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

Our Time (1974)

          Before establishing a reliable brand with a run of moody conspiracy thrillers and wiseass action pictures, director Peter Hyams took journeyman gigs like helming Our Time, a sensitive-ish youth drama that’s only incrementally better than the average afterschool special of its era. Shot with a photographer’s eye for atmospheric detail (always a Hyams signature), the picture has adequate period texture but nowhere near enough originality or substance. Set in 1955, the exceedingly slight story concerns the romantic travails of private-school students Abby (Pamela Sue Martin), a pretty youth generally found courting trouble through insubordination and tardiness, and Muffy (Betsy Slade), her ugly-duckling best friend/roommate.

          Over the course of several months, Abby takes her romance with prep-school student Michael (Parker Stevenson) to the physical realm, while Muffy endures all sorts of misery as she pursues a stuck-up boy who doesn’t want her and reluctantly accepts the affections of a bespectacled dork who does. The first hour of the movie is quite tedious, since there’s no real dramatic tension—the characters aren’t interesting enough for viewers to get concerned about their romantic entanglements. Worse, Abby’s storyline, which is ostensibly the main thread of the story, is eclipsed by Muffy’s sordid melodrama. It’s not as if the filmmakers failed to select a focus; rather, it’s as if the filmmakers grossly overestimated the dramatic value of Abby’s romantic misadventures.

          This problem is exacerbated by a charisma inequity among the leading players: Martin and Stevenson, who later reunited as costars of the TV series The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries, are not well matched, for while Martin offers naturalism and pouty sexiness, Stevenson is so blandly professional that he seems more like a stand-in than an actual performer. Therefore, Slade easily steals the movie from both romantic leads, since she gets to perform nearly every interesting action in the story. (It’s hard to discuss the specifics of her big moments without giving away the only substantial turn in the story, so suffice to say she’s affecting when the time comes.)

          As for Hyams, he delivers characteristically confident camerawork, slinging long lenses low to the ground in order to create scope, and sliding dollies through large spaces in order to accentuate scenes with motion. It seems clear he also created a comfortable space for actors, but the twin shortages of a shallow script and unexceptional acting limit how much he can accomplish. Still, the last half-hour of the picture, when the lives of the characters take a bleak turn, has a little bite, and deft character actor Robert Walden shows up for a memorable one-scene role. (Available at WarnerArchive.com)

Our Time: FUNKY

Lifeguard (1976)

          Based on its title alone, to say nothing of the wretched poster that Paramount created to market the picture, Lifeguard should be a sleazy sex comedy. Instead, it’s a fairly serious character piece about an iconoclastic man wrestling with other people’s perceptions of his prolonged-adolescent lifestyle. Sam Elliott, his signature sweet ’stache already firmly secured on his upper lip, plays Rick, an L.A. lifeguard in his 30s, making him a good ten years older than most of the other buff dudes running up and down Southern California’s beaches in little red shorts. Over the course of one summer, he trains a young apprentice (Parker Stevenson), dallies with a precocious teenager (Kathleen Quinlan), tries to rekindle an old spark with his high-school girlfriend (Anne Archer), and listens to family and friends who say it’s time to put away the SPF and get a real job. Coloring the storyline is the enduring allure of the mythic SoCal lifestyle as celebrated in the songs of the Beach Boys, among myriad other pop-culture artifacts, because virtually no mention is made of current events or even the turbulent goings-on of the late ’60s—which would have been the period of the protagonist’s early adulthood. Therefore, one gets a sense of a man who’s been hiding from the ugliness of the outside world by grooving on the beauty of the rays and the waves. In one telling scene, Rick explains that he likes winters even more than summers because during the cold months, he has the beach all to himself. So even though nothing about Lifeguard invites deep analysis, there’s something meaningful pulsing beneath the film’s bronzed skin.

          Rest assured, however, there’s a touch of raunchiness here and there—think sexy flings at Rick’s bachelor pad, pervy teenage boys chasing busty women at the beach, a senior-citizen flasher, etc. Yet Ron Koslow’s competent screenplay mostly focuses on Rick’s sun-kissed ennui. For instance, the vignette of Rick getting his aging ass kicked by younger lifeguards in a running/swimming race is poignant, especially because that’s when his under-aged playmate (the Quinlan character) first realizes her lover isn’t the immortal hero she thought him to be. In fact, that whole relationship is handled intelligently and tenderly, with the filmmakers neither celebrating nor condemning Rick’s decision to sleep with a teenager. Similarly, the textures of the protagonist’s relationship with his old flame discourage simple reactions. To be clear, Lifeguard has a certain kitsch factor (two words: theme song), and Rick’s I-gottta-be-me attitude is so ’70s that it’s almost a cliché. Yet like its title character, the movie displays unexpected depth, an effect complemented by Elliott’s surprisingly nuanced performance. Koslow, by the way, later wrote the charmingly weird comedy Into the Night (1984) and created the supernatural TV series Beauty and the Beast and Moonlight.

Lifeguard: FUNKY