Heartland

The widowed Elinore Randall arrives with her small daughter Jerrine in a barren stretch of Wyoming in 1910, to keep house for a rancher named Clyde Stewart. The work breaks the back and the isolation becomes unbearable once winter comes. After a while Elinore starts thinking about taking land of her own, and Stewart tries to explain that it cannot be done, least of all by a woman. What is between them is agreement rather than affection; even so they marry and put their claims together, and the real test is still ahead. Richard Pearce directed, from letters Elinore Pruitt Stewart actually wrote. Rip Torn and Conchata Ferrell lead. It shared the Golden Bear at Berlin in 1980. The record gives the year as 1981; the film was made in 1979.