Cross Creek (1983)

Sick Product of a Sick System

Purely Joyful Movie!

Admirable film.

Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.

This is a gentle movie that reflects the pace of life for old Florida in a way that settles in my soul and brings back my childhood. Cross Creek looks deeply into a different lifestyle that actually still existed less than 50 years ago. In my childhood, Florida was a slow paced, slice of something that had ceased to exist else-country. Though the extremes may have seemed harsh, this movie captures the sweet taste of pre-Disney Florida, and the best part of the movie for me (even though I agree with the accolades for the acting, photography, etc.) is that Cross Creek is still there. You can go to Orange Lake and take a step backwards in time. This is my Florida, and I will always love it.

No, I don't think Cross Creek will ever be put up there with Kane or Casablanca, but for some reason I made a connection with this movie the first time I saw it 20 years ago, and it remains one of my favorite films even today.Every creative person goes through the struggle to find their voice, and Cross Creek is about a city-bred writer who runs away to the country to live an ascetic life with her typewriter. She expects her isolation and alienation to "prod the muses" but instead finds these new people and this new land to draw her in until they and it become the soul of her writing.The natural, understated tone of the film allowed for a human resonance I've rarely seen in mainstream Hollywood fare. And while Mary Steenburgen and Peter Coyote are perfectly fine, Rip Torn and Alfre Woodard's performances absolutely floored me. They respectively brought Marsh Turner and Geechee to life with such abandon and clarity, it's some of the finest acting I've witnessed on film, period.I revisit Cross Creek every few years and it always holds up stylistically (Leonard Rosenman's score is timeless). Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings symbolizes America itself, in my opinion, so concerned with pleasing its own, yet progressively exposed to a foreign world that ultimately will shape its real identity.It's a universally human story and, like I said before, I really connect with this little film, and appreciate Director Martin Ritt's courage in making it the way he did. I can't guarantee that others will necessarily feel the same way, but I always recommend Cross Creek to friends, be they creatives or not.

A beautiful and moving realization of the life of Marjorie Rawlings and the events which shaped her life and the lives of those devoted to her. She endured many hardships and was victorious over them, and was a friend to many who loved her dearly.

Novelist Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings took to the backwoods of Florida in 1927 to work on her literary projects. She left behind a husband who was unwilling to relocate, and fashioned a working studio in the most rural of southern locations.The trials she experienced, both creatively and physically, are depicted in this slow-moving, yet well-intentioned enactment. Filmed in lovely Technicolor in Marion and Alachna Counties, Florida by John Alonzo, to the accompaniment of a lush score by Leonard Roseman, the movie attempts to capture Rawling's varied experiences in pursuit of her writing goals. Like many films of true-to-life creative artists, one has little factual evidence as to the accuracy of this tale. The challenges Rawlings faced in attempting to first write her "Gothic novel" and getting rejected by a publisher, are carefully acted out. Only when she changes her subject to that which she is actually experiencing there in Florida does her publisher accept the manuscript. Since there's not much dramatic about a writer "pecking away" at a typewriter, the script finds other things to depict. When a local girl has an emotional "turn" involving a pet deer, and when the focus is on our heroine's saving her farm crops from devastation, another plot begins to be recalled.One realizes this is the story of the woman who finally wrote the beloved family classic, "The Yearling." The film version of that novel, after a failed attempt in the early forties with Spencer Tracy, was finally brought to the screen in 1946 by Director Clarence Brown, with Gregory Peck. That movie captures the essence of Rawlings' work, again in a beautiful Florida setting. "Cross Creek" may perhaps appear to lack focus or be too deliberately paced for some tastes. At the same time, it has its heart in the right place in expressing Rawlings' unusual "artist retreat," as well as her steadfast dedication to her craft. For those who think writing is easy, this may be a stark awakening as to the tenacity it often takes to birth a respectable literary work.