Heaven Help Us (1985)

Director: Michael Dinner
Writer: Charles Pupura
Stars: Andrew McCarthy, Mary Stuart Masterson, Kevin Dillon, Malcolm Danare, Jennie Dundas, Kate Reid, Wallace Shawn, Jay Patterson, John Heard and Donald Sutherland

Index: Make It a Double.

While Stephen Geoffreys’s second choice for Make it a Double was the film he’s best known for, Fright Night, he picked this first. It’s an odd mix of comedy and drama that gave a number of young actors early roles: it was the third for Andrew McCarthy and Mary Stuart Masterson, but the first for Kevin Dillon, Patrick Dempsey and, indeed, Geoffreys.

The version I watched still had the original title of Catholic Boys intact, but I can see why it was changed for the American market. It may have misled a lot of viewers, given that half of it is serious drama, exposing everyday life in a strict Catholic school, St. Basil’s in Brooklyn, but the other half is wild comedy, not quite to the degree of Porky’s but far closer than would be guessed with a title like Catholic Boys.

The lead character is Michael Dunn, who we watch transfer into St. Basil’s and try to find a place in the established pecking order, which ends up being as one of five boys who coalesce into rather than naturally form a group. That’s them on the poster.

Andrew McCarthy plays Dunn as a generally decent sort, hardly the saint that his grandma wants him to become—she has every intention for him to become a priest, a bishop, a pope—but someone who deeply cares when everyone else doesn’t. His biggest role before this was in Class being seduced by Jacqueline Bisset.

His first friend is Caesar, played by Malcolm Danare, who’s an overweight nerd, very smart but pretty arrogant about it. He plans to go to Harvard Medical School and be a psychiatrist. Danare came to this from supporting roles in The Lords of Discipline, Flashdance and Christine.

Third on the list is Rooney, the bully of the group, who mercilessly picks on Caesar but is also ironically reliant on him. While Caesar is the most likely to succeed, Rooney is the most likely to fail and we aren’t going to shed a tear when it happens. Kevin Dillon is very good as a character we love to hate. He’d be in Platoon a year later and lead The Blob two after that.

Stephen Geoffreys counts next because he’s highly memorable as Williams, even if all his scenes follow the same conceit, which is that he’s a chronic masturbator. Otherwise he gets plenty of screen time, floating around behind Rooney with the final member of the group.

That’s Patrick Dempsey as Corbet, who isn’t anything but the final member of the group. It isn’t that he fails to live up to the role; it’s that the role doesn’t have anything for him. He’s a stooge, a wannabe sidekick who doesn’t have the character to at least be interesting. I can’t say that Williams was a great role either, but I won’t be forgetting him soon. I forgot Corbet while watching the movie.

I’m focusing on characters here, because it’s really what the film does. There isn’t much of a plot. We start partway through a year at St. Basil’s and we end most of the way through it, with the characters built and evolved but the backdrop exactly the same. There are a host of subplots, though, woven into the script.

One is a romantic angle for Dunn, who falls for Danni, a teenage girl who effectively runs a soda fountain because her father isn’t able to function any more. It’s not a physical thing; he lost his mind over a woman and hasn’t found it again. Mary Stuart Masterson is excellent as a rare female character in the film and easily the most endearing. She’s in a tough spot but she holds out wonderfully doing whatever she can in any particular moment.

The other is brutality, because this is a strict school but it has an abusive teacher in Brother Constance, played with requisite intensity by Jay Patterson. Rooney fails to do homework so Brother Constance grabs him by the ear, bangs his head against the blackboard then has him eat his blank paper. And that’s just the start. It gets a lot worse until the powerful finalé.

The script was by Charles Purpura, who isn’t well known because he wrote very little else. This was his debut too and he followed it with an episode of CBS Schoolbreak Special a second feature, Satisfaction in 1988, which I may see as see as part of Liam Neeson’s First Thirty.

He nails the backdrop because he had been a Catholic schoolboy and he does a great job at bringing varied character to an ensemble cast, even if there are so many characters that not all of them are going to stick. Enough do to be impressive. What I struggle with is the tone, as I could never be sure if Purpura wanted this to be a drama or a comedy. If the former, then it seems far too irreverent; if the latter, then it’s too dark. Really it ends up as half of each with that awful term, “dramedy”, not applicable.

It certainly doesn’t hurt that the cast is very good indeed, not just the host of young actors but some established names as well, not least Donald Sutherland and Wallace Shawn.

Sutherland plays the principal at St. Basil’s, Brother Thaddeus, but he’s rarely seen outside his office. Shawn is another teacher, one who delivers a wildly over-the-top speech/warning to kick off the joint dance for the boys of St. Basil’s and the girls of the Virgin Martyrs.

That’s one of the showcase scenes, but there are others and Geoffreys gets one, if not two. The first happens at confession, as he’s about to confess that he’s whacked off a hundred and sixty-eight times in a month since his last confession. He even has the maths down: he’s up to 5.6 times a day. However, that’s topped when he’s assigned to be an altar boy assisting the priest who’s giving communion to the girls at the Virgin Martyrs. It’s a gallery of Catholic schoolgirls opening their mouths and putting out their tongues. It’s too much for him; he contorts, presumably orgasms and collapses in the sanctuary.

I can’t talk about all of them because there are too many to detail and I wonder how many are based in truth. I must assume that Purpura was there when Pope Paul VI visited New York in 1965, but I hope he didn’t get a girl so drunk that she puked on him. That’s Dana Barron, by the way, after National Lampoon’s Vacation, and her friend on a double date is Yeardley Smith; being nerdy with Caesar isn’t out of character for Lisa Simpson.

I wonder how I’m going to remember this. It certainly has its flaws, but it does a lot, being stupid, powerful, brutal, touching, funny and honest. Andrew McCarthy has said that it was his favourite movie of the era, “a lovely movie that twelve people saw.” Stephen Geoffreys, I presume, remembers it as the beginning.