Return of the Secaucus Seven

This is what good moviemaking is about. If you are looking for million-dollar cost overruns, over-rated movie stars, the same crop of (yawn) "special" effects and trite action-movie plots and dialog, look elsewhere. This is young John Sayles doing his absolute best with limited resources. The characters are realistic, the dialog brilliant yet believable and the script does an excellent job of handling the subject of not only growing up, but growing older with a bittersweet sense of humor.

For years I heard this film described as The Big Chill only three years earlier. A pretty accurate description. The plot and characters are similar, but Return of the Secaucus 7 has more layers, and provides more random "slice of life" scenes. Whilst watching this film, you can't help the feeling you know these people, or someone like them. Sayles manages to prove that real life situations can be interesting, funny and touching; unexpected moments can start a chain of life-altering events.

The New Hampshire scenery is beautiful – nice to see something shot anywhere other than NYC or a Hollywood back lot. A testament to friendship, fun and low-budget filmmaking.

Shocked that there's only three pages of comments for the film widely considered to be one of the fathers of the modern indie film movement. John Saylees used his b-movie money from Roger Corman (the best scripts written for him) and financed this weekend home movie that became a hit and launched Sayle's film career.

Some of the bad reviews are really unfounded. This has some of the best dialog in American film, and though the performances are not all polished, it adds to the reality. There's a sense of genuine community not like the Hollywoodized "Big Chill."

If you stick with the film you'll be rewarded by many nifty scenes and conversations. Gordon Clapp is fun and there are beautifully observed moments of wit and drama. Mark Arnett is particularly good and the moment he recites his litany of protest arrests is great. The film-making is raw, but that's not the point.

However, the DVD version is actually missing a scene on the VHS of the hamburgers being grilled to some sort of rhythmic montage. Why?

Anyway, if you're a fan of great dialog, political commitment, and what can be done for 40 grand and terrific writing, check this classic out.

Overshadowed by its loud, shallow and uncredited remake (The Big Chill) Sayles' first film is a very slight effort that manages to capture a time and place with quiet brilliance. The actors -- first roles for most of them and only roles for some -- are sometimes painfully amateurish and the duration and self-indulgence of some of the scenes make the viewer long for chainsaw intervention, but the film as a whole does a wonderful job of showing a generation of aging idealists on the eve of Reagan's America. Unlike The Big Chill, where everyone is pretty and successful and the dialogue is crisp and full of what passes for wit on prime time TV, Sayles' characters are almost too low-key, their banter sometimes clumsy and their jokes not terribly funny. The unfortunate side effect of his conscientious effort to keep things "real" is that the film sometimes fails to entertain or engage and most of the characters end up outside the viewers' sphere of caring, like someone else's friends in a third-hand story. Still, a very impressive first film and influential on many other 80s movies besides its gaudy imitator.

I went to a movie theater and saw "Return of the Secaucus Seven" in 1981. I was slightly younger than the characters in the movie but I could relate to their lives. When the Big Chill came out I thought it was a ripoff of Secaucus. In the Big Chill all of the characters have big time jobs - shoe manufacturer, doctor, actor, magazine writer, etc.. In Secaucus most of the characters haven't figured out what they want to do and crashing on the floor is a way of life rather than the expense account Big Chill graduates. The acting is awful. The plot is weak. It is a very rough film. But it has a sense of reality, humor, and place that most professional movies do not have. When I saw this again a few years ago on PBS it was not quite the film I fondly remembered. Perhaps I can no longer relate to post graduate blues or life without children and a mortgage. It is still an impressive low budget first film by John Sayles.

Well before "The Big Chill" came along, John Sayles made this terrific low-budget film. If you are looking for slick-filmmaking go elsewhere. If you want something that is different, and for me far more believable, than most Hollywood films try this one.