Chapter Two:
Oliver's Story and Class of '44
By Brett Ballard-Beach
March 15, 2012
BoxOfficeProphets.com
(So help me God this is the actual tagline of one of this week’s sequels.)
How do you follow-up a film about a once-in-a-lifetime romance? In the very first Chapter Two nearly three years ago, I opened with an answer to that question: Before Sunset. That film was Richard Linklater, Ethan Hawke, and Julie Delpy’s belated sequel to Before Sunrise, the story of an impossibly romantic night among a pair of attractive and articulate but relationship-weary 20-somethings on the streets of Vienna. Sunset looked at the both the fallout and the nostalgic glow of that night with the chance encounter of the two nearly a decade later in Paris. In human terms, it considered the tenuous possibility of a second chance for a match between two souls. But the parallel to sequels to romantic comedies/dramas is an apt one: what can you do for an encore to un/happily ever after? That would be like making a sequel to . . . Titanic. (In this case, I am thankful Cameron has simply opted for a 3D retrofit.)
This week, I examine a pair of largely forgotten Chapter Twos from the mid-to-late 1970s, continuations of two of the most popular American cinematic romances from the beginning of that decade, critical/commercial/Academy favorites that struck a chord, I would argue, precisely because both dealt with loves that burned bright and quickly, and then were sundered by the forces of the universe. Class of ’44 and Oliver’s Story take very different tacks in following the further adventures of their (male) protagonists, and though both fall into the category of modest - as opposed to egregious or colossal - failures, one of them definitely has more on its mind than the other and explores more ambitious themes, even if that comes at the expense of its romantic attributes.
To begin with, it is revealing to consider how much their predecessors had in common. Love Story and Summer of ’42 were released only four months apart, in December 1970 and April 1971 respectively. Both were based on bestselling books (the former a fictional piece by Erich Segal, the latter a memoir by Herman Raucher) but in a “novel” twist, both stories had originally begun as screenplays that the studios - Paramount and Warner Bros - asked to be novelized and published prior to the film coming out. In each instance, the result was a self-perpetuating case of demand where the film version was able to quickly cash in on the story’s success, without having to buy the rights, hire a screenwriter, etc. (Segal and Raucher are solely credited for the screenplays.)
Both were significant box office successes on budgets common for the higher end big-studio projects of the time, in the neighborhood of $1 to $2 million. (Love Story was Paramount’s highest grosser up to that point, to be replaced by The Godfather a few years later.) Each was a multiple-Oscar nominee - seven for Love Story, four for Summer of ’42 - and each was a winner only for its score. Both films tell nostalgic stories of a romanticized love affair from the past, from the point of view of the man in the present, who is given brief voiceover narration to start and end the tale.
In Love Story, the couple is Oliver and Jennifer, verbally sparring college sweethearts who wind up married, only to be separated by the Grim Reaper when she succumbs in her mid-20s to an unnamed disease (specified as leukemia in a reference to her death in Oliver’s Story.) There is very little else to the story aside from their love (and his attempt to earn his wealthy industrialist father’s respect), but Ryan O’Neal and Ali McGraw are everything that a screen couple should be and evenly matched in looks, causticity, self-deprecation, and wounded glances.
In Summer of ’42, the man (or rather boy) and woman are one-time-only lovers: she, Carol, a 22-year-old recent war widow and he, Hermie, a high-schooler vacationing for the season with his family and two best friends on Nantucket. The ick factor (in spite of Jennifer O’Neill’s gentle and non-predatory demeanor) and one’s mind wandering towards charges of statutory rape are theoretically supposed to be alleviated by its being set in a “simpler time” and the fact that Raucher penned nearly all the events and characters verbatim from his life. But the brief narration, voiced by the author, and the “fly set in amber” tone that the film strikes from the very beginning via its bathos-stalgic main theme and color-desaturated still photographs left me uneasy throughout. There are only a handful of characters aside from the three boys and Carol, and nothing else to the story aside from the young men’s fixation on getting laid and what to do before, during, and after getting laid, so the prevailing tone is something like Porky’s dressed up in a bittersweet chamber piece’s garments.
In the case of Oliver’s Story and Class of ‘44, neither project was an initiative driven on the studio’s part. Segal wrote a follow-up novel and Raucher another screenplay, each which were individually optioned. Class of ’44 arrived in the spring of 1973, accompanied by a novelization by Madeline Shaner, while Oliver’s Story showed up in late 1978, about a year after the book’s release. And as different as both are in most ways, and in their levels of entertainment, I find it intriguing that the resolution of a father-son relationship plays a significant role in the conclusion of both, especially in the film where such a resolution comes as a jarring surprise and delivers no emotional catharsis whatsoever.
Class of ’44 is the more abrupt in its tonal shift from its predecessor, so I will begin there. While the first felt in its broad strokes like it had some of the DNA of a French coming-of-age film, and was distinguished by its mix of emotional isolation and randy teen male hormones, the sequel is like Animal House tamed down for the PG set. To put it another way, if Summer of ’42 made me uneasy in the way it seemed to have been directly splashed onto the screen wholesale from someone’s life, Class of ’44 feels as generic and artless as a Norman Rockwell knock-off done by someone whose previous artistic bent was submitting Tippy the Turtle sketchings to the Art Instruction Schools that advertised on matchbooks and in the back pages of comic books. It’s not a terrible sketch but it rarely seems to have the perspective of even two dimensions. I have seen almost nothing else by director Paul Bogart, but his installment in the Oh God! Series - the third and final feature Oh God! You Devil with George Burns both heavenly and hellish - was a childhood favorite of mine on video in the mid-‘80s.
The opening scene, set during the high school graduation of Hermie, Oscy, and Benjy, is notable for what I take to be its straight-faced satire on American patriotic wartime jingoism, as what should be a straightforward and festive occasion becomes an ultra-serious and downbeat pep rally/military recruitment/religious revival. But whatever nuance or critique can be glimpsed there quickly evaporates. Any point to be made from then on (about the relative merits of college, the honor principle, heavy petting, pledging a frat, writing for the college paper, serving one’s country) becomes simply another poorly edited plot point that accumulates ad infinitum. The story lurches from incident to incident with little sense that these moments are meant to add up to any thing in particular. As an example: Benjy merits very little significant screen time on the second go round (and as I recall, he vanished fairly quickly from Summer of ’42 as well.) In all, he is allotted about three minutes total, not much more than an unbilled and nearly unrecognizable John Candy in his screen debut.
Hermie has a meet cute with Julie on his first day. She is a co-ed who is upper class (based strictly on what the screenplay tells us) and more than a little bipolar (based strictly on what I can observe from her behavior.) She and Hermie date after a fashion, break up after a fashion, and if the clichéd but confusing final scene is any indication, have backseat makeup sex after their own fashion. Oscy is once again around for sex-obsessed shits and giggles (his big subplot is pimping out a local hooker to the frat guys) before he finally grows up by the end and follows Benjy into the military. Jerry Houser’s performance here, as in the first film, is endearing, in spite of Oscy’s inherent unlikability. He is as raucous as Seann William Scott’s character in the American Pie films, but less of a douchebag, and mentally faster on his feet. I think of him as a Neil Simon alter ego that Simon never quite got around to penning.
The first of the film’s two key problems is the unacknowledged void at its center. Summer of ’42 has a void of its own: WWII. Yes, it is there, and it inadvertently leads to Hermie’s deflowering but because of the age of the trio, and their being on a relatively secluded vacation spot (and it must be said, Raucher’s artistic license), they seem to exist in a world where Pearl Harbor is barely a reference point, let alone six months in the past, where an offhand reference to an older brother in the military is only a fraudulent anecdote launched in order to secure a trio of condoms from the island druggist.
In Class of ’44, that void is: the summer of ’42. This life-altering event, even if you only go by the wizened remarks of the elder narrator, this summer that changed everything, is never acknowledged, not once. Not in Hermie’s demeanor, not in any off-color jokes from Oscy (which was where I was most anticipating it), not even in a “is this your first time” moment when he and Julie make love. There isn’t even any narration to solemnly intone the vagaries of the past. The only references to the earlier film were in the poster art and ad campaign (“They’ve done a lot of growing up since the Summer of ’42.”)
But perhaps this wholesale amnesia is only appropriate. Raucher’s portentous mood the last time around decreed a life-transforming/affirming/negating romantic experience from which no Hollywood sequel could successfully extrapolate. Or this could be the unacknowledged mundanity of the rest of his life writ small, his inability to deal with the elephant in the room laid bare for the world to see. The movie hems and haws and meanders ceaselessly but only really stumbles in its final act, as Hermie is informed of and reacts to the death of his father. This would be Class of ‘44’s chance for a shameless catharsis, but for one minor detail: the audience has not met the father. Not in Summer of ’42 and not now.
The only substantiation of Hermie’s parentage comes in a handful of lines uttered by his mother off screen in the former film (voice supplied by Maureen Stapleton from All in the Family) and mother and father glimpsed from the inside of the taxi taking Hermie and Oscy off to college. It becomes impossible to identify with Hermie’s conflicted emotions about his relationship with his father and from there to discern how a night on the town drinking in toast to the old man, winds up in a table-smashing fist-flying barroom brawl. The only purpose the death seems to truly serve is to supply him with gravitas that allows him to reunite with Julie as he returns to finish out his freshman year. The final image posits this re-merging as a lonely fuck inside a darkened stalled car outside a closed train depot. My mind can only wander ahead 10 years or so on Hermie’s behalf and imagine him wondering out loud to Oscy or Benjy or the new neighbor down the street in the burgeoning world of suburbia how he wound up “running a day care with someone I used to sleep with.” (Apologies to Linklater.)
I have not read either Love Story or Oliver’s Story. The former clocks in at around 131 pages and could perhaps be completed in the time it takes to view the 99-minute film. Oliver’s Story (in hardcover) runs about three times as long while the film clocks in at nearly ten minutes shorter than its predecessor. I am uncertain whether the extra pages are devoted to more romantic entanglements or more tears of loss and longing. The cinematic version does its best to incorporate both in a minimum amount of time.
The film begins at Jenny’s funeral and then leaps ahead 18 months as it follows an Oliver so desperate to keep Jenny’s memory alive he has all but cocooned himself in introversion. He is reluctantly pulled out of his shell by a brash divorcee (played by Candice Bergen) who he comes to discover has a “shocking” secret - she is a businesswoman and board member and heir(ess) to a family fortune and industry, the same as him. While this may not seem the most enticing romantic entanglement - watching two rich people fall in love - director John Korty, who also receives co-screenplay credit for his additions and alterations to Segal’s script, pushes the material in an unexpected direction. The true block to Oliver’s future happiness comes not from his pining over a lost love, but at his embarrassment over all that he has. He atones for his “sins” by working on tenant’s rights cases at his law firm, and can’t understand how Marcie can so unapologetically enjoy her status.
Korty’s name was unfamiliar to me before this, but his directorial career is an intriguing hodgepodge of Academy-Award winning documentary, pioneering animation, Hallmark Hall of Fame and Lifetime Channel docudramas… and one of the made-for-television Ewok movies that followed in the wake of Return of the Jedi (the first one, from Thanksgiving ’84, without Wilford Brimley). I can only gather at the threads that might tie those choices together, but he seems to have an affinity for the characters in stories above the plot, and for unabashed sentiment coupled with a respect for human decency at all levels of the social class system.
O’Neal has an essentially thankless role in the sequel. He has to play good and noble and wounded and likable, the widower everyone is rooting for because, well, that Jenny was a hell of a gal, and she’d want him to find someone new to love. He endures unannounced blind dates staged by friends, a particularly awkward night out with his former father-in-law at a singles’ bar, and therapy sessions that arrive at insights that seem far too blindingly obvious for what he is shelling out. Interestingly, the film doesn’t present Marcie as having sacrificed herself as a woman in order to find her place in the male-dominated business world, nor does it condescend to her as having had to become a “ball-buster” in order to command respect and attention. Expectations of Murphy Brown, the 1970s years are banished with Bergen’s wry, sexy, and quietly firm portrayal of a modern woman.
But as I hinted earlier, the real payoff is in the sympathetic treatment of Mr. Barrett (portrayed once again by a delightfully underplaying Ray Milland) and the ultimate reconciliation between father and son, which the prior film set the groundwork for. It comes across as too rushed in retrospect, shoehorned into the finalten0 minutes, leading up to an unexpectedly brief coda and narration from O’Neal when another half hour of plot would seem reasonable. (Blessedly, O’Neal is not forced to utter the lines with which I opened this column. No one, not even the trailer voiceover narrator who does intone them, can make them any less than ridiculous.)
And yet, it becomes important at this point to consider the title (which is not “Love Story 2” or “Another Love Story”) and to take stock of the fact that however unnecessary, slight, and transitory Oliver’s Story proves to be, there is no cynicism at its core. It moves past a love story, as it asks its characters to, and stands looking into the future, not the past, for whatever fleeting happiness might be on its way.
Next time: With American Reunion arriving in theaters, it’s time to take a look back at the sequel that launched a thousand (or so) direct-to-video slices of Pie. A raunchy, raucous look at American Pie 2 and how the quadrilogy as a whole is inextricably bound up with my life, one month from now, right here.