Entry Category: Films - Starting with T

Produced, written, directed, and edited by Richard C. Sarafian, Terror at Black Falls was filmed in Arkansas in Scotland (Van Buren County) in 1959 and released in 1962. The low-budget, black-and-white Western was barely of feature length. A DVD runs sixty-eight minutes, but the movie was probably originally longer. Various sources say the film was seventy, seventy-two, or seventy-six minutes. It was the first film directed by Sarafian and may have been intended as his calling card film in Hollywood, a sample to show studios his ability. The film’s loquacious narrator says that the movie tells “a true story” set “when Arkansas was part of the wild American frontier.” However, it was not based on a true story. Like another …

Directed by Bill Norton, Three for the Road (1987), a romantic comedy road movie, was filmed in Hot Springs (Garland County) and Little Rock (Pulaski County) but was set in unidentified states “down in the South.” The film was unsuccessful with critics and at the box office. Paul (Charlie Sheen), an ambitious congressional assistant, is assigned by arrogant U.S. Senator Kitteredge to deliver his rebellious, mildly misbehaving daughter Robin (Kerri Green) to a reform school in the South. Paul and his friend T. S. (Alan Ruck) suffer many wacky situations, inflicted on them by mischievous Robin and eccentric Southerners. The reform school turns out to be a virtual prison. Robin and Paul fall in love, and he engineers her escape. …

Tom Sawyer, Detective, a novella written by Mark Twain and published in 1896, was a parody of mystery stories, especially the Sherlock Holmes tales of Arthur Conan Doyle, which began to appear in 1887. Set in Arkansas, the novel was adapted into a movie in 1938. In the mid-1890s, Mark Twain, near bankruptcy after unwise investments, returned to his popular characters Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn to revive his fortunes. He wrote Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894), a parody of the travel adventures of Jules Verne, and began a novel to be titled Tom Sawyer among the Indians, which was never completed. Tom Sawyer, Detective (1896) had an unusual origin. While visiting Europe in late 1894, Twain had been told the …

The Town That Dreaded Sundown is a 1976 horror film by producer/director Charles B. Pierce. Based very loosely on true incidents that took place just after World War II around Texarkana (Miller County), it was one of the first movies in the “slasher” genre. The film starred 1971 Academy Award winner Ben Johnson along with television stars Andrew Prine and Dawn Wells. The movie, considered a cult classic, made a huge profit over production costs. It was remade in 2014. To form the basis of his fifth film, Pierce chose what were called the “Texarkana Moonlight Murders,” which took place throughout 1946 primarily in Texarkana, Texas, though he represents them as occurring on the Arkansas side of the city. A …

“Here is what happened.” With those simple words, Mattie Ross of Dardanelle (Yell County) begins her reminiscence of the time she avenged her father’s murder with the help of a one-eyed deputy marshal and a dandy Texas Ranger. Set in western Arkansas and the Indian Territory of the 1870s, the novel True Grit, written by Arkansan Charles Portis, mixes this unlikely trio of personalities in a bestselling Western adventure. Published in 1968, True Grit was adapted into a movie and released the following year. The movie garnered veteran actor John Wayne the first and only Oscar of his career for his portrayal of Deputy Marshal Rooster Cogburn. In 2010, a second film adaptation of the novel, written and directed by …

The Tuskegee Airmen was a 1995 movie dramatization of the wartime actions of the Tuskegee Airmen, a group of African American military pilots and air support crew who fought in World War II. They were the first Black flying squadron, as well as the first such squadron to deploy overseas. While the film had a brief theatrical release, it was originally made for HBO and was intended for cable television. Location shooting for the movie took place at Fort Chaffee, right outside of Fort Smith (Sebastian County). In addition, the Fort Smith Frisco Railroad Station was also utilized in filming. The barracks at Fort Chaffee had been used previously in the 1988 wartime film Biloxi Blues. Arkansas actress Natalie Canerday …