Hindsight Has a Future for Film Makers

At times it seems that film makers, and particularly screenwriters, are getting younger every minute. Hanif Kureishi (“My Beautiful Laundrette,” “Sammy and Rosie Get Laid”), Neal Jimenez (“River’s Edge”), Chris Columbus (“Young Sherlock Holmes,” “Adventures in Babysitting”), Shane Black (“Lethal Weapon”), S.S. Wilson and Brent Maddock (“Short Circuit,” “Batteries Not Included”) have seen their first screenplays become films at an age when the rest of us used to be deciding what we wanted to be when we grew up.

Those to whom the ‘60s were not precisely the Olden Days should not abandon hope, however. There is great comfort to be taken right now from three perfectly splendid films that suggest that wine and cheese aren’t the only things to benefit by a little judicious aging. Two of these pictures had 40-year gestation periods, the third much less, but all three of their writer-directors--John Boorman, Louis Malle and William Richert--have said frankly that they could not, even should not, have turned to this material one moment before they did.

Boorman and Malle returned to their childhood experiences during the Second World War for the vastly different tonalities of “Hope and Glory” and “Au Revoir Les Enfants.” A great many emotions, including degrees of shame, had to be laid bare and dealt with before either man could get down to the material at hand.

In “Au Revoir Les Enfants,” Malle is dealing with his feelings of complicity--although his actions were completely inadvertent--in the case of three young Jewish students, cached for their own safety in the private Catholic boy’s school Malle was attending in 1944. One of the three, a somewhat mysterious boy called Bonnet, had become Malle’s closest friend. But on one winter afternoon, Father Jean, the headmaster, and the three boys were taken away by the Gestapo while the whole student body watched. (The title comes from Father Jean’s farewell words, “Au revoir les enfants, a bientot,” although no one watching in that icy courtyard really believed that anyone would see them again.)

Malle has made his film, dedicated to his own children, with a crystalline simplicity. Although Malle’s great, earlier “Lacombe, Lucien” is set in the same period and covers some of the same material--the ordinariness of life during the Occupation, the minuscule questions on which greater moral issues hang--”Au Revoir” is the more shattering of the two, less detached, certainly; more shockingly instructive. Having seen it first some seven months ago, I can say that it has, in common with Agnes Varda’s “Vagabond,” a way of dropping into the recesses of one’s unconscious and remaining there.

The “shame” involved in Boorman’s backward glance may not be immediately perceptible to American audiences, to whom the row houses of Rosehill Avenue, with their stained glass rising suns, look quintessentially English and cozy. But to the English, Boorman was revealing class, and the mortifying fact that he had come not from the thick-booted, cheeky lower class, so universally fashionable in films from “This Sporting Life” and “A Hard Day’s Night” to “Quadrophenia,” but from the stifling, infinitely pretentious middle class.

It’s against their artificial elegances that Ian Bannen’s fearsome Grandfather is constantly fulminating in the film: useless upward striving personified by these red brick semi-detached suburbs into which his hopeless sons-in-law have plunged his daughters. It’s the demolition of those seemingly indestructible landmarks that liberates the film’s wonderful kids and sets the Boorman character, Bill Rohan, on the road to his future as a film maker.

What Boorman needed was every ounce of his maturity as a writer and director to move the lyric flow of “Hope and Glory” as imperceptibly as he has. And he’s done it: The film soars with un-Boorman-like humor and not-unexpected audacity, from the swell of the escaped silver barrage balloon to the silver rain of fish on the river bank.

But under the war and sociology and the drama, Boorman has one more subject: what he regards as the magnetic and dizzying world of women. It envelopes the bewildered, unresisting Bill gradually, like the smell of face powder and lily of the valley but, in its ultimate revelation, as his older sister gives birth precipitously there in the living room, it makes Bill faint dead away. And it lingers with the film maker to this day.

William Richert wrote the novel on which his brilliantly perceptive film, “A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon,” was based in 1963 when he was just 19, and basked in reviews comparing him to Hemingway and Joyce when it was published four years later. But luckily for everyone on both sides of the screen, he didn’t try to turn it to film until 20 years later--Richert is less provocatively flamboyant now than he was when he made “Winter Kills” or “Success,” but his craft is no less assured and his work with actors is still gorgeous. That’s especially noticeable since Richert has cast his excellent youngsters--River Phoenix, Ione Skye, Meredith Salenger and a remarkable talent known only by Louanne--to play characters two to three years older than themselves. It’s a strange gamble, but it works: Being today’s kids, they’re preternaturally sophisticated; playing about-to-be debutantes and country-clubbers, they seem languidly at home, not like kids in dress-up.

In 1962, Jimmy Reardon is a dedicated schemer, an arriviste , desperate to be accepted by the rich North Shore Chicago kids he’s hung around this last summer before college. In some ways, his webs and his pretentions make him a cousin-in-literature to Booth Tarkington’s brave Midwestern striver, Alice Adams. But unlike Alice, Reardon has learned early that, for him, there’s an easy shortcut into almost any world he wants straight through the bedroom door.

Richert has skewered the times, and especially their sexual hypocrisies, with perfection. Jimmy’s consuming passion is a girl who can say breathily “Kiss me passionately, like a highwayman” behind a tree on her father’s estate at one minute and talk about keeping things above “her Southern threshold” in the next. Jimmy’s father see-saws about his son’s ambitions for college, but he’s wholeheartedly in favor of a 17-year-old whose belt has so many notches from sexual conquests, it’s a wonder it can hold his pants up. That comes under the heading of “A boy’s gotta sow his wild oats.” And then there is Jimmy’s mother’s friend, Joyce Fickett, “with the nice lemony” smell. Ann Magnuson’s Mrs. Fickett seems fit to give Mrs. Robinson a silken run for her money . . . so to speak.

Best of all, Richert’s hindsight, a look at what the Republicans were doing during Camelot, is deadly. These young boys and girls are now quite grown up and all around us; you can find their influence everywhere, but especially on days like Super Tuesday. Beautiful work, Richert. So glad you waited.