An Early Death

By John Skow

PROMISES IN THE DARK Directed by Jerome Hellman Screenplay by Loring Mandel

Our society's mighty engines of banality can reduce anything to a bore, and death, the fad that replaced tennis, has lately been talked to death. A viewer may approach Promises in the Dark with some wariness, therefore, because the subject of the film is a 17-year-old girl's death after a long battle with cancer. But Promises is clear, direct and honest, and free of both cant and sentimentality. It is also lively, in the exact sense of the word; the flow of intelligence and feeling between Buffy, the sick girl, and her family and friends makes her inevitable death tolerable.

Buffy (played appealingly by Kathleen Seller) breaks her leg playing soccer, and cancer is discovered. She is bright and tough-minded, and she fights back after her leg is amputated by trying to learn everything about her disease. Against the advice of a senior associate, her doctor (Marsha Mason) conducts what amounts to a seminar on cancer for her, through the months of harrowing chemotherapy that she undergoes. Most of what the girl learns is frightful, but she does not take fright. A strong friendship develops between the hollow-eyed teenager and the doctor who tries to save her and who, when that fight has failed, insists passionately that she be allowed to die with dignity.

The film is not entirely cliche-free. The character played by Mason is a fairly standard woman-doctor stereotype: pretty but prim, with deep-frozen attitudes toward men and a sharp tongue, at first, for the handsome radiologist (Michael Brandon) who wants to cuddle. Oddly, it is the teen-age romance that escapes stereotype: the scenes between Buffy and her boyfriend (Paul Clemens) are remarkably real and touching. In balance, the film is decent and compassionate, and truthful enough not to disguise too much the fact that truth can hurt terribly. --John Skow

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