Court likes Dani but intuits that she’s just too young. Dani and Court meet cute at the waterhole and form an affectionate friendship, that Dani thinks is a romance. Widow Marie Foster (Gail Strickland) moves back to the neighboring farm she has three smaller boys and a teenage son, Court (Jason London) who is going to take on the responsibility of getting the farm going again. College candidate Maureen (Emily Warfield) must fend off unwanted advances from a local boy, while her 14-year-old sister Dani (Reese Witherspoon) is trying to sort out her own feelings on romance. The Trant family of Louisiana is nothing if not prolific with two daughters already in their teens and a girl-toddler in the house, Abigail (Tess Harper) is pregnant again, hoping for a boy for her husband Matthew (Sam Waterston). Today The Man in the Moon is remembered as a go-to title to see the origins of actress Reese Witherspoon - did any child actress ever make such an auspicious debut?
MAN ON THE MOON MOVIE 1991 TV
Wingfield’s original screenplay for Moon received much less attention, and her later film credits are on TV movies and Disney animated sequels.
But that Ridley Scott movie is essentially a distaff riff on the male action buddy movie. The big news in Hollywood that year was Thelma & Louise, which made publicity hay out of its woman screenwriter - big magazine coverage, etc.
The catchall phrase would call this a ‘coming of age’ movie, but Mulligan and screenwriter Jenny Wingfield achieve much more than that.
The Man in the Moon has the same sensitivity to the feelings of children, in this case children becoming sexually aware adults. Robert Mulligan was the directing talent behind To Kill a Mockingbird, a film now recalled with an almost universal reverence. Mark Rydell was an actor who became both a fine director and producer. It’s an excellent drama with fresh, exciting performers, and its filmmakers should have been treated as stars as well. The Man in the Moon had every chance to be a breakout hit. They needed hits to get on a roll, and that didn’t happen for four years, in a brief window of time where the production execs rebooted James Bond, and scored with things like The Birdcage and Get Shorty.
The brief MGM/Pathé regime had come out with some likely winners with big names attached, but all of a sudden most of the projects seemed underfunded, light in star power, or were ‘artistic efforts’ that couldn’t be expected to gather mass audiences. I started work at the newly reconstituted MGM in 1991, when it was pretending that the ownership upsets and financial woes of the previous few years were gone for good. I certainly didn’t want this one to get away. Starring: Sam Waterston, Tess Harper, Gail Strickland, Reese Witherspoon, Jason London, Emily Warfield, Bentley Mitchum. Street Date / Available from the Twilight Time Movies Store 29.95 Photographed by Freddie Francis, this tops even Mulligan’s To Kill a Mockingbird.ġ991 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 100 min. She’s truly a sensation, as is the actress Emily Warfield as the older sister who ‘steals’ Reese’s beau. Robert Mulligan’s late career gem is a beautiful, fad-free tale of teenage romance with universal appeal, famed for introducing Reese Witherspoon to the screen.
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