Older man/younger woman romances were a long Hollywood staple; I tend to associate them with the forties and fifties, but "Murphy's Romance" shows that they were still popular in the eighties. I have never read the novella on which the film is based, but I understand that in it the two main characters Emma Moriarty and Murphy Jones just remain platonic friends. Someone at the studio, however, obviously felt that nobody wants to see films about older man/younger woman platonic friendships. They even exaggerated the age difference; in 1985 Sally Field would have been 39 and James Garner 57, but we the film tells us that Emma is 33 and Murphy 60, thus stretching the difference from 18 years to 27.
Emma is a divorced mother with a young son who moves to a small Arizona town to make a living as a horse-trainer. She finds it difficult to fit in as the local people are not particularly welcoming to strangers, but she does make a friend in Murphy, the town's widowed pharmacist. This being a romantic comedy, there has to be an obstacle to the love of the two main characters, and one arrives in the shape of Emma's ex-husband Bobby Jack, who arrives in town and moves in with her. As the film is entitled "Murphy's Romance", not "Bobby Jack's Romance", we can tell that this is not going to be a comedy of remarriage, but it's a fairly close-run thing. Bobby Jack may be childish and irresponsible, making it easy to understand why his marriage failed first time around, but he is also young and good-looking and his and Emma's son Jake adores him. Just ten minutes before the end it looks as though Emma and Bobby Jack are about to re-consummate their relationship with a (quite literal) roll in the hay, but their plans are frustrated when Emma's hay fever brings on a fit of sneezing. (This made me wonder why anyone suffering from this particular condition would want to take up horse training as a profession).
My main reason for watching the film was that it was directed by Martin Ritt who also made one of my all-time favourites, "Hud", as well as films as good as "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold", "Hombre" and "The Molly Maguires". "Murphy's Romance", however, is not really in the same league as any of those. It is an amiable enough little movie, and Garner and Field make an appealing hero and heroine, but there is little about it that remains in the mind afterward. Ritt was normally a serious-minded director and specialised in serious-minded dramas; rom-coms do not seem to have been his forte. 6/10.
Emma is a divorced mother with a young son who moves to a small Arizona town to make a living as a horse-trainer. She finds it difficult to fit in as the local people are not particularly welcoming to strangers, but she does make a friend in Murphy, the town's widowed pharmacist. This being a romantic comedy, there has to be an obstacle to the love of the two main characters, and one arrives in the shape of Emma's ex-husband Bobby Jack, who arrives in town and moves in with her. As the film is entitled "Murphy's Romance", not "Bobby Jack's Romance", we can tell that this is not going to be a comedy of remarriage, but it's a fairly close-run thing. Bobby Jack may be childish and irresponsible, making it easy to understand why his marriage failed first time around, but he is also young and good-looking and his and Emma's son Jake adores him. Just ten minutes before the end it looks as though Emma and Bobby Jack are about to re-consummate their relationship with a (quite literal) roll in the hay, but their plans are frustrated when Emma's hay fever brings on a fit of sneezing. (This made me wonder why anyone suffering from this particular condition would want to take up horse training as a profession).
My main reason for watching the film was that it was directed by Martin Ritt who also made one of my all-time favourites, "Hud", as well as films as good as "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold", "Hombre" and "The Molly Maguires". "Murphy's Romance", however, is not really in the same league as any of those. It is an amiable enough little movie, and Garner and Field make an appealing hero and heroine, but there is little about it that remains in the mind afterward. Ritt was normally a serious-minded director and specialised in serious-minded dramas; rom-coms do not seem to have been his forte. 6/10.