The Paper Chase

When I at long last sat down to watch 1973's THE PAPER CHASE I almost immediately felt that stomach churn so familiar to my grad school days.  This film comes closer than nearly anything else I've seen (or remember seeing) to capturing the anxiety of trying to excel within, heck, survive the rigors of higher education.  While the setting in this film is the awesomely intimidating arena of Harvard law school, my little square of the Health Professions Division of the university I attended was filled with the sort of adrenaline and dread experienced by the first years here.

Timothy Bottoms plays James Hart, a Midwesterner sweating out the usual pressures of law school and being a fish out of water.  He anticipates all nighters and no social life other than study groups.  But his real challenge is his contract law professor, Charles W. Kingsfield, Jr., played brilliantly by John Houseman, who copped an Oscar for his work.  Hart suffers a few classroom deflations before sufficiently preparing and rising to the occasion. Then he fails again.  And so on.  He longs to join the "upper echelon" of students who actually raise their hands before being called upon, those who dare to engage in Kingsfield's utilization of the Socratic Method of learning.  The professor becomes Hart's obsession, enough so for the young man to break into that special room in the library which houses Kingsfield's notes, taken when he was a student.

Despite warnings from his compadres in the trenches about the incompatibility of such things with law school, Hart becomes involved with an intriguing, attractive young woman named named Susan (Lindsay Wagner).  He doesn't learn right away that she is Kingsfield's daughter.  There are complications, naturally.  One of them is that Hart is so busy with her father's course he can't get away for a weekend with her.  But she knows the territory; she is about to be divorced from a law school dropout.

THE PAPER CHASE alternates between Hart's combative relationships with father and daughter.  The former is beautifully rendered, but I found many of the scenes with Susan to be a bit self-conscious, as when Hart walks on a thinly iced over pond during a discussion about taking risks vs. playing it safe.  Writer/director James Bridges does many fine things in his film debut, but his sketch of Susan is confused and underdeveloped.  Did he intend for her to contradict herself when she berates Hart for being too organized and mannered while she explains that she left her husband back in Europe because he was too rootless?  The script, an adaptation of John J. Osborn Jr's novel, is also quite abrupt in portraying the on-again off again between these lovers.  And in the Questions You're Not Supposed to Ask in Movies category, I kept wondering what Susan did for a living.  She seemed to have an awful amount of free time.

But Wagner's performance is not to be faulted.  She's quite appealing, as is the entire cast.  Early roles for Edward Hermann and James Naughton (as fellow students) are also noteworthy.  Bottoms again (following THE LAST PICTURE SHOW) demonstrates perfectly natural acting.  But Houseman....he positively excels as the rarely impressed, chilly academic who (feigns?) demonstrates a lack of memory of his students'/victims' names - that seating chart comes in handy.  Kingsfield is emblematic of so many fearsome professors and even many professional types with whom most cannot hold a regular conversation.  His command of every scene, especially in the classroom, is a marvel to see.

THE PAPER CHASE, artistically photographed by Gordon Willis, is a drama, but has a fair amount of humor, including the hotel sequence near the end of the picture, when Hart and classmate Frank Ford (Graham Beckel), a fifth generation legacy, hole up for three days to cram for finals.  More poignant is an examination of Kevin Brooks (Naughton) who struggles in his studies as he has a photographic memory but little to no ability to synthesize that information, to employ the critical thinking necessary to practice law.  Though Bridges' ultimately lets him down with an unecessary, really contrived final scene.

And speaking of really contrived final scenes - the finale was also a bit too obvious in its symbolism.  It feels a bit anticlimactic, though I'm sure a few grad students have felt this way.  I liked an earlier moment far better, when Hart walks around Kingsfield's empty classroom one night, thinking about everything.  I did that.  I also returned years after I graduated and walked those aisles again, now with relief and wistfulness.