Just rewatched this movie on YouTube. Taking place during the bus boycott of 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, maid Odessa Cotter (Whoopi Goldberg) resolves to walk but her employer Miriam Thompson (Sissy Spacek) decides to drive her for at least a couple of days of the week to her house. I'll stop there and just say this was quite an inspiring, if intense, drama about how oppressive it could be during that time if you were not only the wrong color but also the wrong gender, that is, if you weren't a white male. I mean, the way Miriam's husband Norman (Dwight Schultz) and his younger brother Tunker (Dylan Baker) felt threatened by the whole thing makes one wonder. And the way Odessa's teen kids, Selma (Erika Alexander) and Theodore (Richard Habersham) were almost completely defeated by those white teen boys definitely gave me a pause. Not to mention how openly bigoted Miriam's mother (Gleaves Azar) said her opinion in front of the help was so blatantly appalling to see. What gives one hope is not only the way Miriam and Odessa communicate with each other, but also the way the narration of the grown Thompson daughter Mary Catherine (voice of Mary Steenburgen, Lexi Randall as a child) assures us how poignantly inspiring the whole time was. So on that note, The Long Walk Home gets a high recommendation from me. P.S. Ving Rhames-several years before his star-making turn in Pulp Fiction-portrays Odessa's husband Herbert with hair. Richard Habersham was Eddie in Do the Right Thing the year before. Younger brother Franklin was played by Jason Weaver who would later be the singing voice of Young Simba in The Lion King. He's also, like me, a Chicago native. And Erika Alexander would become Cousin Pam on "The Cosby Show" after making this.

Blacks in the South during the 1950s start a strife-riddled boycott against the transit system after Rosa Parks is disciplined for not giving up her seat to a white person on the bus. Subject matter is well worth exploring, but director Richard Pearce approaches this story too dutifully, as if he were teaching a course in towing the line. The white folk are all nasty bigots, except maid Whoopi Goldberg's proprietress--a saintly Sissy Spacek--who takes up the black community's cause. It's Convenient Script-Writing 101, and without much of an edge it never has a chance to accumulate any heart--or any vitality. ** from ****

Sissy Spacek and Whoopi Goldberg put on spectacular performances in this story of the relationship between an affluent woman and her maid in Montgomery, Alabama, during the bus boycott. The movie shows how both women start out filling the roles that society expects of them - a housewife and a servant - but both slowly realize that they have to be more than this. There's no glossing over the rabid racism of many of the people in Montgomery, some of whom believe the Civil Rights Movement to be a commie plot.

There's a scene where we hear a suggestion that there might one day be a black person in a position of power. Obviously that's now the case, but racism persists, as do police killings of unarmed blacks. Movies like "The Long Walk Home" will remain relevant as long as these problems continue. I recommend the movie both as a look at the events of the era, and as a look at how these women of different socioeconomic backgrounds turned out to have more in common than they realized.

Definitely worth seeing. Watch for an early appearance by Ving Rhames (Marcellus in "Pulp Fiction") as Whoopi Goldberg's husband.