Apart from that, Hart settles into college life, happy enough in the dorm. He gets recruited into a high cal study group of varying skill levels. They divvy up the areas of law to specialise in to ease the burden of facing all of it at once. But the cracks are already appearing. Bell bullies his way into choosing his speciality and Brooks whose photographic memory leaves him without analytical talent, signalling how dependent on the others he will be. All that and the pressure to excel from one of the most gruelling tertiary schools in the world are going to make first year a learning experience in the worst way. Then Hart gets involved with a woman who is related to the source of his anxiety.
This makes it almost sound like a comedy but The Paper Chase, for all its effortless charm, is every centimetre a drama. It is, at fifty years old, still one of the strongest and most accurate depictions of undergraduate life. While the hallowed halls are rendered with reverent light and the autumnal New England exteriors make you want to throw a thick scarf around your neck and walk into them, this is a film about competition. Hart is a decent enough person until you understand how much of his drive is being sublimated into his imaginary struggle with Kingsfield. When Brooks falls behind the others almost physically recoil from the smear of the loser. His final scene is more than heartrending, it's profoundly depressing.
Hart's troubled relationship with Susan brings us closest to a calming external wisdom as we are going to get. As Kingsfield's daughter (learned after the relationship has started) she knows the grind of the law school and its effects on students as the teachers at the top hurl thunderbolts without consequence. More, she curbs Hart's self-destructive tendency with a firm reminder of what the world offers outside of the academic tunnel. Lindsay Wagner adds a gravitas beyond her youth as Susan, delivering lines with a cool, flinty assurance. Not a "girlfriend" role, her boundaries are set to be crossed only by one whose proof of worth begins with the shedding of pettifogging adolescence. Hart isn't always up to the task.
Timothy Bottoms with his chiselled beauty actually welcoming the '70s aftershave ad moustache on his lip, holds all that dark energy of the struggle beneath a credible nice-guy face. The other shows despite his best efforts at moments of hubris. It takes him the whole story to gain the kind of perspective that allows him sight of effective combat that is based on intelligence as well as personal force.
At the peak of the mountain, John Houseman as Kingsfield deals tough hands to the students and offers an unforgiving stoicism when mercy might make him popular. Houseman's upper crust accent reinforced by a middle-heavy voice render him unreachably superior. In odd moments like the one in the lift when he struggles to recall Hart's name (deflating a year's worth of fantasy on Hart's part) he adds fathoms of character depth in minutes. No backstory needed (though we do get some through Hart's commando tactics). He took that indefatigable presence, honed in English public schools and consolidated by knocking around with Orson Welles in their youth, all the way to the best supporting actor oscar. It's a performance that, fleshed with a bare few scenes, dominates its films. He had almost done the same trick in John Frankenheimer's muscular Seven Days in May but was simply outnumbered.
The tawny, pallet of The Paper Chase is very comfortably of its time. Deep grainy colour and astute lighting give every interior the seductive look of a Playboy full page ad. Add a few contemporary orchestrations of Bach (the "Little" Fugue in G minor is used very effectively) or original arrangements of Italian baroque pieces and you can smell the cigar smoke and taste the single malt whisky.
I saw this back in the early '80s when I was an arts undergraduate. My brother had alerted me to it being on tv. He was a law undergrad and felt the punch of the film personally. He liked to quote Kingsfield in a bullseye impersonation of Houseman's plummy drawl. While this kind of late night movie watching as a student often ended with me dissecting the focal length, cutting style etc as a show off parlour trick for this one I shut up and watched, aware that someone who was communing heavily with the screen was himself, uncharacteristically silent. When the commercials came up he was all bluster but the title card's fade in had him back in his seat and rivetted.
It's a sad note to realise how little university life is put on screen. High school is overcatered and never about the study but the social distractions as the kids do a lot of developing. But the next level reverses this. The pressure is real and can leave a lot of casualties. Sure, I did arts, not law or medicine, and the stakes were a lot lower but as soon as you go in and look intimately at the microindustry that is a university student you'll quickly forget to ask what they're studying. The Paper Chase celebrates this without a moment of nostalgia but sill manages warmth and magnetism.
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