‘Long Walk Home’ Takes Another Run at Success : Movies: Launched in December amid a sea of blockbusters, the modestly budgeted film is seeking a wider audience in rerelease.

“The Long Walk Home,” an intimate drama placed amidst the Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott of the 1950s, opened in December in limited release. It received mixed but often very positive reviews and did fairly good business in competition with the rush of year-end, big budget films. (The budget of “The Long Walk Home” left ample change from $10 million.)

Heartened by the early response to the film, the distributor, Miramax, is placing a big bet that there are larger audiences for “The Long Walk Home.” It is reopening Friday on about 400 screens nationwide. It is a risk that has sometimes paid off. “Harold and Maude” and “King of Hearts” are classic examples of good, small films that were overlooked in their quiet first releases but then indeed achieved classic status. On the other hand, despite a valiant second push by Ray Stark and Columbia, John Huston’s “Fat City” still proved to be too austere for audiences.

The expensive gamble this time is that there are audiences for a tough but ultimately optimistic film about the breaking down of segregation in the South a quarter-century ago.

“The Long Walk Home” was originally written as course work at the USC film school by John Cork, who grew up in Montgomery. When he was a boy, an aunt told him of an incident from her girlhood when she and her siblings had been run out of a public park by a policeman because their attending nursemaid was black.

He never forgot the story, Cork said later, and at USC he made it the starting point for a drama about the bus boycott. After graduation, Cork rewrote the script as a feature and interested producer Dave Bell (previously a maker of documentaries) in the project. Bell found an enthusiastic backer in filmmaker Taylor Hackford, then building a production company called New Visions. Hackford recruited Sissy Spacek, Whoopi Goldberg, director Richard Pearce and Howard Koch Jr. to work with Bell as co-producer. When New Visions was forced to scale back its activities, Miramax became the distributor.

Cork’s script makes the public park incident the beginnings of Spacek’s awareness, as an upper-middle-class white woman, of the cruel underside of a system that has been central to her lifestyle and her family’s before her.

Goldberg as her maid joins the boycott, walking 4 1/2 miles each way (except when Spacek illicitly gives her rides). Spacek is swiftly if genteelly radicalized, despite her husband, her rabidly racist brother-in-law and the white high society in which she is soon identified as a traitor.

A complaint about the film, producer Bell complains, is that a Montgomery bus boycott story should be about Rosa Parks, who triggered the boycott by refusing to move to the back of the bus, and Martin Luther King Jr., who was its rhetorical voice and whose church was firebombed during the boycott.

They exist in the text and off-camera, as it were, but Bell argues that using actors as historical figures would be as unpersuasive as it usually is, and that the power of the film is intended to be on the linked lives of a black woman and a white woman trapped equally in the vortex of historical change.

I confess I am with Bell. Star actors can never quite be ordinary folks ever again (a truth which has undone many a film). But the intimacy of this film and the fact that both Spacek and Goldberg are acted-upon participants rather more than movers and shakers--quiet doers rather than take-charge leaders--gives the film a credibility and an emotional impact that flamboyant, on-the-stump heroics might well not have.

They don’t, like Gene Hackman in “Mississippi Burning,” solve murders or deflect history. That was a quite different kind of film, with its own powers and, as many critics pointed out, its own inherent difficulties of adapting history into fiction (on a scale that “The Long Walk Home” would not dream of.)

The dialogue in “The Long Walk Home,” including the rabid racist talk, rings true because author Cork--so you feel--heard it as he was growing up in a society that was changing fast but had not, and has not, become someplace else altogether.

Far be it from me to recommend collateral reading (well, not too far). But Thomas H. Cook’s “Streets of Fire,” published in late 1989 and now available in paperback, is a police thriller, also set in Montgomery during the bus boycott. There is a murder to fuel the plot; but the book, far more significantly and memorably, is about a cop who despises the racist mentality in the department and who hears the cheers at a King rally as “an immense and shuddering wave from the deep core of the earth.”

Cook’s cop is witness more than protagonist (though he solves the murder). But like the Goldberg and Spacek characters in “The Long Walk Home,” he illuminates--more eloquently than biographies or dissertations might--a harsh and epochal moment in time.

Any year that produces not one but two important and moving films about the black experience in America is remarkable, and last year produced not only “The Long Walk Home” but Charles Burnett’s “To Sleep With Anger.” Burnett, whose earlier feature, “Killer of Sheep,” was recently selected as one of the second group of 25 features to be preserved by the Library of Congress, has taken a unique and uniquely cinematic look at the black experience in South-Central Los Angeles.

He finds a solid core of family virtues and a family lifestyle that is vigorous, spontaneous and touching. But it exists in a curious kind of limbo, with a fading trail of custom and belief leading back to Deep South origins and with an equally uncertain trail leading toward (but not confidently into) the dominant white world with its Yuppie values and aspirations.

Danny Glover, in a wondrous performance as an unusual visitor from the Deep South origins, is a folkloric figure, a lurking and devilish maker of trouble who under one name or another has existed in many societies. (He is The Coyote in Native American culture, as in Tony Hillerman’s recent mystery, “Coyote Waits”).

It is an inventive film, ranged from raucous humor to strangely surrealistic moments (as befits its folkloric content). It is also splendidly acted by Glover and a supporting cast. It refuses to patronize its subject matter; neither drugs nor gangs are part of this middle-class scene, but neither are the blanched pleasures of the Cosby show. Minus all that, it is hugely entertaining and, with all else, suspenseful.

Yet, unlike “The Long Walk Home,” which did well enough in its first engagements to warrant the push in its wider release, “To Sleep With Anger” has had trouble finding audiences and, except among admiring critics, it has been largely a secret. That is a great sadness, most particularly because Charles Burnett is a writer-director of potent and original gifts.

What is encouraging is that both films have been honored with nominations and awards, including a special citation for Burnett from the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn. Awards do not inevitably translate into business, but they can’t hurt and they do confirm that creative passion has its rewards.