Cinema: Nodding Off

CROSS CREEK Directed by Martin Ritt Screenplay by Dalene Young

In 1928 Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, a frustrated newspaper writer, left the cold North and set up residence in the lush remoteness of central Florida. The therapy was successful. She found herself; she found a pleasant local fellow whom she later married; she discovered a passel of good friends in the cracker families living around the creek bend; and out of her experiences she wrote the novel that made her famous, The Yearling, and later her memoir, Cross Creek.

Old-fashioned Hollywood weepies demanded that the audience surrender to the prejudices of gender: that women...