School Ties

By JAY COCKS

A SEPARATE PEACE

Directed by LARRY PEERCE Screenplay by FRED SEGAL

This is a movie about a boy who falls out of a tree. It touches, in addition, on such evergreen themes as coming of age, loss of innocence and passage into uncertain manhood. Such an undertaking represents a narrowing in scope for Larry Peerce, whose previous effort, The Sporting Club, dramatized the decline of the West. In symbolic terms, of course.

At the Devon School (portrayed by the Phillips Exeter Academy), young men sport and struggle through their studies, only intermittently aware of the global conflict that rages outside their ivy cloister. The movie, an unreasonably faithful adaptation of John Knowles' novel, begins in the summer of 1942, currently a fashionable time for elegies to vanished youth. Finny (John Heyl) and Gene (Parker Stevenson) are roommates and best friends. Finny is forever the leader; Gene is more scholarly, more tentative. Together they form a club frivolously called the "Suicide Society." Initiation involves jumping off the limb of a tall tree into the river below.

One day Finny falls from the tree and breaks his leg. Gene spends the rest of the movie consumed by guilt. Did he shake the branch to make his friend fall because of Pinny's unrelenting competitiveness? Or to still a growing homosexual affection? In any case, the terrible truth about the tree limb comes out in a kangaroo court. Finny breaks his leg again, and the kindly old school doctor sets the bone. But there are complications, and Finny meets the kind of unexpected and untimely end that whisked the heroine of Love Story off to Valhalla.

Peerce is a cinematic version of Frank Sullivan's cliche expert. During the tree-climbing episodes, the camera peers up from a low angle, the sun making dainty little flares in the lens. During a confrontation in the drawing room of Pinny's Boston home, a clock ticks loudly, a desperate device intended to lend a little spine to the sponge cake theatrics. As for the unfortunate actors, they are all nonprofessionals and are likely to remain so.

Jay Cocks.

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