Obscure objects of desire

Tony Gallucci of Milkriverblog was instrumental in launching the Circus of the Spineless. Now he's propagating a meme, and unlike most this one isn't altogether stoopid. Tony asks us to name a film that we think (i) very good, yet (ii) undeservedly unknown.

I am no Norbizness, who has a sideline in cinéphilia. I can recommend to you no seminal 1953 Bolivian expressionist verse-drama, no gritty Marxist claymation retelling of the Kalevala with the characters updated as the teaching staff at a Welsh comprehensive.

But I can recommend you see Tender Mercies, if you haven't already. And if you have, see it again. Here, you can order it from my very good friends at Amazon if you have a US-code (or region-free) player to watch it on and want to earn me a little money. I'm not entirely certain that a film for which Robert Duvall won an Oscar as best actor really qualifies as 'obscure', but it any case TM isn't nearly as well known as it should be. It is a quiet understated film with little overt drama; and that little bit of overt drama is an intrusion from a world less quiet than the one in which the protagonist now finds himself. If nothing else the film is a tour de force, in that it makes sympathetic characters of rural Texan Baptists.