In Which Our Hero Succumbs at Last

In vain I struggled. The pull of it was too great. I have joined the ranks of all the other law students to be, past, present and future: I rented and, yes, watched, The Paper Chase. And...

Wow. If I thought for a moment that was an accurate depiction of law school - past, present, or future - I would quit right now. Out of sheer boredom, frankly. Only duty, and the forlorn hope that there would turn out to be a point after all, or that at least something interesting would finally happen, and also the fact that I was too tired to turn it off and go to sleep, kept me watching until the end. Even John Houseman's storied performance I thought was largely wasted in portraying a tediously one-dimensional character; that might have been forgiveable, had the main character possessed even as much depth as that, so that Houseman could have had a worthy protagonist to his antagonist. But no: the character played by Timothy Bottoms ... what was the name again? Katz? Moss? I can't even remember... seemed to possess not even a single dimension. Certainly he had no quality to make me believe, or care, that Lindsay Wagner would fall in love with him, or he with her.

Oh, yes, "Hart," that was his name. God help us.

Maybe if the movie had been cut to an hour in length and shown as a tv pilot, it would have held some promise. As it was, I had to go out the next night and rent Inherit the Wind, with its good old-fashioned purple prose, sledgehammer-between-the-eyes subtlety, and scenery-chewing performances, to recuperate. Geeze, at least it was about something.