Sweet Cheating

CLASS OF '44

Directed by PAUL BOGART

Screenplay by HERMAN RAUCHER

Class of '44 is a quiet and quite possibly unconscious example of McLuhanism at work. It is an environment rather than a movie. No jagged element of plot or character is permitted to catch at the viewer's mind and disturb his agreeable reveries about the world as he falsely remembers its being three decades ago.

At the level of production, design and musical direction, the movie is quite cleverly done; it is no back-lot reconstruction of a nostalgically recalled world. Rather, the producers have sought out and found real streets and houses and a college campus where time seems to have stood shabbily, realistically still since the waning days of World War II. Into them they have carefully intruded the more transitory artifacts of the period--posters, cars, costuming--while placing behind it all a score composed mostly of period pop music--the schlock of easy recognition. The aim is to be realistic without being really, disturbingly real--a neat, subtly corrupting trick.

The story is a sequel to Summer of '42, that phenomenally popular pioneer of this peculiar territory. As everyone knows, the most earnest and self-consciously sensitive boy (who shares a given name with Screenwriter Raucher) of that long ago summer underwent the most significant rite of passage at the end of the film, when he was sexually initiated--tenderly, tastefully--by that older woman rarely encountered in real life but who absolutely throngs in the fantasy lives of all the sad young men growing up absurd in America.

Raucher gropes for a similar big finish for Class of '44; he is nothing if not game. He gives us a funny-awful high school graduation, an awful-awful fraternity initiation, the first attempt to cheat on an exam (and almost getting caught) and, of course, the troubles everybody has had "going steady" for the first time. This includes the apparently irresistible scene in which front-seat romance is punctured by awkwardly cramped positions and comical jabs from steering wheel and gearshift. Throughout, friends change and drift away, introducing young Hermie --played audioanimatronically by Gary Grimes--and his buddy, Jerry Houser, to that sense of bewilderment and loss that is the only mood anyone seems to strive for in enterprises of this kind. The film reaches a choking climax when Hermie's father dies suddenly and he must confront mortality squarely, manfully. Naturally he gets drunk, has a fight and is rewarded by the return of his wandering girl friend. Life goes on. But is this life? Not really. Because life is lived by individuals, not archetypes; it is composed of particular variants on the kind of generalized situations and emotions that Director Bogart uses throughout this film. He permits nothing to provoke, only evoke. Class of '44 is not a confrontation with our collective past but a mindless wallowing in it.

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