Tuesday, May 21, 2019

Breaking Away (20th Century-Fox, 1979)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s library movie was the third and last in their series of films about bicycling — it seems that somebody out there proclaimed May “National Bike Month,” something I wouldn’t have known except that Tracy, the woman currently in charge of programming movies for the library, decided to make May’s showings an expression of “National Bike Month” by showing films about bicycling. The film last night was Breaking Away, a 1979 production by 20th Century-Fox (back when it still usually took only one production company to make a movie!) which I vaguely remember seeing in the early 1980’s on a black-and-white TV but had no recollection other than that it had an awful lot of scenes featuring reasonably cute young men riding bicycles through the Indiana countryside. Though it was nominated for five Academy Awards, won for Best Original Screenplay and helped launch the career of Dennis Quaid (who’s actually the second male lead to Dennis Christopher, a young blond hunk of almost ethereal beauty who should have had more of a career than he did — much the way Annabeth Gish starred in Mystic Pizza and then saw that film’s second lead, Julia Roberts, overshadow her and have a superstar career), Breaking Away has fallen so far below the cultural radar that Tracy was unable to get hold of a U.S. DVD — instead she bought the British version and had to play it from her laptop computer since the San Diego Central Library doesn’t have a multi-region DVD player. (She kept the closed-caption subtitles open during the film and that came through in a number of British-style spellings, including a reference to someone paying for something with a “cheque,” the “chequered flag” that signals the end of the big bike race that climaxes the film, and one odd scene in which the central character calls his female parent “Mom” but the subtitle said “Mum.”) 

The film started life as two separate screenplays by Steve Tesich, who had grown up in Bloomington, Indiana and in 1962 had participated in the 500-mile bicycle relay race in Bloomington, called the “Little 500” to distinguish it from the famous auto race in Indianapolis as member of a team of town residents who competed against the spoiled college brats from Indiana University (located in Bloomington) and were led to victory by David K. Blase, who rode two-thirds of the distance, became an Indiana sports legend, and served as the model for the film’s central character, Dave Stohler (Dennis Christopher), as well as appearing in the movie himself as the announcer of the big race at the end. One of Tesich’s two scripts, The Cutters, was about the limestone quarry that was Bloomington’s big industry until it got hit by deindustrialization — the film includes a lament spoken by Dave’s father (Paul Dooley), “I was proud of my work. And the buildings went up. When they were finished the damnedest thing happened. It was like the buildings were too good for us. Nobody told us that. It just felt uncomfortable, that’s all” — and the other, The Eagles of Naptown, was about the Little 500 bike race. Director Peter Yates read Tesich’s scripts and decided that neither one was strong enough to make a movie on its own, but asked Tesich if he could combine them. 

The result was a tale of four 19-year-old Bloomington town boys — Dave, Mike (Dennis Quaid), Cyril (Daniel Stern) and Moocher (Jackie Earle Haley, who to my mind almost stole the film from the taller, hunkier Dennises) — who hang out together, go swimming in the pool left over from the quarry factory (which is still in operation but at such a lower level of business Papa Stohler quit it and opened a used-car lot) and talk about how they’re going to stay friends forever even though they’re also typical horny straight guys and therefore interested in girls. (Indeed, one of them actually gets married during the course of the movie and I couldn’t help but think of Sammy Fain’s old song, “Wedding Bells Are Breaking Up That Old Gang of Mine.”) Dave’s great passions in life are bicycle riding in general and the Italian bike-racing team sponsored by the Cinzano vermouth company in particular, and he’s gone so far in his obsession with all things Italian that he listens to Italian opera (though the aria we hear most often is actually German — “Ach, so fromm” from Friedrich von Flotow’s Martha, though sung in Italian as “M’appari tutt’ amor”), addresses his father as “Papa,” insists that mom (Barbara Barrie, who actually looks enough like Dennis Christopher they’re believable as mother and son) serve Italian dishes like sautéed zucchini, and says “Ciao!” when he leaves the house to go hang out with his buddies. He’s also courting one of the college girls, Katherine (Robyn Douglass, who got an “Introducing” credit), calling her “Katarina” and inventing a background for himself as one of a large Italian family and even serenading her outside her dorm window with “M’appari” (which to my mind couldn’t help but recall Van Johnson’s similar serenade in Thrill of a Romance from 1945, though Johnson had a real opera singer, Lauritz Melchior, on hand to voice-double for him), which predictably amuses her friends no end. (The whole business of the town kid pretending to be something he isn’t to get a girl to fall in love with him was done much better by Sherwood Anderson in his short story “I’m a Fool,” vividly brought to life by James Dean in a 1955 TV adaptation.) 

On learning that the Italian team is coming to Bloomington for a race against all local comers, Dave enters it — then is disillusioned when the Italian team cheats, first using some sort of tool to knock his bike’s gears out and then, when that doesn’t stop him, clubbing him mid-race with a metal rod. Knocked out of the race and humiliated by his friends having to pick him up from the road where he spilled, Dave takes down all the Italian bike-racing posters from the wall (though he leaves the Cinzano logo on the headboard of his bed) and tells Katherine he isn’t really Italian — which she responds to by slapping him. Meanwhile, the college kids pick on Dave’s friend Cyril and beat him up, and the townies get their revenge by picking a fight at a local bowling alley that ends with a bowling ball getting stuck on someone’s fingers, then flying off again and taking out the glass case holding the alley’s trophies. (This has really nothing to do with the main plot but it’s one of the most entertaining scenes in the film!) Eventually the climax occurs at the Little 500 bike race, in which Dave and his friends enter a four-person team and defiantly call themselves the “Cutters” (as in “stonecutters”), the college kids’ derisive nickname for the locals. (The real-life nickname was “stoners,” but Yates told Tesich they couldn’t use that in the film because then people would think it was a movie about drugs.) The Cutters enter the Little 500 and Dave, with only minimal help from his teammates, stages two dramatic come-from-behind finishes (he takes the lead, loses it when he gets injured and has to yield his bike to a teammate, then takes the lead again) and wins the race in a photo-finish. (Since then, according to imdb.com, the rules of the Little 500 have changed so you have to be college students to enter, though locals who are attending the University of Indiana in Bloomington qualify.) 

Breaking Away is a really charming movie whose only fault is its utter predictability; Steve Tesich abided so tightly by the rules they teach you in screenwriting classes — the three-act structure, including a second act in which the central character loses almost everything and is devastated, followed by a third act in which he (or, more rarely, she) dramatically comes from behind and triumphs, that this film could be used as course material in those classes. When the race announcer (played in a breathless voice by the real David K. Blase, whose actual win in the Little 500 in 1962 inspired the film) says, “Can Dave Stohler come from behind again and win the race?,” I answered, “Of course he can! It’s a movie!Breaking Away is an inspiring movie but also a sad one to watch because it’s precisely the kind of “little movie” — it cost $3 million and made $17 million — that almost never gets made today, especially under major-studio auspices. None of the characters originated in comic books, they don’t have super-powers and they deal with recognizable human emotions and conflicts like the rest of us. Steve Tesich got the film’s one Academy Award and went on to adapt John Irving’s The World According to Garp for the screen — he died young (at 53) in the 1990’s but had had a brief vogue writing scripts like this in a time when the big studios were still greenlighting them. It was also nice to see the film’s actors and principal crew members credited at the beginning and the credit roll at the end still a relatively modest and manageable size (interestingly, 1950’s director W. Lee Wilder — two of his films, Phantom from Space and Killers from Space, we saw last Saturday — back-loaded all his credits to the end, unusual then but standard now). Breaking Away holds up quite well, even though its structure and plot devices are so much a part of standard Hollywood one could well imagine this film having been made in the 1930’s, and of course the sight of so many hot young men, often with their shirts off, gives it added appeal to this old queen!