Katherine

Though a low budget TV movie of the 1970's, Katherine hits a nerve today because it sends a message to a complacent society that has gotten caught up in pop culture and comfort food that injustices are committed everyday by our government with most of us barely noticing. It's a good film for young people who are beginning to grapple with the world around them to learn that things aren't as good as they always seemed in their cocoon of upbringing and schooling. And it is a wake-up call, like a lot of today's new indie films (Syriana, Goodnight and Good Luck and The Constant Gardner) for the rest of us who live for the next episode of The Sopranos or Desperate Housewives between days at work. Despite some drawbacks of the production, Sissy Spacek's impassioned performance effectively sends the movie's message home.

Art Carney and Jane Wyatt are perfectly cast as the upscale Denver parents of Katherine Alman, a renegade revolutionary in the 1960s. She had a life of privilege but gave it all up to make the world a better place. In this film, she is played by the wonderful Sissy Spacek. Henry Winkler plays her boyfriend who is equally liberal in the film. Julie Kavner plays her college friend. There are others in the film. It's an okay film even though I had technical difficulties towards the end which I think left us hanging for more. According to the internet, it's loosely based on the life of Diana Oughton. Anyway, the film goes back and forth over Katherine's life in a beautiful estate in Denver, Colorado where she was raised with a horse, tennis court, and pool by loving and supportive parents to her college days. After college, she went to Peru where she taught to children and adults but she seen as a threat to the system. She returns to the United States where she teaches African American children in the South where she meets Henry Winkler's character. The movie returns to how she must conduct a final mission. It's chilling but the end is cut short. We never really know what her final mission is but we know who she was.

For a 70's TV movie, this is strong stuff. Katherine tells the story of a pampered, UMC, boomer-princess who gets the virus of guilt when she is confronted with injustices in the third world and, you guessed it, turns Marxist.

I sound flippant here, but you can just guess the depths of depravity Sissy Spacek's Katherine--within the bounds of TV sensibilities--goes in her radicalized zeal to tear down the capitalist, fascist, materialistic, racist, showered and shaved system. And yet, when she is confronted with her lover's (Henry Winkler) using of revolutionary principles to justify his banging other girls, you can see her losing her last shred of sanity, her desire to someday have marriage to enjoy and family to care for. The transformation of Katherine from seeker of justice to angry, depraved killer is heartbreaking.

Spacek shows the sort of talent that has made her such a seriously good actress, Winkler is a journeyman actor himself (and you learn to hate him as his idealism morphs into something darker), Art Carney and Jane Wyatt are excellent as Katherine's good Democrat parents who enable her radicalization by funding their daughter as she dives deeper into the underground, and the rest of the supporting cast enriches the story.

The only drag on Katherine is the fact that it is a TV Movie (although the version I saw had a few moments of violence, drugs, and semi-nudity added; presumably for a theatrical release in Europe?). The film just doesn't have enough time to completely tell the story of the radicalized 60's and early 70's. Even though it's told in flashbacks and documentarian interviews (and the interviews with Spacek are so chillingly peaceful, you suspect there's something really bad coming), the time constraints truncate the story. You're left with an almost-told story, not a complete one.

Yet, the strength of the performances and the topicality of the story keep Katherine alive, watchable, and ultimately, crushingly sad.

Saga of the well-meaning teenager gone awry during those turbulent political years 1965-1972. In flashbacks to her girlhood, Sissy Spacek's Katherine, the daughter of wealthy Capitalists, is revealed to be a political hothead from the start (she was never an innocence lost). As she describes to us her reasons for becoming a radical (in an unpretentious, direct-to-the-camera way), we see Katherine move from the Society Column to the Most Wanted pages...and a living, breathing character begins to take shape. Smart, perceptive made-for-television drama with yet another remarkable performance from young Spacek; also good, Henry Winkler as a non-conformist love-interest and Emmy-nominated Art Carney as Katherine's father. Jeremy Paul Kagan directed (he also directed Winkler in 1977's "Heroes") and his work is stark and focused. At the finale, when Kagan shows us that unoccupied stool, we've come away with a lot more than a glimpse into the radical mind--we're aware of a promising life misbegotten.

...even though this film is talking about events from roughly 1964-1970. So at the time this aired, nothing being shown here was more than ten years in the past. However, American culture had changed so fast that it really seemed like you were looking at an era that was just a blip on a very old radar, yet that brief era brought lasting change. Some people think this film was based on the story of Patty Hearst, but it was actually a very loose account of someone of similar age and life experience to Diana Oughton , who was one of the Weathermen, a domestic terrorist group.

The production boasts a top notch cast, including two veterans - Art Carney and Jane Wyatt as Katherine's upper class parents, an up and coming Sissy Spacek as Katherine, the sassy prep school student turned schoolteacher turned protester and ultimately turned violent revolutionary. Riding the crest of a wave of popularity at that time, Henry Winkler stars as Katherine's long time boyfriend, Bob, who in the end acts like most boyfriends in any era of time, except Bob uses revolutionary excuses to explain why he decides eventually to ghost on Katherine, not just that he is getting bored with her - that would be so bourgeoisie! You know, even though Henry Winker was as famous in the 70s as Bogey was in the 40s, that bushy haircut and mustache they planted on him made him completely unrecognizable to me at the time.

This is really well done as Katherine in present day - about 1970 - is talking about the evolution of her viewpoints. And you think from her very plain clothing and the stool she is sitting on she is probably in prison - I'll let you watch and find out what is really going on. At the same time you see her life unfold. After college she goes to South America to teach children and adults. The local landlord - rather like a feudal lord - objects to Katherine teaching the adults to read and has her kicked out of the country. He is afraid the peasants will become educated and revolt. Back in the states she teaches underprivileged African American kids at an alternative school. That's where she meets Bob. The white power structure strikes back by claiming the school is breaking zoning laws, but the black power movement also weighs in, telling Bob and Katherine that white people should never teach black kids, because it will take the hate out of them and "hate is the strongest weapon we have". So slowly Katherine reaches the conclusion that neither education nor peaceful protest will ever fix anything and takes up arms against "institutions of power". She seems to have forgotten that average Joes who have nothing to do with the power structure she wishes to destroy could get hurt in her revolution.

And then there are mom and dad. They are well off, the film never talks about exactly what Katherine's dad does for a living, and even Katherine has to admit her parents are good people, even though she often describes them as living off of other people's oppression. You can tell they want to help and understand their daughter, but she is just on a different wavelength from them. Tea and cookies are not going to fix this. Likewise Katherine's sister and best college friend take on the traditional 60's role of wife and mother and don't get her either.

I'll let you see how this all turns out, but I thought it was quite powerful, and I was only seventeen at the time it aired. I was somewhat disappointed when I discussed this film with my friends the next day and the only thing they got out of it was how pretty Katherine was at the beginning of the film and how used up she looked at the end. But it was the 70s, the Vietnam war was over, nobody's boyfriend was going to get drafted, and this just seemed like a story from a place long ago and far away to a bunch of teens in 1975.

I'm glad we don't have American young people blowing up buildings and robbing banks or kidnapping heiresses anymore, but it would be nice if they cared about more than the next Marvel comic movie and reality TV, if they weren't all just so passively resigned to their fates and hypnotized by their phones. There must be a happy medium.