Main Cast: Mary Steenburgen, Rip Torn, Peter Coyote, Dana Hill, Alfre Woodard
Release Year: 1983
Country: US
Run Time: 122 minutes
Plot
Director Martin Ritt's bucolic rural environments of Norma Rae, Conrack, and Sounder, are re-visited once again in Cross Creek, based on author Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' memoirs of her times on a remote Florida bayou. Mary Steenburgen plays Rawlings, author of The Yearling, who, in 1928, makes the abrupt decision to leave her husband and move to an isolated orange grove to concentrate on her writing. Rawlings buys a run-down house covered with cobwebs that she restores with quick dispatch. In these desolate surroundings, Rawlings pauses in her housecleaning to listen reflectively to the otherworldly noises of the swamp. But suddenly out of this loneliness, people emerge. There is Geechee (Alfre Woodard), Rawlings' devoted servant; Marsh Turner (Rip Torn), a liquor-guzzling swamp rat; Floyd Turner (Cary Guffey), a cute harmonica-playing boy; and Ellie Turner (Dana Hill), a little girl whose fawn becomes the basis of Rawlings' Yearling book. Rawlings becomes involved with Norton Baskin (Peter Coyote), the owner of the local hotel, and, as she settles into life on the bayou and her friendship with Norton and Geechee, she is inspired to begin writing. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide
Review
Cross Creek starts out like it might be some kind of melodramatic, sub-Hallmark Hall of Fame staging of The Great Gatsby. But as it gets its footing in the unstable terrain of the Florida swamps, it starts to approach more of an earthy Southern epic -- something similar in scope to the Elizabethan costume dramas the heroine (Mary Steenburgen) unsuccessfully tries to publish. The film is still underpinned by a certain naïveté and fancifulness, but for the right crowd, it's an effectively romantic look at a woman who finds herself amid a gothic setting and an unlikely smattering of reclusive neighbors. Steenburgen's performance is not always strong -- in fact, there are certain scenes where she behaves so differently than she did in the previous one, it almost feels like she's joking. But she's such a sweet and likeable central figure that the audience really feels her triumphs and failures. As the man seeking her attentions, Peter Coyote employs generous doses of his Kevin Costner-like charm, and Rip Torn, always an interesting performer, makes the most of a backwoods hick who achieves greater complexity than he'd have in lesser hands. Cross Creek is also worth seeing for one of the first cinematic appearances by the superlative Alfre Woodard, who finds herself in a similar role of propping up an underwritten character: that of Geechee, the cleaning woman who keeps Kinnan Rawlings in check. The performance earned her an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress. ~ Derek Armstrong, All Movie Guide
Joanna Miles - Mrs. Turner; Ike Eisenmann - Paul; Cary Guffey - Floyd Turner; Toni Hudson - Tim's Wife; Bo Rucker - Leroy; Jay O. Sanders - Charles Rawlings; John Hammond - Tim; Malcolm McDowell - Max Perkins; Tommy Alford - Postal Clerk; C.T. Wakefield - Sheriff; Keith Michell - Preston Turner
Credit
Joe Tompkins - Costume Designer, Martin Ritt - Director, Sid Levin - Editor, Leonard Rosenman - Composer (Music Score), Walter Scott Herndon - Production Designer, John A. Alonzo - Cinematographer, Terry Nelson - Producer, Robert B. Radnitz - Producer, Dalene Young - Screenwriter, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings - Book Author
The film opens in 1928 in New York State, where Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (Steenburgen) advises her husband that her last book was rejected by a publisher, and she has bought an orange grove in Florida and is leaving him to go there. She drives to the nearest town alone, and arrives in time for her car to die. Local resident Norton Baskin (Peter Coyote) takes her the rest of the distance to a dilapidated and overgrown cabin attached to an even more overgrown orange grove. Despite Baskin's (and her own) doubts, she stays and begins to fix up the property.
The local residents of "the Creek" begin to interact with her. Marsh Turner (Rip Torn) comes around with his daughter Ellie (Dana Hill), a teenage girl who keeps a deer fawn as a pet she has named Flag. A black woman, Geechee (Woodard), arrives and offers to work for her, despite the fact that Rawlings insists she cannot pay her much. The grove languishes below her expectations and Rawlings writes another novel, hoping to get it published. A very young married couple arrives to inhabit a cabin on Rawlings' property. The woman is very pregnant and they both reject Rawlings' attempts to help them.
Rawlings employs the assistance of a few of the Creek residents, Geechee and Baskin, to unblock a vital irrigation vein for her grove, and it begins to improve. The young couple has their child. Ellie's deer grows older and escapes her pen, and Marsh foretells that the deer will have to be killed for eating all their food. Geechee's husband comes to stay with her after being released from prison, and Rawlings offers him a place to work in her grove, but he refuses and Rawlings fires him. Even though her husband drinks and gambles, Geechee goes to leave with him, and Rawlings admits she will be sad to see Geechee leave, after Geechee demands to know why Rawlings would allow a friend to make such a mistake. Geechee decides to stay after all after telling Rawlings that she should know how to treat her friends better.
Rawlings submits her novel, a gothic romance, to Max Perkins, and it is rejected again. He writes her in return to tell her to write him stories about the people she describes so well in her letters, instead of the popular English governess stories she has been writing. She does so immediately, beginning with telling the story of the young married couple (eventually becoming "Jacob's Ladder" published in Scribner's Magazine in 1931). During a visit to the Turner's home on Ellie's 14th birthday, Flag escapes his pen once more and Marsh is forced to shoot him after he has eaten the family's vegetables. Ellie screams at him in hatred, and Marsh goes on a bender, goes into town and attracts the attention of the sheriff. The sheriff finds Marsh drinking moonshine with a shotgun across his lap, and demands the gun. When Marsh offers it to him, the sheriff shoots him (the story eventually becoming the basis for The Yearling).
Max Perkins visits and accepts her story (Jacob's Ladder) upon reading it. Baskin asks Rawlings to marry him, which she accepts after much hesitation about her independence. Rawlings realizes her profound attachment to the land at Cross Creek.
Cross Creek was filmed in and near Micanopy, Florida. At the beginning of the film, Steenburgen as Rawlings asks a gentleman in a rocking chair where the post office is, and he points her in the right direction. The gentleman in the rocking chair was Norton Baskin, Rawlings' husband.
Geechee was a composite of several maids who worked for Rawlings.
