Return of the Secaucus Seven

Sayles' first film is, as one previously reviewer noted, the prototype independent film: small budget, previously unknown actors, an emphasis upon talk and ideas over action or even an event-oriented plot. The script varies from slow at times to very entertaining and incisive at others, but it always feels real. You don't necessarily feel you know the characters all that well when it's over, but you care about them nonetheless. It's all in all a very worthwhile film, in which you can see the director learning how to handle an ensemble cast, as he has done so effectively in recent years in Lone Star and Sunshine State. If you like this type of film at all, you will find it rewarding and quite worth your time.

It is amazing, though, how so many of the reviews attempt to not merely acknowledge the similarities to The Big Chill, but to elevate one film and denigrate the other. They come from very different places in terms of budget, stars and polish, but are both very fine films. In one sense, TBC is deeper in that the characters in that film have varied from their previous ideals (or at least it seems that way), a fact that lends a melancholy beneath the slickness that really isn't there in S7. However, a lot of people reach the age of the characters in S7 (they are all only about 30, younger than the characters in Chill) without yet having to really put things in perspective. The leads in S7 have become teachers, a predictable outcome. One other character has taken a job as an aide to a senator. J.T. is pursuing (or putting off pursuing) a musical career. The fact that this film views the characters before some of the inevitable conflicts in their lives have ripened actually makes it more subtle, and allows for the viewer to wonder where they will be in 5-10 years. Will the leads become Kevin Kline and Glenn Close? Will one of the characters die young and precipitate the life-examining session that occurs in Chill? I think the two films dovetail nicely together. To exalt one at the expense of the other is unnecessary and needlessly cynical.

This is what good moviemaking is about. If you are looking for million-dollar cost overruns, over-rated movie stars, the same crop of (yawn) "special" effects and trite action-movie plots and dialog, look elsewhere. This is young John Sayles doing his absolute best with limited resources. The characters are realistic, the dialog brilliant yet believable and the script does an excellent job of handling the subject of not only growing up, but growing older with a bittersweet sense of humor.

For years I heard this film described as The Big Chill only three years earlier. A pretty accurate description. The plot and characters are similar, but Return of the Secaucus 7 has more layers, and provides more random "slice of life" scenes. Whilst watching this film, you can't help the feeling you know these people, or someone like them. Sayles manages to prove that real life situations can be interesting, funny and touching; unexpected moments can start a chain of life-altering events.

The New Hampshire scenery is beautiful – nice to see something shot anywhere other than NYC or a Hollywood back lot. A testament to friendship, fun and low-budget filmmaking.

I went to a movie theater and saw "Return of the Secaucus Seven" in 1981. I was slightly younger than the characters in the movie but I could relate to their lives. When the Big Chill came out I thought it was a ripoff of Secaucus. In the Big Chill all of the characters have big time jobs - shoe manufacturer, doctor, actor, magazine writer, etc.. In Secaucus most of the characters haven't figured out what they want to do and crashing on the floor is a way of life rather than the expense account Big Chill graduates. The acting is awful. The plot is weak. It is a very rough film. But it has a sense of reality, humor, and place that most professional movies do not have. When I saw this again a few years ago on PBS it was not quite the film I fondly remembered. Perhaps I can no longer relate to post graduate blues or life without children and a mortgage. It is still an impressive low budget first film by John Sayles.

Return of the Secaucus Seven begins with a shot of a man doing a half hearted job of plunging a filthy toilet, and goes down hill from there. Only desperately insecure ex-hippies or their sycophants could praise this very poorly made and unimaginative work. Nothing against writer/director John Sayles, he is excellent ... but not on this film.

I'm just trying to be realistic here for anyone looking for an unbiased opinion. Sayles was 28 or 29 at the time he made this and it was his first film, made by novices on a shoe string budget. Seriously now, how good could it be? Yet it is not the low budget feel that bothers me about this film, although it is quite annoying with it's monkey camera operators, stag film bad lighting and camcorder like sound. It is not the wooden and forced acting on the part of it's inexperienced cast, who, I am not saying is amateur, but every time they would speak their eyes would roll back in their head and the rest of the cast would mouth the line along with them. It was not the unattractive boring cast whose idea of an interesting character choice is singing like Dan Fogelberg on ludes or doing bad impressions of Humphrey Bogart. No, the thing that is really annoying about this film is it's tedious and pretentious script. To think that anyone would be interested in watching a film about a group of uninteresting unmarried unscrupulous 30 year olds kvetching about life as they jump from bed to bed is pretty cocky on the part of the author. If you are not going to have an interesting storyline, you had better have some damn good dialog, like in Diner or Manhattan, or at least an interesting character like in Yojimbo or The Good The Bad and The Ugly, or even Creature From the Black Lagoon.

Several here on the IMDb have praised this films dialog. My guess is they are members of a secret Hippie society that have a Gestapo like fervor for anything that espouses hippie virtues. In reality, the dialog is juvenile at best. It romanticizes such lofty ideals as bean farts and the nuances of puking. The rock band Rush is referred to as a "progressive" band (in 1980? What? Perhaps in 1975 stoner circles), a small tip off as to how out of touch the script is.

A large portion of the script is dedicated to events that have nothing to do with the story. I suppose this is to help develop the characters, but shouldn't those characters first be worth developing? Come on, John, it's bad enough we have to watch the actors suck at acting, do we have to watch them suck at charades as well? What would make you think we would enjoy watching them argue about obvious political opinions, girls playing Clue, or men diving naked into a river? (note major shrinkage factor in chilly New Hampshire water) Speaking of which, what's with that strange leg tuck David Strathairn did every time he took a dive? He looked like a Don Martin cartoon from MadMagazine. That was the final straw for me. I'll bet Richard Nixon could dive better than that. Hypocrites.

Overshadowed by its loud, shallow and uncredited remake (The Big Chill) Sayles' first film is a very slight effort that manages to capture a time and place with quiet brilliance. The actors -- first roles for most of them and only roles for some -- are sometimes painfully amateurish and the duration and self-indulgence of some of the scenes make the viewer long for chainsaw intervention, but the film as a whole does a wonderful job of showing a generation of aging idealists on the eve of Reagan's America. Unlike The Big Chill, where everyone is pretty and successful and the dialogue is crisp and full of what passes for wit on prime time TV, Sayles' characters are almost too low-key, their banter sometimes clumsy and their jokes not terribly funny. The unfortunate side effect of his conscientious effort to keep things "real" is that the film sometimes fails to entertain or engage and most of the characters end up outside the viewers' sphere of caring, like someone else's friends in a third-hand story. Still, a very impressive first film and influential on many other 80s movies besides its gaudy imitator.