Movies
Seitz, Michael H.
MOVIES Sixties people Michael H. Seitz The Return of the Secaucus Seven depicts a weekend reunion, occurring just a year or so ago, of a group of late 1960s movement activists. They are all now...
...In the course of the weekend (and the film), nothing of great dramatic moment occurs...
...his sec* ond novel, Union Dues, was nominated for both the National Book Award and the Critics' Circle Award, and he has written the scripts for a couple of remarkably successful movies (Piranha and Battle beyond the Stars) for Roger Corman's New World Films...
...They are all now entering their thirties, and they have drifted away from political and social action to go their separate ways...
...Katie notes with dismay that all her friends seem to be breaking up...
...As the picture begins, the other members of the Seven show up either singly or in pairs: J. T. (Adam Le Fevre), a charming, unsuccessful country and western singer...
...and Jeff (Mark Arnott), who now works as a counselor in a drug clinic...
...But mostly these old companions just sit or walk around, reminiscing, catching up on each other's lives...
...Their reunion years later takes place at the rural New Hampshire abode of Mike (Bruce MacDonald) and Katie (Maggie Renzi), who teach history and English at the local high school...
...These old friends play volleyball (enjoyably, but not very well), go swimming (nude) in a nearby stream, play some half-court basketball, prepare a cookout, go boozing together at a local bar, play "the game," take in another friend's performance in a summer stock production, and while returning manage to get arrested together once again—this time on a charge of deer poaching (or as Jeff puts it, the frightful crime of "Bambicide...
...The Return of the Secaucus Seven is not a brilliant or strikingly original piece of filmmaking, but its many characters are remarkably well drawn, it has superbly written dialogue, and its scenario is pleasantly free of dramatic contrivance...
...It's difficult to believe that such a thing could be done in these days of eight-figure film budgets, but he managed to complete the work for the incredibly low sum of $60,000...
...He is the recipient of an O. Henry Award...
...While traveling down the Jersey Turnpike to one of the last big Washington marches, they had stopped at Secaucus to gas up their borrowed car...
...Frances (Maggie Cousineau-Arnt), who is finishing medical school and wants to be an obstetrician...
...The annual spring rite of the Academy Awards prompts most film critics to review their own judgments and preferences among the films released during the preceding year...
...Writer-director Michel Deville has woven sexual anecdotes contributed by fifteen contemporary French writers into his screenplay, and realizes each of them through varied manipulation of the cinema's narrative resources...
...Voyage en Douce...
...Ih other words, 583 such films could be made for the cost of one Heaven's Gate...
...Trendy, generally engrossing crime-thriller by the writer-director team of Breaking Away—who prove that it is still possible to make an effective popular film in this genre without titillating nudity or gory violence...
...get it on" together (he feels guilty afterwards, because he is supposed to be her husband Jeffs best friend), and Frances (who had hoped to make it during the weekend with J. T.) lets herself be seduced by a fast-talking local auto mechanic...
...That whole story is considerably more complex, and would have to include those who have remained committed to social and political activism, as well as movement opportunists who have shamefully sold out, and those who have just plain freaked out (getting born again or joining mystical Eastern sects...
...This exceptional film was written, directed, and edited by John Sayles, who also plays the part of one of the New Hampshire locals, a former high school sports star who has become the harassed but proud father of three young kids...
...Secaucus Seven is my Ordinary People: populated by progressively inclined men and women with whom I've worked, marched, and occasionally shared a pleasant weekend in the country...
...Eyewitness...
...Secaucus Seven, moreover, makes no real attempt to trace the process by which its protagonists have drifted away from active involvement in work for social change...
...And at the end of the weekend they all embrace warmly (except Jeff, who sneaks off when no one's looking, because he doesn't like goodbyes) and go their various ways...
...Irene (Jean Passante), who has become a speech writer for a "liberal" U.S...
...Irene admits that she doesn't give a "rat's ass" for the Senator she works for, but finds him preferable to the alternatives...
...But it does represent a part of the story, and it has realized this part with extraordinary credibility...
...Frances admits that "doctors are assholes, mostly," but she is nonetheless looking forward to delivering babies...
...I feel that I can, on the whole, give myself fairly good marks...
...The women discuss birth control devices (they've all gone off the potentially dangerous Pill), and the dangers of having children after one's mid-thirties (they are all, as yet, childless...
...Sayles sank all his earnings from these endeavors into The Secaucus Seven...
...In between these group activities, Maura and J .T...
...Hits and misses The Postman Always Rings Twice...
...A cleverly written, beautifully lensed tour de force, dealing with the erotic fantasies of two middle-class women (Dominique Sanda and Geraldine Chaplin) approaching middle age...
...Senator and has brought along her disarm-ingly straight boyfriend (a true beMichael H. Seitz teaches film at Rutgers University and reviews films regularly for The Progressive...
...M.S...
...The film opened to an unsuccessful commercial run in New York City last September, but refused to disappear, and is now drawing unexpectedly large audiences in a second release...
...Since he could not even afford to pay the Actors' Guild minimum, he chose his cast from among the best non-union actors he could find (he's promised them union scale when the film shows profits), and he assembled a small crew of people whose previous experience was limited to commercials and industrial films...
...The fourth film version of James M. Cain's gritty Depression novel of lust, greed, murder, and betrayal...
...Mike points out that "everybody we like is hard to live with...
...As I watched the award ceremony on television, and found myself (as usual) in frequent disagreement with the "Academy's" choices, I began wondering if I had done an adequate job in these pages of drawing the reader's attention to those relatively few films which seem to be truly deserving of critical praise...
...But they spent their college years in the peace movement (Cambridge-Boston contingent), worked on registration drives in the South, and several of them subsequently served in VISTA...
...They were promptly busted by the local constabulary on trumped-up drug charges—thus becoming, as they jocularly put it, the infamous Secaucus Seven...
...The Secaucus Seven may appear to some viewers as a rather odd and unsettled bunch of no-longer-still-young people—but I feel that they are some of my closest friends, and that I know them better than the characters in any Other recent movies...
...Sayles, who has just passed thirty himself, has been making something of a name for himself as a writer within the last five years...
...Maura (Karen Trott), a would-be actress who has just left her husband, Jeff...
...I stick by my initial judgment that Raging Bull and Melvin & Howard represent the best American filmmaking for 1980, and I still think that Kagemusha (Kurosawa), Every Man for Himself (Go-dard), The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith (Schepisi), and In a Year of Thirteen Moons (Fassbinder) are the most noteworthy of the foreign films released here last year...
...It is not, nor does it try to be, the great American movie on the 1960s generation as it enters the 1980s...
...No effort is made here to build up to big, emotionally charged scenes, or to endow the genial reunion of these former activists with more drama than the circumstances warrant...
...The Return, of the Secaucus Seven is an intimate film, and it is deliberately limited in its focus...
...Despite more explicit sex than in earlier renditions, greater fidelity to Cain's story, and some strong acting (from Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange), this Postman is superior neither to Luccino Visconti's 1942 neo-realist classic, nor to the John Garfield-Lana Turner film of 1946...
...liever in working for reform within the system...
Vol. 45 • June 1981 • No. 6
