High Lonesome

High Lonesome (1995) is a made-for-TV movie, otherwise known as A Father for Charlie. It’s set in the American South in the Depression and tells of the friendship between Walter, a black sharecropper (Louis Gossett Jr) and Charlie, a small white boy. Though the film’s motives are honourable in its attempt at dealing with white racism, the story is implausible in its assumptions (would a black man have been allowed to foster a white boy at that time?) and deeply sentimental, not least in the last-minute conversion of the virulently racist local sheriff.