Sommersby

Sommersby is a 1993 period romantic drama film directed by Jon Amiel from a screenplay by Nicholas Meyer and Sarah Kernochan, adapted from the historical account of the 16th-century French peasant Martin Guerre. Based on the 1982 French film The Return of Martin Guerre, the film stars Richard Gere and Jodie Foster, with Bill Pullman, James Earl Jones, Clarice Taylor, Frankie Faison, and R. Lee Ermey in supporting roles. Set in the Reconstruction era, it depicts a farmer returning home from the American Civil War, with his wife beginning to suspect that he is an impostor while also falling in love with him.

Sommersby was released in the United States on February 5, 1993, by Warner Bros. The film received generally positive reviews from critics, who praised the performances and chemistry of its lead actors, as well as Danny Elfman's musical score, and was a box office success, grossing over $140 million worldwide on a budget of $30 million.

Wealthy planter John "Jack" Sommersby left his farm to fight as a Confederate officer in the early days of the American Civil War and is presumed dead after six years. Despite the hardship of working their farm in Vine Hill, Tennessee, his apparent widow, Laurel, is content in his absence, free from an unpleasant and abusive husband. She makes remarriage plans with one of her neighbors, Orin Meacham, who has been helping her and her young son with the farmwork.

One day, Jack seemingly returns with a change of heart. While originally hesitant, Laurel begins to warm to his now kind and loving demeanour towards herself and their son, Rob. Jack finds the local economy ruined, and his land mortgaged and exhausted. To revive the economy, he suggests Burley tobacco as a cash crop. He persuades the townsfolk to pool their resources to buy seed, offering them to share-crop on his land, and to sell them their plots at a fair price once the mortgage is cleared. Jack also offers former slaves the opportunity to purchase the land they agree to help work on, causing animosity from several white citizens.

Upon taking the townspeople's money, he buys the tobacco seed, claiming that the crops will raise enough funds to rebuild the town church. All those who bought in on the deal set to work, transforming the plantation into a breeding ground of promise and prosperity.

Displaced from his courtship of Laurel, Meacham suspects Jack to be an impostor. The town shoemaker also finds that this man's foot is two sizes smaller than the last made for Sommersby before the war.

In the evenings, Jack reads to them from Homer's Iliad, which the old Jack would never have done. He claims that the book was given to him by a man he met in prison. Jack and Laurel rekindle their intimacy, which leads to Laurel becoming pregnant.

Joseph, a black freedman living on Sommersby's land, is brutally attacked and brought to Sommersby's door by hooded night riders from the town proclaiming themselves the Knights of the White Camelia (one of them is Meacham). Jack is threatened in an attempt to force him to exclude black people from the landowning, but he refuses. Meacham threatens Jack and Laurel and attempts to set fire to the barn on their property before Jack stops him. Laurel gives birth to a daughter, Rachel.