The Substitute Wife - 1994 (Farrah Fawcett, Lea Thompson)

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The Substitute Wife (USA - 1994)

Drama / Romance / Western

starring . . . Farrah Fawcett, Lea Thompson, Peter Weller

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0111304/

The Substitute Wife, with Farrah Fawcett, is such a quiet charmer of a film that you wonder what it's doing on network TV in the '90s.

Set on the 19th-century American frontier - Nebraska in 1869 - there isn't a rape, hanging, gunfight or massacre in it. Hardly anyone even raises a voice. It's sort of "The African Queen" without the explosion at the end.

Fawcett is terrific as an aging prostitute, but she's clearly sharing the movie with Peter Weller and Lea Thompson, who play a homesteading husband and wife named Martin and Amy Hightower.

In fact, it's really Thompson's movie, if anyone's. When her character, Amy, learns she has less than two months to live, she starts taking steps to make sure her family and farm will not be split up after she's gone. She decides her husband and four small children need someone just like her - a nanny, farmhand, maid, charwoman, veterinarian, cook, seamstress, candle-maker, schoolteacher and moral instructor. In short, a wife and mother.

But what Amy quickly finds out - in a series of funny and touching scenes as she approaches various women about filling her shoes - is that women on the frontier are outnumbered by men 10 to 1. A good woman is all but impossible to find.

Video: XviD, 576x432, 23.976 fps, 1216 kbps, 01h31m58s
Audio: Dolby AC3, 48000 Hz, stereo, 128 kbps

VHS Rip, English audio, no subtitles