THE LONG WALK HOME (1990)

A stirring and intelligent dramatization of the 1955 Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott. With a minimum of fuss, the film eases us into the lives of Odessa Cotter (Whoopi Goldberg), a quiet, unassuming maid who joins the boycott the day it's announced, and her employer, Miriam Thompson (Sissy Spacek), a pampered scion of the Montgomery upper-middle class who, acting out of a mixture of sympathy and self-interest, begins to help out by driving Odessa to work in the morning. Neither woman is held up as a role model. They are both, in their different ways, blessedly ordinary. And so the movie, while not a work of great depth or imagination, is able to show us how the nagging physical reality of the boycott -- the overwhelming inconvenience of it -- worked its way into the texture of people's lives. In the end, ''The Long Walk Home'' is about Montgomery blacks seeing that not all their oppressors meant them harm. The true liberation was in realizing that decency could come from both sides.

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