Fun, Adventure, Romance on $75 a Week
Director: Joan Micklin Silver
Producer: Raphael D. Silver
The staff of the Back Bay Mainline, a Boston underground newspaper that rose to prominence in the 1960s, struggles with the shifting social climate of the '70s amid rumors that the paper is about to be sold to a media giant.
101 min
Rating: 5.318/10
Released
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Top Cast
John Heard
Harry
Lindsay Crouse
Abbie
Jeff Goldblum
Max
Jill Eikenberry
Lynn
Bruno Kirby
David
Gwen Welles
Laura
Movie Info
Director: Joan Micklin Silver
Producer: Raphael D. Silver
Production Companies: Midwest Films
Countries: United States of America
Now Streaming On
Criterion Channel
Cohen Media Amazon Channel
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What Others Said
CinemaSerf:
The twenty-something staff of the erstwhile quite radical newspaper "Mainline" are struggling to keep their work relevant as the 1970s give way to the 1980s. I don't know if anyone remembers a television drama called the "Paper Chase" (1973) but a lot of the style and characterisations of that film are reminiscent here. Young people trying to make their own way, defiantly trying to hold on to values and commitments that may be largely on the wain. The thing with this, for me anyway, was I found them all rather shallow and selfish. The combination of their working and social lives are presented in a fashion that is very, very, verbose. Why use one word when you can use eight? As the story drifts along, I felt less and less interested in the characters and their semi-comic antics and started to notice silly continuity errors - that wouldn't ordinarily matter - and to focus more on the tangential aspects of the film - the big collars, bell-bottom jeans - all the things I used to remember from "Starsky and Hutch". Maybe the fact that I'm not an American means that this Bostonian story of intellectual maturity and liberating camaraderie doesn't resonate in the same way - because I found this all rather dull. Will their newspaper be subsumed into a bigger, commercial, enterprise? Well at the start I hoped not, but by the middle I was indifferent.