A
film review by Vincent Canby for the NY Times, April 11, 1973.
The little bird has
scratched at the window, says the high school valedictorian, a girl who looks
like Ann Rutherford in cap and gown, for
nature has told him it's time to go. It's June, 1944 and Hermie (Gary Grimes), Oscy (Jerry Houser) and Benjie (Oliver Conant), the three friends of
Robert Mulligan's "Summer of '42,"
are graduating from their Brooklyn high school to face not the terrors of a
world at war but those of a sequel gone suddenly, hopelessly flat.
The
only things worth attention in Class of
'44 are the period details - the cars, the billboards, the haircuts, the
songs, the suits and dresses and shoes, all soberly researched and
reconstructed as if they were artifacts for Colonial Williamsburg. But because
nothing much happens with these props, Class
of '44 seems less like a movie than 95 minutes of animated wallpaper.
The
new film takes Hermie and Oscy to college while Benjie joins the Marines. As college
freshmen, Hermie falls in love with Julie (Deborah
Winters) while Oscy provides the comic relief by, among other things,
installing the town whore in his fraternity house for one busy night.
The
boys have intimations of mortality, and there are jokes about making out, but Class of '44 has about as much relation
to what growing up was like then (and may still be now) as did the Henry
Aldrich radio series of that period. The screenplay is by Herman Raucher, who also wrote Summer
of '42. Those were the good old days,
I assume we're supposed to say, but the good old days in Class of '44 seem incredibly unimportant, while Hermie and Oscy are
essentially clods, fellows who've most likely grown up to be legendary bores on
their respective Thursday night bowling teams. Paul Bogart produced and directed the film.
Blogger’s
comment: The only thing that gives this film a spark of life is the romance
between Hermie and Julie. Julie is an attractive, blonde sorority girl whom
Hermie meets when they are both applying for jobs as reporters for the college
newspaper. Julie has a rich daddy who’s provided her with a pre-war convertible
to drive around campus. She chooses Hermie, ostensibly because it is wartime and there
are few desirable males on campus, but I also think she chooses him because he’s
young and innocent and she can control him, like getting him (and Oscy) to
pledge a fraternity. But even this relationship is not especially well
developed. It’s as though screenwriter Herman (Hermie) Raucher had a
two-picture deal and decided the sequel was the easiest thing to write. The
problem is nothing rings true, probably because it wasn’t Raucher’s personal
experience. He was born in April, 1928 and was fourteen when he had his first
sexual experience with Dorothy, as related in the Summer of ’42. So graduating from high school in 1944, at sixteen
years of age would have been highly unlikely. What is more likely is that Hermie, Oscy and Benjie would have graduated in 1945 or 1946 and would not have seen military service in WWII.
For
something decently written, directed and acted about this period of history, The Way We Were, also released in 1973,
would be worth your time.
Labels: college, drama, teenager
Growing pains on Packett Island
by Richard Bradford, May 21, 1971
New York Times
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