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Movies don't often make their big-screen debut in Memphis.
But that's exactly what's happening today - and the reaction of Memphis audiences will determine, in part, whether the film is released to theaters in the rest of the country.
No, the movie isn't Cookie's Fortune, the Robert Altman Southern gothic comedy that was filmed in nearby Holly Springs, Miss. Cookie's Fortune, which also opens here today, debuted in New York and Los Angeles last weekend, and already is guaranteed a fairly wide release.
The movie in question is The Hunter's Moon, an independently financed and distributed production that is something of a throwback in more ways than one. It opens theatrically this weekend exclusively in 18 theaters in Memphis, Nashville and Jacksonville, Fla.
The Hunter's Moon - which stars Burt Reynolds, Keith Carradine and Pat Hingle - is reminiscent of such backwoods barn-burners as Jackson County Jail, Macon County Line and Boxcar Bertha, not to mention such earlier Reynolds pictures as Gator, White Lightning and - on the more sophisticated end of the scale - Deliverance.
These rural-themed action films were big hits in the South in the 1950s, '60s and '70s, when a large and active circuit of drive-ins and small-town theaters still catered to undemanding audiences. Pix for the hix in the stix, as Variety...