Mississippi Madonna

By J.C.

TOMORROW

Directed by JOSEPH ANTHONY

Screenplay by NORTON FOOTE

Something small and serious was the aim here. Size is no measure of quality, though, and glumness no substitute for depth. Tomorrow is an antique--a remnant, like last year's Going Home, of television's "golden years," a time that memory has much improved. Horton Foote's screenplay is based not only on a William Faulkner short story called Tomorrow, but also on Foote's 1960 Playhouse 90 adaptation of it. This may explain why the film looks a little like a kinescope.

Tomorrow is photographed in black and white, a technique that still has enormous range and possibilities, as Robert Surtees' work in The Last Picture Show demonstrated. Here, however, Allan Green's camera lacks all tone but a flat, relentless gray. Robert Duvall, a character actor of exceptional virtuosity (TIME, April 3), plays a Mississippi farmer who falls in love with a pregnant woman whom he has found in the woods. Duvall gives an initial impression of such granite stoicism that it slightly unbalances an otherwise carefully modulated and intensely sympathetic performance. The script allows him to open up only toward the end of the film, when it is almost too late. Olga Bellin portrays the back-country madonna in a shrill regional accent that is undiluted Broadway Southern.

Faulkner's story was not one of his best, but it was far from as mawkish as what Foote (who was also responsible for the screenplay of To Kill a Mockingbird) has homespun out of it. The farmer undergoes every conceivable trial and hardship. When the woman dies soon after giving birth, the farmer devotedly raises the child (Johnny Mask) as his own, only to see the law return him eventually to his natural father. But like Dilsey in The Sound and the Fury, the farmer endures. Foote's script and Anthony's leaden direction transform this small saga of indomitability into a mere valentine to pluckiness. . J.C.

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