurist in the first
place.
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| Olga Bellin, Robert Duvall |
For the explanation why, we flashback to Fentry’s life from
many years previous. Jackson is hired by
the father of Isham Russell (Richard McConnell) to be the caretaker of the
family’s sawmill during the winter…and on the morning of Christmas Eve, Fentry
prepares to set out for his father’s farm when he discovers a young woman
passed out from hunger not far from his shack.
She’s Sarah Thorpe Eubanks (Olga Bellin), pregnant and homeless after
being abandoned by her husband and shunned by her family. Fentry asks her to stay in the boiler shack
he calls temporary home (the Russells are planning to build him a permanent
dwelling come spring) until she delivers the baby…and their friendship
eventually blossoms into a romance, one where Fentry and Sarah tie the knot
despite her already being married.
In 1973, Robert Duvall received the first of his seven
Academy Award acting nominations for his supporting turn as consigliere Tom
Hagen in
The Godfather (1972). (Duvall would eventually win a trophy for his
performance as a veteran country music singer-songwriter in 1983’s
Tender Mercies…though
some have persuasively argued he should have won it
for the title role in 1997’s
The Apostle.) I’d be willing to gamble, however, that Bob
would have preferred his inaugural Oscar nom be for his outstanding work as
Jackson Fentry in
Tomorrow (1972), a
performance that he has singled out in several interviews as one of his
personal favorites. The story goes that
Duvall based Fentry’s unusual accent (from the information presented in the
film, Fentry is a Mississippian…though I’m sure some natives would take exception
to this) on a man he encountered walking the foothills of the Ozarks. Listening to Duvall’s speech patterns (I
particularly enjoy how he pronounces the woman’s name as SAY-ruh as in “Marry
me, Sarah”) reminds me of that kid in
Swing
Blade (1996—Duvall has a small role in this one, too): “I like the way you
talk.”
 |
| Duvall |
A soft-spoken man with limited emotional reserve, the stoic Jackson
Fentry surpasses expectations by reaching out to a woman who’s been kicked
around by life; Sarah, who’s not used to being allowed a voice in any kind of
situation, relates how she lost her mother at an early age and that her
existence has been dominated by men insensitive to her needs from that moment
on. Fentry is the man she’s sorely
needed to bind her emotional wounds—on that initial Christmas Eve morning, he purchases
some hard candy for her as a Christmas gift, and is determined to take care of
her after the arrival of the baby.
Taciturn for most of the film—he speaks only when it’s necessary—Fentry expresses
unbridled love and joy in the scenes where he’s taken on the responsibility to
raise Sarah’s son (Johnny Mask) …a happiness that, sadly, will be short-lived.
 |
| Bellin |
Written by William Faulkner as a short story published in
1940,
Tomorrow was fashioned into a
play by Horton Foote (who won screenplay Oscars for two of Duvall’s films,
To Kill a Mockingbird [1962] and
Mercies) that was originally presented
on CBS’
Playhouse 90 in 1960 (with Richard Boone and Kim Stanley). Foote would rewrite and expand his
presentation for a production that ran for 25 performances at the HB
Playwrights Foundation Theatre in Greenwich Village in 1968; it starred Duvall
and Olga Bellin, who reprised their roles for the film directed by Broadway
veteran Joseph Anthony.
Tomorrow was Bellin’s feature film
debut…and her swan song; she purportedly did not take direction well from
Anthony, and decided to return to stage work until her death in 1987 from
cancer. (Olga’s celluloid resume is sort
of spotty, though she did guest star in such TV classics as
Route
66 and
Naked City.)
At the time of its initial release,
Tomorrow barely made a blip on the radar of moviegoers:
New York Times critic Vincent Canby wasn’t particularly laudatory, noting “Even
if the movie's intentions are decent, as reflected in the accurate look of the
production, filmed in Mississippi, the effect is mostly patronizing.” The movie got a bit more exposure when it was
re-released in 1982, but for the longest time it was a difficult film to track
down (a DVD released by Homevision in 2004 quickly went OOP…thankfully B2mp
brought it to Blu-ray in 2015). I first
saw it on IFC in the late 90s back when those letters stood for “Independent
Film Channel” (since being bought by AMC, both it and The Sundance Channel have
strayed vastly from their “independent film” mission to become AMC-Lite) so
when I saw it on the schedule of The Greatest Cable Channel Known to Mankind™
recently I was eager to possess it (my precious).
 |
| Sudie Bond |
As a person who’ll readily admit to not being particularly
enamored of a lot of William Faulkner’s work,
Tomorrow is one of my favorite
adaptations. I love how director Anthony
chose to shoot the film in black-and-white to emphasize the harsh, rural setting,
and Duvall’s performance is a marvel (I’ve noticed a few critics have
emphasized that deciphering his thick accent can be a chore for some…which
worries me, because I never had a problem).
One of my favorite character actors, Sudie Bond, also does splendid work
as the midwife who provides Fentry with support and assistance. Some viewers might find
Tomorrow challenging because it’s mostly dialogue-driven (it also
takes some sleuthing figuring out how the scenes in the beginning connect with
the rest of the movie) and devoid of blowing things up real good, but the
characters are so vividly drawn that I’m always filled with regret when the
closing credits run. I agree with Randy
Miller III at
DVD Talk
when he observes “
Tomorrow is a
buried treasure that's unquestionably more compelling than any simple write-up
can make it sound.”
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