Peter Yates’s comedy about four quarrymen’s sons idling through a summer in a college town is warm, funny and plain about class. Paul Dooley and Barbara Barrie are two of the best screen parents we know; the race at the end is the least of it.
Bloomington, Indiana, has a university, a limestone industry and not much between them. The students arrive every autumn from somewhere better off. The men who cut the stone for their buildings live in town, and their sons, the summer they leave school, find that nobody has left anything for them to do. Steve Tesich’s script follows four of them, Peter Yates directs it without ever raising his voice, and we would put it in front of anyone.
Dave Stoller (Dennis Christopher) has dealt with the problem by deciding he is Italian. He shaves his legs, plays opera in his bedroom, has named the cat Fellini and rides his racing bicycle round the county with a smile the town regards as a symptom. Christopher plays him as a boy who is sincere and knows, somewhere, that he is performing, and never tips into either. His father Ray (Paul Dooley), a former cutter who now sells used cars, takes each new Italian word as a blow to the stomach. The scene in which a customer brings a car back and Ray cannot make himself say the word “refund” made us laugh out loud, and the joke is that he is in real pain. Barbara Barrie’s Evelyn watches from the kitchen, cooking whatever Dave’s Italy requires.
Matthew F. Leonetti shoots the town in flat summer light and saves his colour for the quarry, an abandoned pit of green water walled in white stone where the boys spend their afternoons. It is the one place in the film that is theirs and he makes it look like it. Patrick Williams’s score leans on Mendelssohn and Rossini and uses them for speed. The sequence in which Dave tucks in behind a lorry on the highway and the driver holds up fingers to count him to sixty is cut by Cynthia Scheider to the music, and we grinned at it like children.
The other three are drawn quickly and well. Mike (Dennis Quaid) was the school quarterback and is angry all the time, because the students who look through him will be nineteen again next year and he will not. Cyril (Daniel Stern), the tall one, jokes because his father has told him to expect nothing. Moocher (Jackie Earle Haley) is small, out of work and about to marry Nancy (Amy Wright). Betsy Cox puts the four of them in work shirts and cut-offs and the students in pressed campus clothes, so when the two sides collide you can tell them apart at a glance. Yates stages the collision as a scuffle and is honest about who started it.
What does not work is the love story. Katherine (Robyn Douglass) is given a boyfriend, Rod (Hart Bochner), a sorority house and about one conversation of her own, and Douglass does what she can with a part that exists so that Dave can lie to it. Rod is a rich boy from a catalogue. When an Italian racing team comes through town, midway, the plot arranges the meeting to give Dave exactly what the story requires, and it is the one place we felt Tesich’s hand. What follows we will not describe. The final race, the university’s Little 500, is staged clearly, with Scheider keeping the laps and the positions legible, and it is also the one part of the film that could have come from any sports picture.
The scene that moved us more than we expected has no bicycle in it. Ray walks Dave through the campus one evening and points at the buildings, naming the stone he cut for them, and says he was proud of the work and never felt he was allowed inside. Dooley says it flat, looking at the wall. It is where the comedy and the subject turn out to be the same thing: a town that built a place it will never be invited into. Yates had made Bullitt and The Friends of Eddie Coyle before this and went on to bigger, noisier things. This is his gentlest film and, we think, his best.
It is a PG, 101 minutes, and the right thing to put on with anyone from about twelve upwards. Warn them that the father is not a bully. He is frightened for his boy, and about eighty minutes in they will see why.
