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!
