Courtship

Courtship (1987) is a terrific talky story by Horton Foote and is one arc of his memoir trilogy of stories about a small town in Texas in the 1910s ... (the others are On Valentine's Day and 1918). Together they track the years 1915-18 and the lives of Elizabeth Vaughn (Hallie Foote) and Horace Robedaux (William Converse-Roberts).

This first entry sets up the courtship and eventual elopement of the young lovers and the girl's father (Michael Higgins) and his defiant distaste for Horace. He seems a tad obsessed with his daughters (Amanda Plummer plays the younger Laura) to the point of sexual obsession. He likes the idea of their being old maids.

These plays by Foote beautifully capture the era in which they are set. He gets all the peripheral things right like the music, the clothing, the movies they talk about, but more importantly the way we were in those more innocent times. While people were outwardly more genteel and polite, inside, they still seethed and hated and loved.

The class-conscious daddy is also anti-booze and anti-dancing and most certainly against women voting etc. Yet Elizabeth has the gumption to defy her father and run off with Horace. Even the mother (Rochelle Oliver) would rather have her daughters be old maids rather than marry the "wrong man."

Beautifully done. The trilogy ends in 1918 with the family dealing with the consequences of WW I and the Influenza epidemic.

The IMDb credits are wrong. Neither Richard Jenkins nor Steven Hill appear in this film.

In 1915 Harrison, Texas, an as-yet-unkissed piano teacher in her twenties is stymied from finding romance by her snobbish, suffocating parents whom she still lives with. Screenwriter Horton Foote adapted his one-act play, originally part of his nine-play saga "The Orphans' Home Cycle", and apparently had a hand in the casting as well (Horton Foote Jr. plays Steve, Daisy Foote is Allie, and the leading role is played by Hallie Foote). Obviously this was a labor of love, but nothing quite looks right or sounds right here. Foote has a definite ear for small town gossip, rife with religious and class prejudice, but his characters are merely sounding-boards, not people. Did he mean the parents to come across as such ignorant bullies--and if so, why? Do they want their eldest daughter to be an old maid piano teacher, untouched forever? The performers are uneven, their accents are over-emphatic, and the director has no idea where to place the camera, making this one clumsy "Courtship". * from ****