For the most part, it isn't a bad film but it is no long forgotten. They filmed on location in New York City. There are plenty of familiar faces like David Doyle Robert Klein a young Barbara Hershey Arthur Hill Rue McClanahan Barnard Hughes and Charles Durning. Her grandson is played well by Michael Sarrazin who accidentally kills an elderly woman in a car accident. Ruth White is great here as the prejudicial wealthy WASPy grandmother in New York City. White played older female roles in other works. She is too young to play Grandmother Popper. She was only 55 years old at the time of her death. She did in 1969 and this was her final screen performance. This film should be dedicated to the memory of beloved film, stage and television actress, Ruth White. The plot is quite thin but the sensitivity and reasonable depth of many of the various performances, notably by his gentle father (Arthur Hill) and bigoted grandmother (Ruth White), give it substance. By and large, this film was sensitively executed, about a Columbia student, from an old and wealthy New York family, who accidentally knocks down and kills a woman with his car on a very rainy night and where the tragedy leads him.Michael Sarrazin is good to look at, as his girlfriend played by Barbara Hershey and he turns in an honest and tender performance.
They were often clumsily and quickly made to cash in on the period's 'youthquake'.This is not entirely the case here, though it does have its clumsy clichéd moments. **1/2 from ****Ī lot of the films about disaffected youth in America produced at the end of the 60s and the beginning of the 70s were very clichéd and cheaply made by people who really didn't know anything about the subject. A forgotten picture worth-seeing.and worth discussing afterward. The supporting cast is wonderfully filled with now-familiar faces: Sada Thompson, Ralph Waite, David Doyle, Robert Klein, William Devane, Rue McClanahan, Charles Durning. Sarrazin and young, lovely Barbara Hershey are very good Arthur Hill also excellent as Sarrazin's surprisingly understanding father. There's no happy ending (hence the irony of the title), but certainly the circumstances which arise here are thought-provoking. It doesn't want to be a cop-out and have the protagonist become "a better man" by being a model prisoner-and at the same time, it doesn't want to be explosive or dynamic and have the kid get away guilt-free. Not a surefire crowd-pleaser (especially for this generation), the film is intelligent and smoothly handled, if unable to explore its themes adequately within this milieu. Not wanting to be dishonest to himself, he manages to get in much deeper trouble. Michael Sarrazin's dazed and confused young man doesn't mean to buck the system (i.e., the Establishment), necessarily-he refuses to play by the rules because, as he sees it, you have to lie to win. Intensely troubling material, based on the book by Thomas Rogers, given low-keyed, matter-of-fact treatment. Uninvolved New York college student, estranged from his wealthy family and half-heartedly romancing his radical girlfriend, realizes just how empty and directionless his life has become after he accidentally strikes a jaywalker with his car and is sentenced to a year in jail for vehicular manslaughter.
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