Growing Pains

By J.C.

OUR TIME Directed by PETER HYAMS Screenplay by JANE C. STANTON

The school year 1955 is distant enough by now to be vulnerable to the assaults of nostalgia. The light is diffused, soft and often colored gold: the director would probably describe it as the golden light of memory. Our Time is that kind of movie. The setting is Penfield, a fancy girls' boarding school in New England. The two protagonists are senior-year roommates, Abby (Pamela Sue Martin) and Muffy (Betsy Slade). Abby shows up to start the new school year with a suitcase full of summertime sexual experiences shared with her boy friend Michael (Parker Stevenson). She tells the dazzled Muffy that they almost went "all the way." A few weeks into the term, Abby slips off to Boston to spend the weekend with Michael at a congenially dingy hotel where they settle unfinished business.

Muffy is wistfully jealous of her friend's maturity and develops a crush on a preppy heartbreaker. When he spurns her, she turns back to the steady, unexciting Malcolm (George O'Hanlon Jr.). They abandon their virginity on Christmas Eve with all of the uncertainty but none of the accomplishment that characterized Abby's liaison. Muffy blames it all on her never-ending bad luck, the consequences of which approach sentimental catastrophe when she becomes pregnant.

Like Summer of '42, on which it is cut to pattern, Our Time is made with a combination of calculated modesty and poignance. There is even the same sort of bubble-bath musical score by Michel Legrand to orchestrate the conveniently unhappy ending. The destiny to which Muffy's bad luck leads her is surprising, not because it has been engineered with any tact but because it seems so arbitrary and imposed. Like the climaxes of most melancholy romances, it is never real enough to matter.

What does matter is the occasional grace note inserted by Director Peter Hyams--he manages the comedy and embarrassment of the first fall mixer well--and a couple of performances.

George O'Hanlon Jr. is fine as the gawky Malcolm, loyal in his affections but too young to see in Muffy the real puzzlement and desperation that she herself does not understand.

Betsy Slade, who is Muffy, is wonderful. She is 19 and has acted only once before, so this is quite the proper occasion for the throwing of bouquets. She does not have the polish of a professional, but she has the quick intelligence, the willingness to get right up against the raw emotion. Slade makes Muffy into the kind of quick, bright, funny girl you want immediately to reassure: to tell her that all the doubts, all the clumsiness will pass in a short time, and she will be really terrific. As for Miss Slade, she already is. "J.c.

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