Synopsis
Two women, black and white, in 1955 Montgomery Alabama, must decide what they are going to do in response to the famous bus boycott led by Martin Luther King.
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Cast
- Sissy SpacekMiriam Thompson
- Whoopi GoldbergOdessa Cotter
- Dwight SchultzNorman Thompson
- Ving RhamesHerbert Cotter
- Dylan BakerTunker Thompson
- Erika AlexanderSelma Cotter
- Lexi RandallMary Catherine
- Richard HabershamTheodore Cotter
- Jason WeaverFranklin Cotter
- Crystal RobbinsSara Thompson
Recommendations
- 88
Chicago Sun-Times
A powerful and affecting film, so well played by Goldberg and Spacek that we understand not just the politics of the time but the emotions as well. - 88
The Seattle Times
Suspense is the key element in The Long Walk Home. That may seem like a frivolous thing to say about a fictionalized but scrupulously authentic account of the 1955 civil rights bus boycott in Montgomery, Ala. Yet it's what holds this movie together, gives it distinction and makes it considerably more than a TV-movie-style docudrama. That, and the richly imagined performances of Sissy Spacek and Whoopi Goldberg. [15 Feb 1991, p.24] - 83
Entertainment Weekly
Both actresses are quite fine. The role of Odessa is somewhat underwritten, but Goldberg, playing her as a modest, God-fearing woman, acts with a deep-buried determination. If she’d been allowed to show some of her humor, the character might have soared. Spacek gives a beautifully modulated performance. - 75
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
Funny, heartbreaking and, yes, uplifting, The Long Walk Home takes the audience into a past that is always threatening to become the present; that it was made makes the future seem a little less threatening. [09 Feb 1991] - 70
Washington Post
A respectably stirring film about the rupturing birth of civil rights in the South. Although most of Walk Home heads down this ready-for-prime-time moral path, director Richard Pearce and screenwriter John Cork uncover some interesting dramatic grays along the way. - 70
The New York Times
The Long Walk Home offers a careful, dispassionate, finally moving evocation of its setting. In attempting to present segregated Southern society matter-of-factly, it avoids shrillness and keeps its potential for preachiness more or less at bay. - 67
IndieWire
It’s a pretty intense film at times, and it may be too earnest for its own good; but it’s a finely acted film and one that also firmly makes a connection between the Civil Rights movement and the beginning of the women’s movement, as Spacek begins to find her spine and come out of her protective “good wife” shell. - 60
Empire
Like Driving Miss Daisy this deals with a white employer and a black servant in the times of revolution, not only that but in both films it's a jaded view with the servant being loyal and not a 'friend'. Besides that small problem, it's a moving film with a steady performance from Spacek, but by the end it has definitely become Goldberg's film.
