A low-budget challenge to the Western spectacle, Heartland is a quiet celebration of true grit on the American frontier. Based on the experiences of turn-of-the-century Wyoming pioneer Elinore Pruitt Stewart and her husband Clyde Stewart, it is a rare treatment of the pioneer woman's experience. In the tradition of such silent classics as Sjöstrom's The Wind (with Lillian Gish) and the recent PFA rediscovery The Canadian (William Beaudine), Heartland follows a city woman into a male-dominated world of cattle-brandings, horse tradings, rude jokes and long silences. Unlike the heroines of the early films, however, Elinore (Conchata Ferrell), a widowed laundress, leaves Denver for Wyoming with the express purpose of homesteading her own land. This she accomplishes with great difficulty and no little compromise--including an unromantic marriage to her employer, the taciturn Scot, Stewart (Rip Torn). Director Richard Pearce notes, “I wanted to try and make a truer kind of Western, one that would be about struggle and isolation and real economic work, where the simplest things--things that films so often take for granted or make seem easy--would sometimes be the most difficult and hard won.”