Circa 1987, I watched a movie on TV with my grandmother. I don’t remember the whole story, but there was a young woman – I remember her as good-looking and fair-haired – who lived alone with her father in a shack or cabin somewhere in the Old West or elsewhere on the American pioneer frontier. As I remember, they lived a harmonious hillbilly life, but one day, some bootleggers or other criminals murdered her father. I think I was too young to understand everything that was happening in the movie, but I think she buried her father herself, lived for a while alone, possibly dressing in his clothes, and maybe in the end she was received in the house of another woman.
A final detail I recall is of this movie having the protagonist’s narration as voiceover. The overall aesthetic suggests a Western from maybe the late 60s or the 70s? (It is not “The Ballad of Little Jo”, which came out in 1993, about five years later, though the aesthetic of that movie is not dissimilar).
At first I thought it was the movie I was thinking about, but having watched it, I don’t think it is. The protagonist went out West with her husband and children, not her father. At first I thought I might have conflated her own father with her children’s father, but having watched it, I’m pretty sure I haven’t. The husband did lose his life, but it was in a natural calamity, he wasn’t murdered (though he was assaulted by people who accused him of claim jumping early in the movie).
That said, it does bear an uncanny resemblance, and it was nice to watch a classic Western after a while. Thematically, it reminds me of “Drylanders”, an old black and white Canadian movie about a homesteading family that we watched in my high school geography class. Thank you, @DCnDC.
