Hal Holbrook was born to play sly, cantankerous rascals. In the likably dawdling Southern heart-tugger That Evening Sun, he's Abner Meecham, a crusty old retired Tennessee farmer who breaks out of a nursing home to return to his land — only to discover that it's been leased to a vicious drunken ne'er-do-well (Raymond McKinnon). Abner moves into the property's tenant shack and refuses to leave, setting off a battle of wills that's really an elegy for his own lost dreams. Holbrook makes Abner a shining-eyed, noble crank — a fellow who would rather die than fade away.
