My dad tells me horror stories of his childhood in a Catholic boy’s school. With he being a weedy kid, as I was, I could relate to some of the stories of full grown men who taught school a lot more sternly than would be allowed today. Canings and paddlings and such. Pure barbarism by today’s standard and one wonders what the men of the future will be like, being raised these days without physical discipline. Anyways, enough of that. Both Dad and I grew to be big men, so that weediness is well past and over with.
Here we get a story of five regular guys in a regular Catholic Boy’s School in Brooklyn, 1965. Over the course of a year we follow Dunn(Andrew McCarthy)’s arrival in the school and how in his first week he makes an enemy and a friend of the school bully, Rooney (Kevin Dillon). He also fancies the girl who runs the corner milk bar (Mary Stuart Masterson) whose father suffers melancholia. She supports the two of them by overworking and passive aggression and Dunn’s first efforts are knocked back.
| "Oh sure, you’re gonna reason with a grown man in a dress?" |
In time, she softens and they share some special teenage moments together, but the Brothers don’t like her store and its liberal allowance of boy/girl interaction. Leader of the Brothers’ attitude is Brother Constance, who singles out the five boys in the gang for regular punishment that all but Dunn think is normal. So Dunn naturally rebels with mixed consequences.
As a coming of age film, this story works quite well. Unfortunately the ending sneaks up on us too suddenly and cuts off too fast for truly satisfying closure. A hastily scrabbled narrative from Kevin Dillon reflecting back is all we get and this leaves us with a feeling of absence in light of any real information. Characters are being developed well all throughout the film, yet this sudden editing of the narrative flow rudely kicks us out of the boy’s lives without so much as a beg-your-pardon.
Director Michael Dinner, whose last DVD release Off Beat had me in fits of nausea during the review, salvaged a good deal of credibility back in the majority of this film, but lost nearly all he had worked for again in this dump ending.
However, as a budget release, Catholic Boys is well worth the look, if only to see some of the actors in younger roles. Donald Sutherland is also brilliant as Brother Thadeus the school principal, but the film belongs to the interplays between McCarthy and Dillon and McCarthy and Masterson. As a special treat Yeardley Smith also turns up and speaks some very nerdish, very Lisa Simpson-type theory with another nerd. A small bright voice in the dark.
Not a bad picture for a budget release, with very few film artefacts to mar the picture quality. The image is quite clear, with no loss of detail and even shadow detail isn’t too bad. Blacks are true as are flesh tones, though there are few errors in the transfer like some hefty pixellation at 40:44 that goes for eight frames and a film stutter at 47:02 which may or may not belong to the film stock. It’s a frame that rewinds a frame and then repeats again so it’s very possible it’s in the original print. We also receive a nice anamorphic enhancement of the cinema aspect ratio of 1.66:1.
A nice simple Dolby Digital stereo affair here that does a fairly admirable job considering. There’s a swag of period music playing that all sounds fine and the score from James Horner goes everywhere from pre-Titanic Irish pipes (it’s Catholic School in New York, after all) to fully scored orchestral bits. Not bad and well created to fit the film.
Dialogue is all clear and easily understood without any troubles understanding anything. I like to check subtitles whenever I don’t understand what someone just said, but there aren’t any on this disc to do that with. However, English speakers will find no real use for them here.
This isn’t a bad film and the release as a budget production has been done pretty well - but for a few errors here and there. There is a great central performance from Andrew McCarthy who doesn’t seem to do much these days (though of course his swan song is and always will be Weekend at Bernies 2).
Worth seeing for the vast cast of stars that were in their youths and the fairly authentic capturing of Brooklyn in 1965 (at least, I assume it’s authentic. It looks okay to me). The ending being abruptly thrown at us is disappointing after the 99-minute investment we’ve made in the characters, but let’s blame the director for that one.
