![]() ![]() He is also said to have deserted the Confederate Army and ended up in prison. One witness says that the man currently posing as Jack defrauded his township of several thousand dollars after claiming he wanted to help rebuild the schoolhouse there. Several witnesses are brought up to discredit this Sommersby as a fraud they state that he is Horace Townsend, an English teacher and con artist from Virginia. Jack fires the lawyer and sets about re-establishing himself as the real Sommersby. Meacham devises this plan in exchange for Laurel promising to marry him upon "Sommersby's" imprisonment. This would save him from hanging for murder, but he would still be imprisoned for fraud and military desertion. Laurel and Jack's lawyer agree to argue that her husband is an impostor. Laurel's attempts to save her husband focus on the question of his identity: whether this "Jack" is who he claims to be, or a lookalike who met the real Sommersby whilst in prison for deserting the Confederate Army. Marshals arrest Jack on the charge of murder, which carries the death penalty. Laurel gives birth to a daughter, Rachel. All those that bought in on the deal set to work, transforming the plantation into a breeding ground of promise and prosperity. Upon taking the townspeople's money, he buys the tobacco seed claiming that the crops will raise enough funds to rebuild the town church. Jack is threatened, in an attempt to force him to exclude black people from the landowning, but he refuses. Joseph, a black freedman living on Sommersby's land, is brutally attacked and brought to Sommersby's door by hooded night riders proclaiming themselves the Knights of the White Camellia (one of them is Meacham). This raises further doubts in his old neighbors, who believe that the "old" Jack would not give away his father's land, and causes resentment about the inclusion of former slaves. ![]() 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. To revive the economy, he suggests Burley tobacco as a cash crop. Jack finds the local economy ruined, and his own land mortgaged and exhausted. The town shoemaker also finds that this man's foot is two sizes smaller than the last made for Sommersby before the war. Jack and Laurel rekindle their intimacy, which leads to Laurel becoming pregnant.ĭisplaced from his courtship of Laurel, Meacham suspects Jack to be an impostor. He claims that the book was given to him by a man he met in prison. In the evenings, he reads to them from Homer's Iliad, which the old Jack would never have done. He is now kind and loving to Laurel and their young son, Rob. One day, Jack seemingly returns with a change of heart. She makes remarriage plans with one of her neighbors, Orin Meacham, who has been helping her and her young son with the farmwork. Despite the hardship of working their farm in Vine Hill, Tennessee, his apparent widow Laurel is content in his absence, because Jack was an unpleasant and abusive husband. John "Jack" Sommersby left his farm to fight in the American Civil War and is presumed dead after six years. The film received generally positive reviews from critics who praised the performances and chemistry of its lead actors as well as the musical score and was a box office success grossing over $140 million worldwide on a budget of $30 million. Sommersby was released in the United States on Februby Warner Bros. Set in the Reconstruction era following the American Civil War, the film depicts a farmer returning home from the war, with his wife beginning to suspect that the man is an impostor. 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. Sommersby is a 1993 American period romantic drama directed by Jon Amiel from a screenplay written by Nicholas Meyer and Sarah Kernochan, adapted from the historical account of the 16th century French peasant Martin Guerre. ![]()
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