Word: pilcher
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Dates: during 1996-1996
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...SINCE IN THE HEAT OF THE Night has a good ole cracker had a culture shock like the one Earl Pilcher Jr. (Robert Duvall) receives in A Family Thing. It comes in the form of a deathbed letter from the woman he has always believed was his mother. In it she tells him that though he looks, acts and thinks white, he is half black, the product of a union six decades ago between his father and the family's African-American maid, who died giving birth to him. His adoptive mother's last wish is that he find...
...film begins after the funeral of Arkansas native Earl Pilcher's (Duvall) mother. In a letter written before her death, she reveals that, although he looks white, Pilcher's real mother was a black woman, a maid forced into a sexual relation with his father. She died after giving birth to Earl, who was afterwards taken into the Pilcher household and brought up as a legitimate son because of his white skin and features. Further, Earl learns that through his natural mother he has a half brother named Ray Murdoch, now a policeman living in Chicago...
...this intended moment of epiphany somehow falls flat, spoiled by Aunt T.'s inappropriate exclamation "You were as white as an angel!" In general, the women in "A Family Thing"--Aunt T., Mrs. Pilcher, Ray's and Earl's mother--are too saintly to be true, while the men are either churls (like Pilcher, Sr.) or burdened by a huge chip on the shoulder. Like balky horses, they must be forced into decent, sensible behavior by their womenfolk. "A Family Thing" would probably have been more convincing had nobility and selfishness been more evenly divided between the two sexes...