Warm-hearted adaptation of Alice Walker's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Celie (Whoopi Goldberg in her film debut) is a poor black girl in the rural South who is separated from her sister and forced into a marriage in which she is treated brutally. Over the next 30 years, through tribulation after tribulation, Celie survives and ultimately triumphs; her spirit is indomitable. Fishburne plays the part of Swain.