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Good Try, But . . .

Thu, 06/21/2012 - 10:23am
Movies: ‘Bernie’
By
Fred Baumgarten
Shirley MacLaine and Jack Black in “Bernie.”

In 1996, a murder occurred in the backwoods city of Carthage, Texas. A man named Bernie Tiede, who had arrived some years before to take a job as assistant director in the city’s funeral home, shot a rich, 81-year-old widow, Marjorie Nugent, whom he had befriended at her husband’s funeral.

The peculiar story of this killing and the city’s character is told in the indie film “Bernie,” directed by Richard Linklater and based mainly on a 1998 article by Skip Hollandsworth in Texas Monthly, “Midnight in the Garden of East Texas.”

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