Cheap A Small Circle of Friends (DVD) (Rob Cohen) Price

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Customer Reviews of A Small Circle of Friends

TOUCHY TABOO TOPICS........
This one's fairly well-hidden, after all when I originally saw it a few conservative [ahem!] audience members walked out in disgust just as Brad Davis, Karen Allan and Jameson Parker decided to become 'close' friends - nothing shocking, but slightly too much back then and probably today. [Yes, it does somewhat touch on the world of the bi-sexual, or is it just experimentation? It is also a rather good movie about EMOTIONAL CONTACT between three young people.]

It covers THAT radical period in our history [Viet-Nam and all of that!] - students exploring and discovering various 'things'. Don't ever mix love and politics I guess!

BUT it's more of a memory play - along the lines of a modern 'Our Town'. These are also great minor performances in the movie - the conservative guy who turns radical with deadly results.

MISS Brad Davis spontaneous talent - gone too soon - something of the Dean quality there and Dean would probably have approved of this movie.

Also equally stellar? Mr. Parker and Ms. Allen for just daring to be so bold!

Bravo!

[Then there's also the somewhat period but 'based on fact' - "Jules and Jim" - not forgetting "Sunday, Bloody Sunday"]

They shared everything. why not each other?
The most resonant element of director Rob Cohen's film is the music score by Jim Steinman, which includes the melody that was later recorded as Total Eclipse of the Heart. Otherwise this tale of a supposed menage-a-tois between Harvard university students Brad Davis, Karen Allen and Jameson Parker is as dramatic as the cartoon opening and closing sketches. The screenplay by Ezra Sacks attempts coverage of the Vietnam era from 1967 to 1971 from a student activist point of view, but the tri-romance hardly seems from the same era since it isn't until towards the end that there is any suggestion of bigamy. There is also even less suggestion of homosexuality interest between Davis and Parker. When the 3 finally go into the same bedroom, the camera is left outside and the door closed. Their lack of involvement in activism is paralled with the radicalisation of a Texan boy scout who comes to Harvard at the same time and ends up a terrorist, and highlighted by a campus riot that comes out of nowhere. Even the Vietnam connection as a comment on the relationship and vice versa doesn't work. Sacks opens with Parker reuniting with Allen in "the present" before we start flashbacking to 1967, with Davis' absence pre-empting the outcome, and Cohen supplies matching love scene montages. Davis' has steam so apparently is more erotic and ends abruptly, whilst Parker's is set to Chances Are and ends more positively. Sacks has 2 lines I liked - a technique of breaking into a glass window "I saw it on I Spy or was it The Untouchables", though Cohen repeats it, and "Only men would come up with a draft lottery using balls". Utilising period TV and photographic images - the assassinations of the Kennedy's and Martin Luther King - and a series of bad wigs, the only sense of reality and truth comes in a moment when someone sings the Star Spangled Banner to TV closure. Davis has the impossible charming/wild man role, not helped by his looking older than the others, and the best he can do is stare child-like for vulnerability. Allen doesn't have a strong screen persona so it's easy to think one is watching Amy Irving or Janet Margolin or Brooke Adams. Of the 3, Parker probably comes off best even when saddled with a Colonel Sanders look. His character's basic dullness is probably the reason he needs to be reunited with Allen. Even when the competition is Davis, anyone that prefers to experiment with rats rather than go to an Ingmar Bergman film is definitely worth reconsidering as a partner. Watch for Shelley Long as a photographer, and Daniel Stern, billed as Dan.