Robert Duvall wears an unidentified watch

The still holds Robert Duvall in the doorway of a roadside motel, propped against the frame in a cowboy hat and a worn leather vest over a faded denim shirt, the white Texas daylight and a neon sign burning in the glass behind him. He is Mac Sledge, and the detail the frame gives up is at the wrist of the hand he has set on his hip: a round watch riding past the snapped cuff under a high domed crystal. The window light pours straight through that dome and floods it, so the dial beneath washes out to a pale blank disc with nothing left on it to read. The watch is plainly there and plainly unidentifiable.

Mac Sledge is a country singer the bottle has all but finished, a onetime star who turns up at a filling station and motel kept by a young widow, Rosa Lee, her first husband lost in Vietnam. Tess Harper plays her, in her first film. He works off a room, stops drinking and marries her, while an estranged daughter of eighteen, Sue Anne, played by Ellen Barkin, waits at the far edge of the story. Bruce Beresford directed from an original screenplay by Horton Foote, shot around Waxahachie, Texas across seven cold weeks at the close of 1981 and released in 1983.

The watch keeps its name to itself; Duvall does not. He sang every note and played the guitar himself, and wrote two of the songs, 'Fool's Waltz' and 'I've Decided to Leave Here Forever.' That quiet, almost wordless performance won him the Academy Award for Best Actor, the only Oscar of a career that has reached six nominations, while Horton Foote took a second statue for the screenplay.