Much about Larry Kent’s 1964 Sweet Substitute now
seems plain or cursory, but it remains memorable if only for its breathtakingly
cold-hearted closing moments, giving the bland-sounding title a startling spin
(the alternative title Caressed is far less apposite). To summarize,
student Tom finds out that his closest female friend Kathy is pregnant (as far
as we know they only had sex once, entirely impulsively, although the film is coy
on such matters) and reacts despairingly: his male friends gang together to
protect him, cruelly dispatching her from the movie, then in the last shot he’s
with his regular date Elaine, a new engagement date prominent on her finger. It’s
been well-established though that Elaine’s view of their relationship is
entirely calculating, that she’s strategically withholding sex until the
marriage she’s been manipulating him into, that she dumped (if indeed she fully
did) her preferred mechanic boyfriend only because Tom has better financial prospects
(he plans to be a high school teacher!) and she won’t need to work; the conversations
between them are trivial and desultory, where those between Tom and the much
more independent-minded Kathy are vibrant and multi-faceted. The film roots Tom’s astounding wrong
turn in an amusingly bored depiction of car-less life in Vancouver (at one point he and a friend rhapsodize about the cross-country trip they
could take, if only), providing enjoyable time capsule glimpses of downtown (movie theaters
showing A Hard Day’s Night, that kind of thing) and the beach; Tom’s academic
struggles, it seems from what’s presented, are based partly in sexual
frustration, and otherwise in his push to finish reading From Here to
Eternity. The film seems incurious at best in its approach to some of the
other female characters, and is shaky in various other respects, but this
generally adds to the historical interest, with Tom’s chronic lack of
constructive introspection seeming to tap a broader societal, if not national precariousness.
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