John Houseman

(On Cable TV, November 2020) There’s something almost mythical to the first year of a university degree that, frankly, very few movies seem to get beyond the frat-party surface. For many people, it’s a first year away from home, thrown into the pressure-cooker of a highly competitive environment. The Paper Chase goes for the big leagues in describing the first year of a student at the Harvard Law School, under the tutelage of difficult teachers. Now, the story gets a bit melodramatic once it follows a romantic relationship between the protagonist and a young woman who ends up being a feared teacher’s daughter—while this introduces many dramatic complications, it also distracts from the main strength of The Paper Chase: Students thrown in a sink-or-swim environment, trying to out-think the course material and dealing (not always gracefully) with the stress. The film is at its best when it deals with academic material, with harebrained schemes (such as breaking into a law school archives) that often turn out to be not especially useful—except as a way to realize that there isn’t much of a difference between students and the teachers at their age. Timothy Bottoms makes for a great audience stand-in as the protagonist, even if the characters surrounding him are nearly all more interesting—with that going double for John Houseman’s Oscar-winning performance as the exemplary teacher. (The big irony of the film is that he exerts a terrifying influence over his students… but can’t even recognize them in an elevator at the end of the year.) There are some great set-pieces along the way, including nothing less than a climactic study session in a hotel room. The 1970s setting shows, but much of the material still rungs true today: The Paper Chase is quite an enjoyable film for those of us who still have final-exam nightmares about our first year of university.