Amber Waves

This is a beautiful film, wonderfully acted with subtly and nuance; well written, well directed. I wish I could find it on DVD or streaming...

Kurt Russell shines in a role that could easily have been shallowly depicted. Similarly, Dennis Weaver does a great job and avoids over-playing into melodrama. This is wonderful early work by Mare Winningham. Even if you're not surprised by the ending, it is no less beautiful and quietly, realistically played.

Kurt Russell is a womanizing, irresponsible male model who is both full of himself and improbably on a shoot in the wheat fields of the Midwest, while aging Dennis Weaver works nearby with the barely profitable wheat harvesting company that he owns. Each man is having the worst day of his life, as Kurt is beaten up in a bar then fired for his now un-photographable looks and he ends up headed back to NYC with no money to get there. Meanwhile, Weaver's credit is caput at his bank, he can't find a buyer for his troubled firm and his doctor has just told him he has terminal cancer. Weaver picks up a young hitch-hiker, who happens to be Russell and when Weaver drops him off in the city the cops pounce on the young man for hitch-hiking and vagrancy, which will no doubt net him a term on a chain gang.

Weaver bails out the young model and at first his motive appears to be altruism, but his agenda becomes clear when he announces he's short of labor and that he's shanghaiing Russel to be a part of his crew. A duck out of water at first, the arrogant young pretty-boy/model gradually toughens up physically and even begins to develop character, thanks to the hard work and the good example set by straight-arrow Weaver. Against all odds Russell turns into a valuable member of the crew. Enter Weaver's daughter, played by Mare Winningham, who ends up falling for Russell, who discovers a noble streak he never knew he had, as he tells Winningham to save her love for "somebody who deserves it." This is a simple, beautiful film that puts to shame the noisy, head-rattling and cartoon-ish drivel that graces our movie theaters these days. The fine script features realistic parts for Weaver, Russell, Winningham and Wilford Brimley, who deliver uniformly fine performances. After watching this you will feel you've experienced a part of America you've probably never seen and gotten to know some people who speak and act straight from the heart.

Everything about this movie is "classic," as far as custom combining movies go. About the only thing wrong with it is maybe too much licentiousness. Weaver and the others do excellent acting. Custom combining is an American tradition since World War II. In the late '70s and early '80s, there were a lot of combining crews, as combines were getting bigger and more comfortable to operate, yet they weren't as modern as today's combines. And a lot of those combines were Canadian-built Massey-Ferguson 760s. This was an ABC TV movie. It was filmed in Canada, though the movie is supposed to occur in the U.S.A. Weaver's character almost kills himself and loses a combine, but the harvest must go on.

I agree with all the other reviewers in that this is quite a well made movie, however you don't have watch too closely to see that actually not a lot of wheat gets cut by these custom cutters. In scenes with the combines, they spend most of their time just driving aimlessly around an already cut field in the dark or even worse making it appear like they are cutting wheat by in fact just driving the machine through some scrub grass. Some minimal stock footage was used of combines in wheat but it amounts to seconds of the film.

Its sad that the movie could not have had the chance to get some decent shots of the machines doing the job.

This is the only major factual fault in what really is a well produced, directed and acted TV movie.

Who would have thought that a TV movie about wheat-whackers would be this good? (See other reviews for detailed description.) Dennis Weaver, Kurt Russell, and Mare Winningham are uniformly excellent in their roles in a dramatic (but never melodramatic) script by veteran television series writer Ken Trevey ("Gunsmoke," "The Big Valley," "Lou Grant," et al.). It might sound like a snooze-fest, but you won't regret watching this one.