Based on a Book

Jay Craven has made a little niche for himself in dramas of the American Midwest. His 1993 sleeper Where the Rivers Flow North chronicles the standoff between the WPA and a defiant Vermont farmer during the depression. Stranger in the Kingdom, adapted fro... Read More

Jay Craven has made a little niche for himself in dramas of the American Midwest. His 1993 sleeper Where the Rivers Flow North chronicles the standoff between the WPA and a defiant Vermont farmer during the depression. Stranger in the Kingdom, adapted from the novel by Howard Frank Mosher, finds Craven back in Vermont, circa 1952, where a sleepy little town is awakened by the arrival of worldly black pastor Ernie Hudson, fresh from 15 years of service as an Army chaplain. The community doesn't take to their new two-fisted moral policeman, and tongues wag when he takes in a sexy young French Canadian mail-order maid fleeing from her abusive household. When she's murdered the community points its fingers to the minister. As long as the film stays with Hudson, it's a compelling portrait of small-town provincialism turned ugly, but the film's real protagonist is hometown attorney David Lansbury, a fun-loving scamp who confronts his own arrested adolescence while defending Hudson in a Perry Mason-like climax. The film loses its complexity as it turns whodunit, but until then it's a richly populated, well-sketched portrait of rural paradise polluted by ignorance and hate, beautifully shot in autumnal colors. Sean Nelson (Fresh) costars as the minister's son, and Martin Sheen and Henry Gibson appear as attorneys for the prosecution. --Sean Axmaker

Howard Frank Mosher has earned both critical acclaim and a wide readership for his vivid historical portraits of northern New England residents in his fictional Kingdom County, Vermont. A Stranger in the Kingdom tells the unforgettable story of a brutal m... Read More

Howard Frank Mosher has earned both critical acclaim and a wide readership for his vivid historical portraits of northern New England residents in his fictional Kingdom County, Vermont. A Stranger in the Kingdom tells the unforgettable story of a brutal murder in a small town and the devastating events that follow. The town"s new preacher, a black man, finds himself on trial more for who he is than for what he might have done in this powerful drama of passion, prejudice, and innocence suddenly lost . . . and perhaps found again.