Cross Creek (film)

Cross Creek is a 1983 film starring Mary Steenburgen as The Yearling author Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. The film is directed by Martin Ritt and is based, in part, on Rawlings 1942 memoir, Cross Creek.

The local residents of the Creek begin to interact with her. Marsh Turner Rip Torn comes around with his daughter Ellie Dana Hill, a teenage girl who keeps a deer fawn as a pet she has named Flag. A black woman, Geechee Alfre Woodard, arrives and offers to work for her, despite the fact that Rawlings insists she cannot pay her much. The grove languishes below her expectations and Rawlings writes another novel, hoping to get it published. A very young married couple arrives to inhabit a cabin on Rawlings property. The woman is very pregnant and they both reject Rawlings attempts to help them.Rawlings employs the assistance of a few of the Creek residents, Geechee and Baskin, to unblock a vital irrigation vein for her grove, and it begins to improve. The young couple has their child. Ellies deer grows older and escapes her pen, and Marsh foretells that the deer will have to be killed for eating all their food. Geechees husband comes to stay with her after being released from prison, and Rawlings offers him a place to work in her grove, but he refuses and Rawlings asks him to leave. ........

Source: Wikipedia