Rambling Rose

Director: Martha Coolidge

1991 / 112min / 35mm

Acclaimed novelist and screenwriter Calder Willingham adapted his own 1972 novel of the same name scripting Coolidge’s tender, deeply humane Great Depression-set drama, starring Dern as Rose, a teenager rescued from a life of prostitution after being taken in as a domestic by an eccentric Georgia family, her sexual precocity soon making her a destabilizing force in the household, comprised of father Robert Duvall, mother Diane Ladd, and son Lukas Haas. Dern and Ladd would become the first real-life mother-daughter duo to be nominated for acting Academy Awards in the same year for their work in Rambling Rose, which Roger Ebert raved “contains some of the best performances of the year, especially in the ensemble acting of the four main characters.”

Print courtesy of Academy Film Archives, on deposit from Martha Coolidge