List Price: $14.98You Pay Only: $13.49 You Save: $1.49 (10%)Prices subject to change.
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Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Binding: DVD
Brand: TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX HOME ENT
EAN: 0027616921840
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD-Video, Full Screen, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
Label: MGM (Video & DVD)
Manufacturer: MGM (Video & DVD)
Number Of Items: 1
Publisher: MGM (Video & DVD)
Region Code: 1
Release Date: April 12, 2005
Running Time: 93 minutes
Sales Rank: 25310
Studio: MGM (Video & DVD)
Theatrical Release Date: 1991
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Editorial Review:
Description:
OscarÂ(r) winner* Robert Duvall 'is terrific' (The New York Times) in this 'vividly realized' (Variety) drama co-starring Lucas Haas (Witness) and James Earl Jones (Field of Dreams). 'Gracefully adapted to the screen' (Los Angeles Times) by Horton Foote (Of Mice and Men) and ably directed by Peter Masterson (Blood Red), this riveting tale of an unlikely bond is 'a tasty feast' (LA Weekly)! In rural Texas 1902, 13-year-old Horace (Haas) toils on a run-down plantation to buy a tombstone for the father he lost a year earlier. Soll (Duvall), the crusty old Confederate who owns the plantation, has yet to pay the boy a pennyof the money he owes him. But on Christmas Eve, as Soll becomes obsessed with his own mortality, hemakes a grand promise forcing Horace to confront his fear of death and the harsh truths of a decadent society. *1983: Actor, Tender Mercies
Amazon.com:
The works of Texas-born writer Horton Foote are always dealing with transition and transformation, caused by the intermingling of time and experience, and Convicts is a prime example of Foote's thematic consistency. It's also one of several fruitful collaborations between Foote and actor Robert Duvall, whose career has connected with Foote's at pivotal moments since Duvall's screen debut in the Foote-scripted classic To Kill a Mockingbird. And while Convicts may lack the emotional power of 1971's Tomorrow or the dramatic delicacy of 1983's Tender Mercies, it adds resonance to their mutual body of work. Here, in a story set in coastal Texas in 1902, Duvall plays an eccentric, dying sugar-plantation boss who takes a young boy (Lukas Haas) under his wing to teach him a few of life's harsher lessons.
His frontiers long since conquered, with slaves of the past now replaced by local convict laborers, the boss is a stubborn, violent, hardened relic of a bygone era, and Duvall's performance breathes feisty life into a man who's ready for death (well, almost), but not without firing a few more rounds from his trusty Colt .45. It's a bit theatrical (and veteran stage director Peter Masterson--Mary Stuart's father--approaches Foote's play adaptation with dry visual style), but Convicts is bathed in the candlelight of a passing age, and its tone is suitably wise and keenly observant. Barely released in theaters, this film is ripe for rediscovery. --Jeff Shannon
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - It's Horton Foote Quality, Which Some Viewers "Miss"
I'm giving it four stars only because it's not as good as some of his masterpieces like TRIP TO BOUNTIFUL, or his adaptations of TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD and OF MICE & MEN. But it's still a great film.
When you read the reviews, take into account the reviewers. The ones who dismiss it as boring will be bored by anything Horton Foote writes. His work is too subtle to be popular, so if you want a shoot-em-up Western like THE LONG RIDERS or Hollywood fare like SILVERADO, you won't get that here. This is a play, adapted beautifully for screen, filled with nuances and surprises that are for viewers who notice, or care to notice, such moments in life. Foote attracts great actors for his plays because he gives them the chance to do this kind of work that will hold up for generations and won't be tied to trends or formulas.
CONVICTS is in the same category as TOMORROW, 1918, ON VALENTINE'S DAY, COURTSHIP, LILY DALE, TENDER MERCIES, HABITATION OF DRAGONS, OLD MAN... wonderful screenplays that rely on an attentive and sensitive audience. I've seen every movie he's written, over and over, love them all, and wish the world could enjoy them like I do... but most people fall asleep.
Rating: - No escape . . .
Robert Duvall, who was 58 when this film was made in 1990, plays a King Lear-like old tyrant in his 80s, more than half-demented, half-drunk, and fully armed. Part of Horton Foote's cycle of nine plays featuring a character, Horace, much like his own father, "Convicts" is of a different temper from his more bittersweet scripts ("Tender Mercies," "The Trip to Bountiful"). Here the violence and brutality of the Old South is portrayed in a remote rural setting along the Texas Gulf coast on a convict farm, where the workers are no better than slaves, and though it is 1902, the Civil War seems still in the recent past.
Duvall is Soll, the owner, raving, confused, forgetful, paranoid. His scenes with his employees, Ben (James Earl Jones), 13-year old Horace (Lukas Haas), Martha (Starletta Depois), and a trustie Jackson (Mel Winkler) are rambling, circuitous and full of repetitions and questions with "I don't know" answers. It's a Faulkner story retold by Samuel Beckett. While there is much talk of death, dying, and killing, there are also moments of comic absurdity. Viewers eager for plot and action will be impatient with the theatricality of the dialogue and the scenes, but that's not what the film is about. They are all convicts, trapped in a dying world and going nowhere. Only the young Horace, with his education, his intelligence and humanity, and his knowledge of a modern world elsewhere will escape.
Rating:  - Convicts
Don't waste your money like I did.......Robert Duvall westerns are usually great but this one was MAD !!!!!!
Rating: - Good life story
Typical Robert Duvall film. It was funny and touching and probably real for someone somewhere in that time period. About the differences in people, thier situations and circumstances. If you like Rober Duvall this is a must have film.
Rating:  - Convicts
Story went nowhere for the amount of acting talent involved . I kept thinking it was going to build up to something & before I knew it the Unclimatic ending was there in front of me.
Very disappointed but.... oh well.
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