A nice subject, the tensions between the natives and the university students in the industrial town of Bloomington, Indiana. The acute class-consciousness of the treatment, however, seems somewhat Europeanized or Medievalized, owing presumably to the origins of the British director, Peter Yates, and the Yugoslav scriptwriter, Steve Tesich. Those two are very hard on the collegians, who are all seen as ruthless snobs, and very soft on the "townies," whose inverted snobbism is scarcely even suggested. The most preposterous episode is the one where a trio of nineteen-year-old deadbeats from the town stray into the campus commons, and immediately every student in the place senses, as if by radar, that their sanctuary has been invaded by undesirables. In a movie that wants to tap the underdog bias of the mass audience, and particularly the Rocky audience, it takes no great courage for Yates and Tesich to depict the anti-intellectualism of the townsfolk as an endearing and ennobling trait. The conflict between the Haves and Have Nots comes to a head in a marathon bicycle race in which the local dark horse is a pretentious Italophile, a highly entertaining character played by Dennis Christopher, who fashions himself after his idols, the Italian champs. (The Verdi opera accompaniment to his bike riding is perhaps justifiable in context, but it inevitably seems like an idea swiped from The Bad News Bears.) The boy's Italian-style courtship of a blankly characterized co-ed (a moonlight serenade beneath the sorority windows, etc.) is pretty much a waste, and his father's exasperation with his Italianisms ("Ciao, Papa!" etc.) is rather easy sitcom stuff, although Paul Dooley could not have played this red-blooded American any better if he had been coached for the role by Sinclair Lewis. (1979) — Duncan Shepherd