Misery

A novelist crashes his car in a Colorado blizzard and is rescued by a nurse who owns every book he has written and does not like where the series is going.

Rob Reiner directs it as a two-hander in one house and it is essentially a stage play, which is why it works so completely: everything depends on Bates alternating between cheerful hospitality and something else in the same sentence.

The hobbling scene was changed from the novel, in which she uses an axe. Reiner insisted on the sledgehammer because he judged the axe would lose the audience entirely, and William Goldman disagreed with him for years.

Bates is the only actor to win an Oscar for a King adaptation.

James Caan is doing the harder job, spending the film in a bed and reacting.