| Genre: | Drama |
| Director: | Joan Tewkesbury |
| Starring: | Louis Gossett Jr. Sara Gilbert |
| Theme Music Composer: | Michel Colombier |
| Country: | United States |
| Language: | English |
| Executive Producer: | Donald March |
| Editor: | Robert P. Seppey |
| Runtime: | 95 minutes |
| Company: | Donald March Productions Freed/Laufer Productions Hearst Entertainment Productions |
| Network: | Lifetime |
Sudie and Simpson is an American television film that originally aired on Lifetime on September 11, 1990.[1] Directed by Joan Tewkesbury, the film stars Louis Gossett Jr. and Sara Gilbert.
Set in a small town in Georgia during World War II, Sudie and Simpson focuses on the friendship between Sudie Harrigan (Gilbert), a 10-year-old girl who had never seen a "nigger" in real life, and Simpson (Gossett Jr.), a black man living surreptitiously in an abandoned shack in the woods. Sudie who finds to her surprise and pleasure that black people are not all nine feet tall, that they know what they do, and that their skin color doesn't rub off. Moreover, the gentle, harmless and moral character of Simpson is contrasted with a white teacher who molests his students.
The themes of racism and morality are compared and contrasted, dramatically. If the whites, who "don't allow no niggers" in town, discover the presence of Simpson, they will likely expel him or lynch him. If the victims of the white child molester complain to their mothers, they fear getting "a whipping".
People said, "Gossett towers over the cast of this sexually frank but lax melodrama."
Ray Loynd of The Los Angeles Times liked it and of the production he said it "is atmospheric and redolent of love and squalor." He added "what's so well captured is the personal point of view of a 12-.year-old girl rebelling against the taboos in the narrow world around her. Gilbert is sensational, right down to her mastery of a Georgia dialect, and Gossett is memorable as a survivor hiding in a shack outside of town and tending his secret vegetable garden. Textured support comes from Frances Fisher's staunch schoolteacher and an uncanny performance from newcomer Paige Danahy as Sudie's chubby, dim-headed girlfriend."[2]
In 1991, Sara Gilbert was the recipient of a Young Artist Award for Best Young Actress in a Cable Special.[3] It was additionally nominated for two awards in 1992; writers, Sara Flanigan and Ken Koser, were nominated for a Humanitas Prize for PBS/Cable Television, and Louis Gossett Jr. was nominated a for CableACE Award for Actor in a Movie or Miniseries.