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Show ' ::Wy: IEeefl Wcuirfldl HXr zL'X') I bvIMrkBrough 'Running Brave' gets off track when it goes beyond athletics f A Classic Recommended Good double-feature double-feature material Time-killer For masochists V only Running Brave Billy Mills' story is a natural for a movie. At the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, he jumped out of the pack to win the 10,000-meter run. Considered strictly an also-ran, also-ran, Mills streaked across the finish line while spors-: spors-: writers squinted at their programs to find his name. Mills' victory was the culmination of a long physical physi-cal and psychological struggle. strug-gle. Thanks to some good performances, "Running Brave" engages your interest in this story. But it covers the distance with an uneven pace and a muddled plot. As a young man, Bill Mills (Robby Benson) runs on his Sioux Indian reservation, and his speed and endurance win him a scholarship at Kansas University, under . the tutelage of Coach Easton (Pat Hingle). Billy has, trouble fitting in at first because his extreme shyness and apprehension is mistaken mis-taken by a white man's world for aloofness. Plus, he receives a few doses of old-fashioned racism. When a cop on campus picks him up for vagrancy and calls him "Chief,". Billy snaps, "I'm not a chief I'm a freshman." Pouring all his energies into running, Billy soon becomes a nationwide contender con-tender in track and field. But the pressures of competition begin to pile up on him. He , struggles to cope sin his romance with a White girl (Claudia Cron). Worst of all, he begins to lose sight of why he wants to run. v c Finally, he abandons everything and goes back to the reservation.', The. surroundings sur-roundings are comfortable, but he finds it still existing, the dead-end life that originally ori-ginally drove him away into the wider world. . , ,. From this low point, the picture moves swiftly to his T triumph at the Olympics. But the trouble is, you don't see what strength or philosophy philo-sophy Billy uses to bounce back. There's a lot of talk here about the value of winning. Billy's father says, "A man don't stand for much unless he wins" then has a fatal heart attack, affirming his advice as Gospel. Coach Easton is also hard-nosed. He gets irritated when good-natured Billy lets his opponents nearly catch up in races. The coach tells him he should leave a competitor in the dust. "He'll break inside, and you? will own him forever,," says Coach. Easton sounds right when he preaches that an Olympic athlete must put aside personal,. per-sonal,. ; problems (like racism), and come from behind. But what does this mean? That Billy should adopt the coach's winning-is-everything attitude? BV. The movie never answers the question. In the latter part of the film, Billy leaves the reservation, joins the Marines while he's getting his head together, and presto! finds the strength to enter the Olympics and astound the world. If anything, any-thing, the moral seems to be that the Marines do build men. The movie is good low-grade low-grade entertainment thanks to the performances.: Robby Benson's eager, almost wet-eyed wet-eyed look helps us to feel his aspirations, despair and triumphs. tri-umphs. Hingle's gruff coach lends conviction even to speeches that sound like blatant bullf earners. Claudia Cron is wooden as Billy Mills' wife. (Incidentally (Inciden-tally we're told that Billy has to cope with the prejudice of her parents. But we never even see them another issue the picture skips.) Dennis La Croix is convincing in the awful part of the doomed good buddy back on the reservation. He's Billy's artistically-talented friend who can't stand living with the tribe and can't stand leaving. Graham Greene (no, not the novelist) is another Sioux friend the kind you can just barely stand. Director D.S. Everett does all right with the race scenes. His depictions of college life are stiff. But he has a nice feel for reservation reserva-tion life, where feelings are torn between present-day shame (alcoholism) and old proud traditions. "Running Brave" has its good rah-rah moments as a sports story, but fudges its potential as a socially-questioning socially-questioning biography. |