A Separate Peace (1972)

          Lyrical and sensitive, Larry Peerce’s film of John Knowles’ acclaimed coming-of-age novel uses the friendship between two young men at a private school in the 1940s as a means of examining themes of aggression, jealousy, justice, masculinity, and even sanity. Although the film is modest and imperfect, the highest compliment one can pay is to note that the picture never veers off the path it defines during the opening scenes. From beginning to end, this take on A Separate Peace is a meditation on lost innocence shot through with pointed commentary about the costs of competition, hostility, and other craven aspects of the human experience, as exemplified by the way World War II lingers just outside the frame throughout much of the film.

          In a prologue, grown-up narrator Gene returns to the Devon School in the symbolically depleted season of winter, visiting a tall tree by a river where significant things once happened. He then flashes back to younger days, where teenaged Gene (Parker Stevenson) is nearly inseparable from his best friend, Finny (John Heyl). Introverted and studious, Gene finds the cavalier and irresponsible Finny intoxicating, a blonde paragon who seizes life with a vigor to which Gene can only weakly aspire. The first and cruelest blow to their friendship occurs one hot day when they run to that tree and prepare for a dangerous dive into the river below. Finny falls, breaking his leg, but neither of them is quite sure whether (or why) Gene rattled the branch upon which they were balanced, causing the accident. How the friends go forward after that event, and how they navigate the painful consequences of one confusing moment atop a tree branch, defines the courses of their lives. Meanwhile, seemingly peripheral dramas, such as the brief military service of troubled classmate Leper (Peter Brush) and the assumption of an authority position by malicious classmate Brinker (Victor Bevine), create additional tensions that impact the Gene/Finny saga.

          Some of the filmmaking team’s choices work better than others. Crisp long-lens photography lends both an icy remove and a sense of place, while delicate wafts of twinkly piano music accentuate the poetic flow of gentle dissolves connecting sequences. Less consistently effective is the acting, since some of the young players give tentative performances. (Leading man Heyl, a student at the school where the film was shot, made his acting debut with this project and never appeared onscreen again.) That some of the film’s most assured work comes from Stevenson, later of The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries, says a great deal about the film’s limitations. Yet the sincerity of Stevenson’s work reflects an overall seriousness of purpose that helps the movie, more often than not, surpass its tendency toward self-conscious artiness.

A Separate Peace: FUNKY

The Sporting Club (1971)

          Things get weird fast in The Sporting Club, a wildly undisciplined adaptation of a novel by Thomas McGuane, who later became a screenwriter of offbeat films with Western themes. Here, the theme is actually Midwestern, though The Sporting Club certainly has enough eccentrics and iconoclasts to resonate with other films bearing McGuane’s name. The basic story is relatively simple. Rich white people gather at the Centennial Club, a hunting lodge in the Great Lakes region, for a drunken revel celebrating the club’s hundredth birthday. One of the club’s youngest members, an unhinged trust-fund brat named Vernur Stanton (Robert Fields), has a scheme to destroy the club from within while making a grand statement about class divisions in American society. Vernur fires the club’s longtime groundskeeper and hires a volatile blue-collar thug as a replacement, injecting a dope-smoking X-factor into the uptight culture of the Centennial Club. Yet the plot is only the slender thread holding the movie together. More intriguing and more prominent are myriad subplots, as well as bizarre satirical scenes featuring the aging members of the Centennial Club devolving into savagery.

          If it’s possible to imagine a quintessentially American film that should have been directed by British maniac Ken Russell, The Sporting Club is that movie. Like one of Russell’s perverse freakouts, The Sporting Club puts a funhouse mirror to polite society, revealing all the grotesque aspects that are normally hidden from view. And like many of Russell’s films, The Sporting Club spirals out of control at regular intervals.

          Here’s a relatively innocuous example. Early in the picture, Vernur and his best friend, James Quinn (Nicolas Coster), wander from the Centennial Club to a nearby dam, where the (unidentified) president of the United States makes a public appearance. Vernur and James sneak onto a tour bus left empty by Shriners watching the president, then trash the bus and commandeer it for a presidential drive-by during which Vernur moons the commander-in-chief. The scene raises but does not answer many questions related to character motivation and logistics. And so it goes throughout The Sporting Club. Outrageous things happen, but it’s anybody’s guess what makes the people in this movie tick or even, sometimes, how one event relates to the next. Very often, it seems is if connective tissue is missing. In some scenes, James makes passes at Vernur’s girlfriend, and in other scenes, he’s involved with the local hottie sent to clean his lodge. Huh? And we haven’t even gotten to Vernur’s fetish for vintage dueling pistols, the time capsule containing century-old pornography, or the climactic scene involving a machine gun and an orgy.

          As directed by journeyman Larry Peerce and written by versatile wit Lorenzo Semple Jr., The Sporting Club has several deeply interesting scenes and a few vivid performances. Coster, familiar to ’70s fans as a character actor, does subtle work in the film’s quiet scenes, even though the nature of his overall role is elusive. Conversely, the great Jack Warden is compelling to watch as the replacement groundskeeper, even though he’s spectacularly miscast—more appropriate casting would have been Kris Kristofferson, who plays a similar role in the equally bizarre Vigilante Force (1976). The lively ensemble also includes Richard Dysart, Jo Ann Harris, James Noble, and Ralph Waite.

          There’s a seed of something provocative hidden inside the bewildering action of The Sporting Club, and one imagines the folks behind the movie envisioned a provocative generation-gap farce. What they actually made is a disjointed oddity with lots of drinking, sex, violence, and pretentious speechifying.

The Sporting Club: FREAKY

Two-Minute Warning (1976)

          The premise of Two-Minute Warning couldn’t be more appealing for fans of cheesy ’70s blockbusters: A sniper takes a position in the clock tower of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum during a crowded football game, so cops led by Captain Peter Holly (Charlton Heston) must take the sniper out. Chuck Heston versus a psycho against a backdrop of tragic melodrama—pass the popcorn! Unfortunately, the title of Two-Minute Warning is itself a warning (to viewers), since virtually nothing exciting happens until the last two minutes of the game that provides the film’s narrative structure. Most of the movie comprises a long slog of “character development” in the superficial disaster-movie style, meaning Two-Minute Warning is nearly all foreplay with very little payoff.

          That said, if you dive into the movie aware that it’s a slow burn, the combination of enterprising location photography and enthusiastic performances might be enough to keep you interested. The main relationship in the movie is between Captain Holly, who spends most of his time watching the sniper through a video feed originating in the Goodyear Blimp (!), and hotshot SWAT team commander Chris Button (John Cassavetes). Holly wants to remove the sniper without gunplay, whereas Button is itching for a shootout. Watching these alpha males clash provides a smidgen of macho entertainment, though one wishes the filmmakers had found a way to make their conflict more dynamic. The lack of strong leading characters lets supporting players run away with the picture. Brock Peters stands out as a Coliseum maintenance man who tries to be a hero, and Beau Bridges has some sorta-affecting moments as an unemployed dad fighting with his wife and kids in the stands, unaware of the danger lurking behind the end zone.

          Two-Minute Warning hews so closely to the disaster-movie paradigm that the story also includes an aging pickpocket (Walter Pidgeon), a football-loving priest (Mitchell Ryan), and a bickering couple (played by David Janssen and Gena Rowlands). Yes, it’s the old “Who’s going to live, who’s going to die?” drill. Director Larry Peerce rounded out the cast with his then-wife, Marilyn Hassett, the star of his maudlin The Other Side of the Mountain movies, although casting his missus appears to be as close as he got to emotionally investing in this trifling potboiler. Since the Coliseum figured prominently in ’70s pop culture (it was used for Heaven Can Wait, North Dallas Forty, and innumerable TV episodes), the venue provides as comforting a presence as any of the name-brand actors, and Peerce shoots the location well. Overall, however, Two-Minute Warning is a missed opportunity given all the possibilities suggested by the premise. Fumble!

Two-Minute Warning: FUNKY

The Bell Jar (1979)

          A perennial favorite of adolescent women suffering fraught emotional lives, poetess Sylvia Plath’s sole novel, The Bell Jar, is a thinly veiled account of Plath’s real-life experiences as a young woman who fell from the heights of academic overachievement to the depths of electroshock therapy after emotional problems led to a series of suicide attempts. In the right hands, this book could be adapted into a bold and honest drama, providing a sensitive exploration into the mysteries of mental illness. In the wrong hands, as is the case here, The Bell Jar becomes fodder for cheap manipulation.

          Director Larry Peerce and his on- and offscreen muse, actress Marilyn Hassett, reteamed for this project after their success with The Other Side of the Mountain (1975) and The Other Side of the Mountain Part 2 (1978), which were about a real-life skier who became a paraplegic. Nothing in those trite films suggested Peerce or Hassett were predisposed toward investigating the intricacies of the human mind—and, sure enough, their take on The Bell Jar is sincere but numbingly superficial.

          Furthermore, the script, by Marjorie Kellogg, departs in significant ways from the source material, conjuring a gruesome climax that’s absent from the book; Kellogg also streamlines Plath’s narrative in a way that makes the lead character’s trip down the rabbit hole seem like a brief detour on the way to wellness. In short, the filmmakers blew a powerful opportunity to depict what it’s like to feel trapped in one’s own mind, instead focusing on the garish sensationalism of a beautiful young woman experimenting with sex before succumbing to personal demons.

          As in the book, Esther Greenwood (Hassett) is a gifted student who wins a summer internship at a ladies’ magazine, where she’s challenged by a tough editor (Barbara Barrie) to explore new literary frontiers. Meanwhile, Esther and her summer roommate, Southern party girl Doreen (Mary Louise Weller), fall into steamy situations like a threesome with an overbearing disc jockey (Robert Klein). Esther’s emotional troubles manifest suddenly, since the filmmakers fail to convey the textures of Esther’s inner life, so it’s hard to grasp why she’s so unhappy about a summer filled with excitement and opportunities.

          Eventually, Esther returns home to her needy mother (Julie Harris), and Esther’s anguish over falling off the fast track to success drives her to attempt self-destruction. This implied cause-and-effect relationship insults the source material and the subject matter, and the dubious interpretation is exacerbated by Hassett’s weak performance. Though Hassett clearly gave this project her all, she simply can’t summon the darkness needed to bring this character to life. Having said all that, The Bell Jar is quite compelling if one overlooks the gulf between what the movie should have been and what the movie actually is, simply because the underlying story is arresting and lurid. And, to the filmmakers’ credit, their contrived finale, which involves a disturbing reunion between Esther and her college pal Joan (Donna Mitchell), has a painful poetry the rest of the picture lacks.

The Bell Jar: FUNKY

The Other Side of the Mountain (1975) & The Other Side of the Mountain Part 2 (1978)

          The blockbuster success of Love Story (1970) reminded studios about the moneymaking potential of over-the-top tearjerkers, which explains why Universal put its muscle behind The Other Side of the Mountain, even though the bummer material seems more suitable for a TV movie. Based on the unfortunate experiences of real-life American skier Jill Kinmont, The Other Side of the Mountain depicts what happened to Kinmont (played by Marilyn Hassett) before, during, and after an accident that left her paralyzed from the shoulders down, ending her promising athletic career and confining her to a wheelchair. Adding to her woes, Kinmont became engaged to skier Dick “Mad Dog” Buek (played by Beau Bidges) after her accident, surmounting the many issues separating able-bodied persons from the disabled, but Buek died in a plane crash before they got married.

          The movie frames these sad events with a quasi-uplifting prologue and epilogue, showing Kinmont looking fulfilled in her second career as a schoolteacher, but the point of the movie is bludgeoning viewers with the particulars of Kinmont’s misery. As directed by feature/TV journeyman Larry Peerce, The Other Side of the Mountain is so perfunctory it occasionally borders on self-parody—every time Peerce shows the heroine smiling, it’s a sure sign something horrible is about to happen. Even Kinmont’s best friend, fellow skier Audra Jo Nicholson (Belinda J. Montgomery), suffers the whims of fate, losing full mobility in her legs after a bout of polio.

          The workaday nature of the picture is not aided by Hassett’s performance: Though sincere and wholesomely pretty, she alternates between extremes of sweetness and hysteria. Luckily, Bridges has fun with his daredevil role, and Montgomery lends sass whenever her character castigates Kinmont for self-pity. (The great comic actor Dabney Coleman appears in a minor role as Kinmont’s pre-accident coach.)

          Audiences gobbled up The Other Side of the Mountain, generating enough interest for a sequel that offers an uplifting change of course from its predecessor. The Other Side of the Mountain Part 2 shows Kinmont finding love again, this time with simple but soulful truck driver John Boothe (Timothy Bottoms). The sequel also delves deeper into Kinmont’s occasionally fraught relationship with her mother-turned-caretaker, June (Nan Martin). However, whereas the first picture moves briskly by jamming years of experiences into a single feature, the second picture feels padded and thin. Nonetheless, Bottoms is appealing, exuding vulnerability even though his acting sometimes lacks polish; in a strange way, he and Hassett make a potent screen duo because the strain of their respective efforts feels compatible.

          Taken together, these two movies are meant to be inspirational celebrations of Kinmont’s triumph over despair, but they also contain three and a half hours of almost relentless human suffering. So, if schadenfreude takes you to your (un)happy place, then a world of wonder awaits on you on The Other Side of the Mountain. (Available as part of the Universal Vault Series on Amazon.com)

The Other Side of the Mountain: FUNKY

The Other Side of the Mountain Part 2: FUNKY