Review of Sweet Substitute

Much about Larry Kent's 1964 Sweet Substitute now seems plain or cursory, but it remains memorable if only for its breathtakingly cold-hearted closing moments, giving the bland-sounding title a startling spin (the alternative title Caressed is far less apposite). To summarize, student Tom finds out that his closest female friend Kathy is pregnant (as far as we know they only had sex once, entirely impulsively, although the film is coy on such matters) and reacts despairingly: his male friends gang together to protect him, cruelly dispatching her from the movie, then in the last shot he's with his regular date Elaine, a new engagement date prominent on her finger. It's been well-established though that Elaine's view of their relationship is entirely calculating, that she's strategically withholding sex until the marriage she's been manipulating him into, that she dumped (if indeed she fully did) her preferred mechanic boyfriend only because Tom has better financial prospects (he plans to be a high school teacher!) and she won't need to work; the conversations between them are trivial and desultory, where those between Tom and the much more independent-minded Kathy are vibrant and multi-faceted. The film roots Tom's astounding wrong turn in an amusingly bored depiction of car-less life in Vancouver (at one point he and a friend rhapsodize about the cross-country trip they could take, if only), providing enjoyable time capsule glimpses of downtown (movie theaters showing A Hard Day's Night, that kind of thing) and the beach; Tom's academic struggles, it seems from what's presented, are based partly in sexual frustration, and otherwise in his push to finish reading From Here to Eternity. The film seems incurious at best in its approach to some of the other female characters, and is shaky in various other respects, but this generally adds to the historical interest, with Tom's chronic lack of constructive introspection seeming to tap a broader societal, if not national precariousness.