Unofficial Academy Awards Discussion Board

Uri wrote:. But who else? Sally Field didn’t in Places in the Heart, but I can’t remember if Jessica Lange in Country or Sissy Spacek in The River did.

Having just finished watched The River (1984) for the first time since its release I can confirm that Spacek drives a tractor twice in the film.

The first time she's is pulling along some machine with chemicals being sprayed onto crops. The second time is after she gets her arm free from some machinery and is driving back to the farm house badly injured.

Oh, and she's riding on a tracker with Mel Gibson in the second last shot - but he is driving.

Reza wrote: I also remember images (not from a film) of Elizabeth Taylor driving a tractor on a farm in Virginia when she was married to Senator John Warner.

THIS I can actually imagine. I think that at one point, in the early '80s, my village was the place with the highest rate of residents who had gastric bypass surgery in the world - about 1 percent of the population, all of them women of a certain age. Weight Watchers was huge among my mother and her contemporaries here. Liz (who was at her largest during her Warner days) would have fit perfectly.

Apart from the actresses and films you mention one of the most recent films I can recall with an actress driving a tractor is Sultan (2016) from Bollywood with leading lady Anushka Sharma. This superb film has a rural setting so the scene fits into the scenario. Although women rarely, if at all, ride tractors in our part of the world unless its for fun.

I also remember images (not from a film) of Elizabeth Taylor driving a tractor on a farm in Virginia when she was married to Senator John Warner.

I was having problems sleeping the other night and I happened to bump into this silly film, Elvis and Anabelle, which is practically Six Feet Under meets Field of Dreams. Speaking of fields, it featured Blake Lively, playing a resurrected Texan beauty queen, plowing land while riding a tractor, as resurrected beauty queens so often do.

Now, growing up on a farm in a village, I used to be quite efficient driving and operating tractors, the way most men and boys here are. Much fewer females did, or do – my mother could, as well as my sister, but the sight of women driving a tractor was not a common one, and as a young, budding feminist I was – and still am – rather fascinated by it.

And if it’s not that frequent sight here in my village, it’s even rarer in films. Judy Garland drove a tractor in Summer Stock (ok, she was sitting on one in front of a screen, but still, for me, that imagery was a vivid one). Meryl Streep did it in The Bridges of Madison County (and being MERYL STREEP, she did actually do the deed). But who else? Sally Field didn’t in Places in the Heart, but I can’t remember if Jessica Lange in Country or Sissy Spacek in The River did.

Can you come up with other films, other than old Soviet ones, featuring women on tractors (or other heavy machinery, for that matter)?

(I was toying with the idea of presenting this topic as a trivia quiz – “what very particular activity was done on screen by Judy Garland, Meryl Streep and Blake Lively?” – but I felt it was way out there even for you guys).