On Screen

...They have little patience as well for working out the few subtleties they do try to weave into their work Early in the film, there is a brief shot of a protester standing alone and ignored in the rain, reading the names of local boys killed in action along with the school each attended No Harvard or MIT students are among the dead, w ho all seem to have ended their education at South Boston High or Boston Technical Nevertheless, when Leo and some other unlucky students are forced to take their physical at the local induction center, one young Harvard man who passes is dragged oil b\ MPs shouting, "1 don't want to die " Once again, a very telling point could have been made about the contrast between middle-class students' self-dramatizing and self-serving draft resistance, and working-class non-students' acquiescence to the war machine But the filmmakers shy away from this, either out of insensitivity or fear of offending their audience...

...Characters appear and disappear abruptly Jimmy the cook outlives his usefulness to the plot very quickly, a young woman named Alice (Shelley Long) materializes magically whenever Jessica needs a helping hand, or Nick another bed-mate because Leo is occupying Jessica And the literally explosive climax of the film makes absolutely no sense It is 1971 Leo goes to interview Haddox-the "first person from Red Falls, Texas, to go to Harvard"-who has popped up throughout the film in ever more radical guises until now he is an underground terrorist A bomb that one of the terrorists is manufacturing explodes, killing Leo and Haddox (well-played by John Friedrich, who was so good as Joey in The Wanderers) and the other rebels...

...Jessica's increasing involvement in women's liberation activities also lacks any motivation, she takes karate lessons and joins consciousness-raising groups merely because that's what lots of young feminists are doing Had Cohen and Sacks displayed some irony, I would almost be willing to believe the point of A Small Circle of Friends is that students in Cambridge, lacking any ideas of their own, were susceptible to whatever washed up on the banks of the Charles...

...Indeed, the whole process of politicization is so totally ignored that the characters appear practically mindless When Leo draws a low draft number, he reacts hysterically " 1 don't want to die in the DMZ," he cries "I don't even know where it is " Since he is a political reporter for the Harvard Crimson, and has a giant chart on his bedroom wall showing the monthly body count in Vietnam, it is a little hard to buy his profession of ignorance On the other hand, Leo's anguished reaction must be taken as genuine, for his desperate efforts to evade the draft and the strain this places on his relationship with Jessica figure prominently in the plot Thus the filmmakers' portrait of Leo is either inconsistent or shallow...

...To be successful as anything other than a fantasy for nostalgic ex-radicals, this latter-day Jules and Jim needs characters whose personal lives are deeply affected by the political trauma of their time, who are truly representative of the changes m the larger culture As it is, the public and private realms are merely confused Given their political commitments, for example, Nick and Leo's acceptance of a shared relationship with Jessica is astonishingly blithe One day after a romp in the country, she proposes out of the blue, "Let's all go to bed,' and equally suddenly they accept The filmmakers could have shown how sex was politicized during the decade and men and women were forced into sexual arrangements less by emotion than ideology Instead, the\ simply present this happy threesome as a "natural" plot development (Some things .ire apparently "unnatural," however, to Cohen and Sacks The implicit issue of homosexuality is discreetly sidestepped We see in pointless detail what Jessica does in bed with Nick and Leo separately, but the three-way action takes place behind closed doors...

...There seems to be little concern, though, about offending our intelligence In the crucial year of 1968, when LBJ announces he will not seek re-election, the trio and their fellow students proclaim, "We drove that son of a bitch from office,' and hang the President in effigy from a chandelier Yet apart from one demonstration against the presence of the ROTC on campus-nearly rained out because, as one character says, "It's too damned wet for the liberals"-none of the students has been shown actively opposing the war...

...The entire enterprise is so suspect, it would be pointless to go on to discuss the acting or photography Suffice it to say that compared to A Small Circle of Friends, such movies as Getting Straight and The Strawberry Statement are masterpieces of moral realism How sad that the intervening decades of the '70s has brought so little wisdom and so narrow a perspective on those years of the '60s that still haunt us...

...Now Rob Cohen, in his directorial debut, gives us A Small Circle of Friends, based on a screenplay by Ezra Sacks It is meant to be an intimate yet ambitious survey of the key years 1967-71 as experienced by three students in Cambridge-Harvard freshmen Leo (Brad Davis) and Nick (Jameson Parker), and Radcliffe first-year student Jessica (Karen Allen) Initially Jessica and Leo become lovers, soon she takes up with Nick, then they all get together in an menage a trots that comes finally to an unhappy end along with the decade's other dreams...

...Hypocrisy seems to be the overriding imperative in A Small Circle of Friends Aside from our glimpse of the lonely protester, one of the few indications in the movie that the Vietnam War affected anyone besides Harvard students is an episode involving Jimmy (Harry Caesar), the school cook When Leo learns that Jimmy's son has been sent to Vietnam, he writes an article, "One Son to Go," that is rejected by the Crimson because, we are supposed to believe, the editors are uncomfortable about Leo's contention that Middle America is sending blacks to do the dirty work in Vietnam So Leo and Nick break into the Crimson offices at night and stuff copies of the article into the bundles of newspapers awaiting distribution, when the paper is read by the student body the next morning, Leo's insert makes him the most talked-about figure on campus What began as a protest against the unfair burden shouldered by blacks, though, ends as the celebration of a journalistic coup achieved by chicanery, for Cohen and Sacks, the drama of Leo's personal triumph, such as it is, overshadows the moral point of the entire episode...

...On Screen LOSING A LOST GENERATION BY ROBERT ASAHINA EVERY GENERATION is in some fashion "lost," and each of its members considers himself an authority on why So it is not surprising that the further we get from the '60s, the more we hear about them Movies focusing on the New Left and the counterculture actually began appearing by the turn of the decade Alice's Restaurant was released in 1969, Getting Straight, Woodstock and Gimme Shelter in 1970 But with the exception of Easy Rider (1969), films about the cultural and political turmoil m America during the '60s have lacked the supposed authority of the personal perspective that marked the decade's novels and New Journalism Productions such as The Strawberry Statement (1970), adapted from James Simon Kunen's account of the 1968 Columbia University strike, have been patently commercial products aimed at the "youth" market-much closer to the conventions of the Hollywood beach-blanket genre, in fact, than to the disturbing events of the period...

...No reason for the explosion-either technical or dramatic -is apparent, apart from Cohen and Sacks' need for a bang-up conclusion In the "framing" sequence, a conversation between Jessica and Nick set in the present (the bulk of the movie is actually an extended flashback), we are simply told that Leo's death somehow caused the two survivors of the manage a trots to separate The tragic ending is as arbitrary, unearned and totally unredeemed by irony as every other event in the film...

...Throughout, too, the inattention to detail borders on the scandalous The intertitle "1968" appears after we see Johnson withdraw from the Presidential race The "summer of love" in San Francisco took place in 1967-the summer before the movie begins-not between the characters' freshman and sophomore years, as Cohen and Sacks suggest in their rather crude presentation of the conflict between the New Left and the counterculture (another interesting topic that they mishandle) One of Leo and Jessica's supposedly charming escapades-when he treats her to champagne late one night atop the closed Prudential building in Boston-makes sense only when we learn that the security guard who lets them into the building is Leo's father-a detail that is not divulged until Jessica visits him after Leo's death, at the end of the film...

...No doubts are expressed about Leo's method of evading the draft either Nick, a pre-medical student whose late father had been a physician, helps his friend by doctoring some of his father's medical forms to manufacture a phony history of asthma for Leo, who thereby manages to flunk his physical Throughout the episode, Nick suffers neither anxiety nor remorse, although Cohen and Sacks portray him as idealistic and committed to his studies and future profession One wonders what kind of career is in store for him one is left wondering a lot in A Small Circle of Friends The episodic story tries to cover too much and leaves too many loose ends...