Fall Time

Far from wading in violence and sexuality, as some viewers have suggested, FALL TIME underscores its erotic moments and shows only enough violence to prove that the robbers were not the "Hollywood" bad guys that the boys were pretending to be. Viewers who flinch from its violence share the same expectations as the teenagers appeared to in the film. The film, at times, played with the audience's expectations: one youth was hung, but, no, the beam breaks, and the boys lives--only to be shot a few minutes later. One boy gets loose, and a struggle for the gun finds one of the youths squaring off with the bank robber, who torments him to shoot by slamming his buddy's head against the wall. Another moment we have been expecting: when the bank robber says the boy will not shoot but he does. But just when the boy finds the courage to kill we are expecting, he is shot by the other bank robber. Two of the three boys end up dead in the particularly good ending, with the third shot up and in a state of shock. He has robbed a bank, seen his friends murdered, and killed a man. He has had a busy day. The supposed "innocence" of the witness balances off the true lack of it in the leading character. The actors were excellent, making the somewhat contrived plot idea--that the bank robbers would pull a job at the same time the boys were pulling their "monkey romp," and that the robber and the boy would be dressed alike and thus mistakened for one another--believable. The three young actors were particularly good, but they had no sense of what fifties' youth were all about, seeming more like eighties' or nineties' youths thrust back into an earlier time.

It was this lack of a sense of period, time, or place that kept the film from being what it could have been, just as it was its deft handling of the loss of innocence theme that kept it from being the predictable thriller exploitation film of sadists tormenting innocence it almost was. It could very well have been set in the thirties or sixties or almost any other period of time. Apparently, the film took place in Minnesota or Michigan, but the accents and the overall ambience were Southern, with a police officer telling the boy he was speeding out of town faster than a "[...] leaving Little Rock." The movie had an absurd sense of what the late fifties were, with characters, costumes, and hair styles of another (sometimes earlier, sometimes later) period of time. The boys dressed for their heist in a "Blues Brothers" look that suggested the early sixties, with thin ties and tailored slacks that were hardly the look of the late fifites. The title, an obvious reference to the fall from innocence of the main character, highlighted the main point of the movie, but the loss of innocence motif at times seemed the English class "thesis" to add respectability to what otherwise would have been a routine dabble into sadism. A film that had the makings of a truly great film came off as only a good one due to its sloppy sense of feeling for place, time, and people.