LOOKING BACK TO THE SIXTIES
Mills, Nicolaus
It is billed, by its own production company, as a "warm and comic exploration of the rapidly changing world of a group of friends working on a small weekly newspaper." And certainly it is...
...It won't, as do so many attacks on the '60s, dismiss the wit and energy of the decade...
...The real focus of Between the Lines rests not with the struggle between '70s money men and '60s print men but with the internal dissolution of a once innovative paper...
...Time and again we hear those on the paper refer back to the golden '60s (on one occasion the nostalgia comes immediately after a love scene) and the more they reminisce, the more apparent it becomes that their real tie to the '60s has been a loose one...
...It is the excitement of the journalistic chase, the pleasure of working together and affronting the establishment that has been the real stimulant for the Mainline staff, and with this "high" now over, what they cling to and choose to come down on are the stylistic changes the '60s brought about—in dress, in sex, in dope, in music...
...When Laura looks at a picture of a rally she went to, she speaks of it as though it were a giant prom...
...By the end of Between the Lines, however, any such possibility is out of the question...
...The change from the hard, glassy architecture of the new Boston to the stately old Boston of H. H. Richardson and Charles McKim is jarring, and in this setting only the rumpled Pollard—and by extension the Mainline—seem capable of bridging both worlds, making what is modern and efficient human as well...
...A worthy successor to her Hester Street, it is the best film we have had so far on what happened to the college radicals of the 1960s...
...and when Harry discusses a hospital expose he did, it is not in terms of anyone he helped but with a sense that he "shook things up...
...They are the best and the brightest of a rebellious college generation that defined itself in terms of radical politics and yet never on the whole became radicalized...
...Harry (John Heard), the Mainline's star investigative reporter, is now interested in life-styles (his current story is about strippers...
...Silver is willing to keep her camera in place for long periods of time, and the result is a series of hilarious sequences: among them, a reverse-roles love scene between Abbie and Harry that occurs when she shows up at his apartment late at night and he takes the stance of the about-to-beseduced...
...Slowly we circle the gigantic Hancock Towers (an architectural disaster that became a news story when its windows kept popping out and falling into the street below...
...It is billed, by its own production company, as a "warm and comic exploration of the rapidly changing world of a group of friends working on a small weekly newspaper...
...And Laura (Gwen Weller), who has been with the Mainline almost from its inception, just goes on turning out copy for want of anything better to do...
...But Joan Micklin Silver's Between the Lines is far more than a 1970s gang-spirit picture...
...What makes Between the Lines so telling and unexpected is, however, that this kind of neat generational contrast is precisely what Silver and screenwriter Fred Barron, a former reporter on the Boston Phoenix and the Real Paper, allow for and then destroy by carefully avoiding a morality play in which the tough business world administers a dose of reality to the radical young...
...Abbie (Lindsay Crouse), the staff photographer, is ready to leave the Mainline as soon as "something better comes along...
...an Irwin Corey-like music lecture that Max (Jeff Goldblum), the Mainline's Rock critic, delivers at a women's college (during which he manages to give out his phone number...
...And certainly it is this softness that accounts for its audience appeal...
...Then we are on the ground, in the middle of Copley Square, and the first voice we hear is that of Michael J. Pollard, hawking copies of the Back Bay Mainline...
...Between the Lines opens with a helicopter shot of the Boston skyline...
...A few novelists—notably Ann Beattie in Chilly Scenes in Winter, Eleanor Bergstein in Advancing Paul Newman, Lisa Alther in KinFlicks—have tried something similar, but Silver in a movie produced without a star and on a modest budget has gone further than they, and in addition opened up the biggest question of all for the generation of reporters and writers who came of age in the '60s—where next...
...IT IS THIS state of restless ambivalence on the part of the Mainline staff that is grist for the pervasive humor of Between the Lines, and what follows for most of the picture is a series of encounters that are a combination of hip bedroom farce and comedy of manners...
...Michael (Stephen Collins) wants to write a book on the'60s instead of doing "reporting crap...
...and a conversation between Harry and David (Bruno Kirby), the Mainline's cub reporter, in which Harry tries to convince David that the story he is doing on whales would be improved if only he wrote it from the whale's point of view...
...What gives Between the Lines its richness is that it keeps this total picture in focus...
...Very early in the film we see that with the exception of Lynn (Jill Eikenberry), the receptionist and mother hen of the Mainline, the staff is not solidly committed to the radical politics that brought the paper into existence...
...Yet in scene after scene it makes clear that ten years later, when the wit and energy of the decade are all that its middle-class "radicals" retain, there was something fundamentally wrong—and certainly politically parasitic—in the lives they led...
...The Mainline has been sold to a smarmy publishing mogul (Lane Smith), and most of the paper's old staff has quit or been fired...
...To pursue this kind of thinking at a time when so many retrospective studies of the '60s try to define its end in terms of a single event (King's assassination, Nixon's election, the last March on Washington) is no mean accomplishment...
...In all of this the comedy of Between the Lines maintains its edge because without recourse to preachment or ideology it fixes on the disparity between the lives of the Mainline staff in the '70s and the political turmoil that brought them together...
Vol. 24 • September 1977 • No. 4
