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Show Review 'peace' plays on emotions b ','' n . 1 t byGAYLAN NIELSON Chronicle Staff has been quite some time since Lnt to the preview of "A cpoerate Peace" but I didn't stop rintfng about it. By way of per-., per-., asions, I went to the movie w,th a A !erv sensitive actress who I felt V Lould lead me into the open. Both I the girl and I were moved. She, in fact was overcome with emotion, dot more relative to a personal experience. Instead of "Lear" One additional point is that all the . English teachers over the width and breadth of America are teaching John Knowles "A Seperate Peace" in place of "King Lear." Could they all be wrong? To answer my own question, along with a subtle reply; yes. As wrong as 67 percent of all J those people who need Nixon for ) four more years. Enough politics. Shallow novel The novel isn't a bad novel it's !;: justshallow. It is moving and works well with cliches and back-yard I I anecdotes-the ones we all know. The movie is not a bad movie, not 1 ! one that I would discourage people to see, it's just shallow and relative sfc to almost nothing except te: emotion. But in "A Seperate !!: Peace" I have as hard of a time M, dealing with it as important as with w "Love Story" and "A Summer of ate '4Z" (I'm quite sure I have at least sen--:- sold a thousand or more seats for r them, but...). lit The movie is about a bunch of ti- boys at a military academy who are ' making serious decisions in their year of graduation. It takes place during the second World War and Jft causes an eruption of opinion ol : about services to the country. sir( Energy opposed fc'fi John Heyl plays Finny, the super jit'; jock who keeps the pace at Devon tte Academy a rollicking one. And S1- Parker Stevenson plays Gene, the j!: intellectual (validictorian) type. They are roommates and their s- energies seem diametrically opposed. op-posed. Finny says, "No matter how hard I work, I get C's." Gene wants to stay at the top with his grades, but Finny is always pulling him out to run up and down hills and daring him to do things beyond his realms, but Finny falls off a limb and breaks his leg and puts him out of the sports scene. Weary directing The young actors, especially Heyl and Stevenson, are very good a virtue of young actors with no acting goal in mind nature. But the directing by Larry Preece was weary. He suffocates a film with lack of technique (no cutting, no interesting camera angles), but now to be ironic, the most important thing he did with the film is suffocation. There is a suffocating silence that makes me introspect and deal with the emotions very directly it was persuasive but cheap. Another winning point has to do with the text itself. There are some important im-portant realizations that are made about life and death and even more so with war. Finny didn't want to recognize that a war was going on but when a mutual friend named Leper returns only half witted he is forced to deal with the problem. Character mistake This brings up the worst folly of the movie. Leper was a very secondary character in the movie and if Knowles did anything with the novel of any worth it was the importance of that character but why make people think? So it was slushed aside on a snowy hillside where Leper rolls over and is basically ignored. The film is not really realistic. Like "Guess Who's Coming To Dinner" the protagonists always have to be something in excess of natural. If I felt that I was really needed to sell this movie, I would make a hard and fast ruling but the audience will be jammed with teachers alone until next June. It was made into a movie because it had a ready-made subscription audience. But it's not that great unless you are susceptable to a good cry. , fit ' |