Lane Smith

A young pilot finds himself recruited unwittingly into a covert and corrupt CIA airlift operation in Laos during the Vietnam conflict. Air America was the CIA's private airline operating in Laos during the Vietnam War, running anything and everything from soldiers to foodstuffs for local villagers. After losing his pilot's license, Billy Covington is recruited into it, and ends up in the middle of a bunch of lunatic pilots, gun-running by his friend Gene Ryack, and opium smuggling by his own superiors. —Jeff Cross <blackjac_1998@yahoo.com> Billy is a wacko pilot who loses his last straight job as a helicopter traffic reporter by getting into a screaming match with a driver. He takes a job working for what amounts to a CIA airline in Asia. Billy puts it as, "I'm used to being the weirdest person in the room. Here I don't even make the top ten." There is an insurgency shooting at them, government soldiers running drugs, a pilot who is supplying arms to the whole region, and those are the straightforward sub plots. —John Vogel <jlvogel@comcast.net>

Places in the Heart is an emotionally gripping story that centers around Edna Spalding and her unending struggle against extraordinary hardships in the 1930s in Waxahachie, Texas.

When three automotive factory workers who're struggling financially try to steal from their own labor union, they discover corruption, and reluctantly decide to use this information for blackmail. Three workers, Zeke (Richard Pryor), Jerry (Harvey Keitel), and Smokey (Yaphet Kotto), are working at a car plant and drinking their beers together. One night, when they steal away from their wives to have some fun, they get the idea to rob the local union's bureau safe. First they think it is a flop, because they get only six hundred dollars out of it, but then Zeke realizes that they also have gotten some "hot" material. They decide to blackmail their union. The best reason for that is the union itself. All three are provoked by the fact that the union claims to have lost ten thousand dollars by their robbery. —Oliver Heidelbach Three auto workers at a car factory in Detroit rail against the injustice they see and their lot in life. They are barely getting by and factory management are always hounding them and generally making their life a misery. Their union should be looking out for them but does nothing. They then decide to rob the union's head office but find something much more valuable: evidence of shady dealings by the union. However, what should have been their ticket to a reasonable amount of money turns into a life-threatening situation. —grantss

Marshal Rooster Cogburn unwillingly teams up with Eula Goodnight to track down her father's murderers. A band of drunken thugs overruns a small village in the Indian Nation that is run by Minister Goodnight and his daughter Eula and proceed to violate and kill the villagers. Miss Goodnight teams up with ruthless Marshal Rooster J. Cogburn to go after them and bring them to justice. —Christopher D. Ryan <cryan@direct.ca>

A small-town police chief investigating a murder is offered help by a self-described psychic. However, when the chief discovers that the "psychic" is in possession of information known only to the police, he suspects that the man may be more involved in the case than he lets on. —Anonymous