A Separate Peace (film)

A Separate Peace is a 1972 film directed by Larry Peerce. It was adapted by John Knowles and Fred Segal brother of George and father of Nick, from the formers bestselling novel of the same name. It starred Parker Stevenson, who would later rise to fame as Frank Hardy on The Hardy BoysNancy Drew Mysteries, and as Craig Pomeroy on Baywatch.

Vincent Canby of the New York Times was impressed Larry Peerces film version of A Separate Peace is so good and true in small, subsidiary details of costume, music, weather and such that the ultimate banality of what its all about is just that much more apparent, and just that much more difficult to accept without seeming unnecessarily illtempered. ...Peerce is very good with his almost completely nonprofessional cast, especially with John Heyl, a stocky, handsome young man whose face reflects the profound cheerfulness of someone who will never grow old. Parker Stevenson has the more difficult role perhaps an impossible one and Im not sure Id have had much idea of what was going on in his mind had I not ready the book. As he displayed in Goodbye, Columbus, Peerce has a positive talent not only for period detail, but also for knowing when and how to cut around and away from the performances of nonactors so that Heyl, Stevenson and a large proportion of the Exeter student body manage to come up trumps. Not so kind was film historian Leonard Maltin, who denounced the picture in his annual Movie and Video Guide This supposedlysensitive story, from an overrated novel, is morbid enough to make anyone gag. The acting is incredibly amateurish, and the direction has no feeling at all for the period. A Total Bummer is more like it. ........

Source: Wikipedia