Horton Foote was the adapting hand behind this superlative black and white filmization of the 1939
William Faulkner story -Tomorrow. Framed in flashback, the film explores the personal reasons that semi-literate farmer
Robert Duvall is the lone jury holdout in the guilty verdict for a young killer on trial. We learn in a gradually unfolding fashion that the boy is the son of
Olga Bellin, a woman with whom
Duvall had had an intense personal involvement some twenty years earlier.
Foote's script had previously been utilized on a Playhouse 90 TV version of
Tomorrow, which starred
Sterling Hayden. Universally regarded as the best-ever film adaptation of a
Faulkner work,
Tomorrow was in danger of vanishing without truly finding its audience, when it was given a well received TV premiere on PBS on December 17, 1984--twelve years after the film was made. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide