Okay, why did I watch this movie? I happened to be surfing thru the channels one night and my attention was arrested by the fresh, Breck Girl beauty of Pippa Scott. She and her character's husband are in a scene bantering a bit about their plans for married life, and she really looks great. The film seemed to express a typical 60s-era family-oriented TV series sensibility, so I stuck with it for awhile, mainly for nostalgia's sake. Pretty soon, tragedy strikes some of the characters, and it becomes obvious that this is a religious-oriented film, but hold on, it's actually kind of likable, and not too heavy-handed.....an enthusiastic Sam Groom plays the minister, who's almost a spitting image of Ben Affleck. In addition, a couple of the more dramatic scenes about characters dealing with loss are appropriately grim and not soft-peddled, and the outdoor location scenes are filled with vintage cars tooling around (metal eye candy), since one of the main characters is a mechanic.
The casting coup of this film has got to be Teri Garr portraying one of the wayward teens; I think she's supposed to be a bit of a bad girl here (or a least a searching soul), as signified by the dark eyeliner she wears (it still looks good on her, though!) If you're a Teri Garr fan, she is especially cute near the end of the movie, when she's shown smiling as she rides with her boyfriend through the city streets.
After one of the worst jump cuts I've ever seen, we find ourselves watching the characters holding an informal motorcycle race. An inadvertently funny scene occurs when the young kids are sitting around the picnic blanket listening to the sound of their friend's motorcycle engine on the other side of the hill, when it suddenly stops. The kids laugh and say, "Oh, well, I guess he must've crashed or something!" and they laugh again.....without lifting a finger to go see if he's ok!!
One major plus is the song that Al Freeman Jr. sings in the garage near the end of the movie; it's an excellent song (that I'd never heard before) in an expressive 60s-era folk style; I wish I had recorded it to play again. (It was groovy!)
This is the second Billy Graham movie that I've watched and enjoyed more than I expected to, and I'm not a particularly religious person. The pleasures of films like these are admittedly simple, but they do exist nonetheless.
