This week we have Rob Reiner’s take on a King movie, the retitled ‘Stand By Me’ (based on the novella ‘The Body’).

First though, let us say a brief prayer of thanks to be through a particularly rough patch of Sundays with Stephen:

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of Maximum Overdrive,
I will fear no Cat’s Eye;
For King art with me,
His Shawshank and his Shining they comfort me.

Welcome back to Sundays with Stephen, now 50% more blasphemous.

More below the cut.

I wasn’t sure I was going to make it after Cat’s Eye. I mean, wow. I didn’t see that one coming.

Silver Bullet wasn’t as bad as I had expected, but then Maximum Overdrive in DVD quality? It was wailing and gnashing of teeth time there.

So I was somewhat relieved to get to Stand by Me for this week’s SwS; I’d seen it a long time ago, as a younger individual, and didn’t hold any particularly unkind memories.

What’s more, my childhood recollections largely hold up. It is indeed a pretty good movie.

First, the basics. Stand by Me is based on the King story ‘The Body’, and is about a group of four boys who go on an adventure of sorts to find the body of another missing kid. It isn’t really about the trip (as the sappy Netflix description makes clear, with the usual banter about Learning about Themselves along the way, etc). It’s really more about the kids, and the awful crap that you have to deal with at that age sometimes, even though you’re not old enough to do so.

A framing device establishes that a modern day (well, ok, in the 80s) narrator, credited only as The Writer but obviously Gordie (or a Gordie-like individual, more later), is looking back on his childhood after reading that a good childhood friend has just died of a violent crime. He thinks back to a summer when he went on a trip with said friend, a trip that proved very important in their developing lives.

There were four people in this circle of friends. Gordie I mentioned, a gangly boy with a nascent talent for fiction; his friend and ‘gang’ leader Chris Chambers, the son of a local family of no-good violent tuffs and drunkards. Teddy Duchamp is a third friend, a boy scarred both physically and emotionally by a distant, and now physically removed father, who suffered from fits of rage and mutilated him with a hot stove before being sent to a sanitarium. Finally there is Vern Tessio, the designated Fat Kid, who sadly doesn’t develop much past that stereotype.

The casting is interesting for a number of reasons. Future Geek stars Wil Wheaton (Gordie) and Jerry O’Connell (Vern) are here, as is Signature 80s Star Corey Feldman (Teddy), and rounding out the principal four is River Phoenix (Chris). John Cusak is in a flashback cameo as Gordie’s older brother, and Kiefer Sutherland plays the town sociopath, which isn’t much of an acting stretch for him, I guess.

There’s a lot to like about this movie. The acting is largely solid, especially from some of the kids. Wheaton and Phoenix are both very good as boys who are suffering from the emotional abuse of the adults that run their lives. In Gordie’s case, it’s a father and family who are still grieving for his older brother, now dead four months in a car accident, and who have little time or use for their oddball younger child. In Chris’ case, it’s a violent abusive father in a violent abusive family and the awful knowledge that nobody thinks you’re worth a damn because of your last name (and in a small town you can’t run from a last name).

Duchamp and his father are another interesting case. Teddy has a militarism/hero worship thing going on with his dad, who he idolizes for having ‘stormed the beach at Normandy’. The timing is right; Teddy’s dad would have been of the right age, and this is the right era. But Teddy’s dad, as previously established, is barking mad. Did these events that Teddy chooses to fixate on, ignoring his own pain and literal scars, actually happen? A lesser movie would have answered that question, I think. It works for me better that we never find out here.

As a road trip movie, it’s pretty good. You get a really nice sense of place, the pacing is good, the directing is fairly solid, without a ton of stupid tricks like in Cujo or Carrie.

I will say one thing, however: we get that it’s 1959, Rob. Seriously. The soundtrack breaks in with a cloying 50s song every five minutes to remind us of that fact, and most of them are really irritating. It’s a bit of a grudge with me. I hate, hate, HATE that music.

On the other hand, the kids singing the song from Have Gun Will Travel is kind of cute. It’s not much of a song, but it got me interested in the show. Wikipedia tells me that the ‘savage land’ in question is mid-19th century San Francisco, and that Paladin was most likely a trade name of the gunfighter-star of the show. An actual ‘knight without armor’ named Paladin would have been a bridge too far for plausibility, but hey, if you’re going to take on a fake name, why not make it double as advertising for your job?

Amazing the side-quests you get on with Wikipedia.

At any rate. This gaggle of boys with psychological problems gets the idea to go on a quest after Vern overhears his older brother, a member of the local high school gang (which operates with impunity in this seemingly lawless town) talk about having seen the body of a missing boy while joyriding in the woods in a stolen car. Vern thinks they could go find it and be local heros, perhaps even get on television. The gang agrees, and off they go, in no small part to avoid their problems back home.

Gordie doesn’t particularly want to go at first. He doesn’t want to do much of anything, actually. His much-more-loved older brother’s death has left his family in tatters, but the numbness of it all has gotten to him. Over time he becomes driven, as the Writer tells us in the present, to see it through, however, and this is another high point for me: we’re never told why.

I think it’s fairly obvious that Gordie’s reasons for going to find the dead boy in the woods are tied up with his brother’s death, but what he could get out of seeing another one is hard to imagine. That’s the point, I guess; confronted with awful grief, people behave in very strange ways. Maybe he wants to rub salt in his own wounds, or maybe he can’t help but be drawn to death now that it’s dominated his life so utterly. Perhaps he’s seeking it out because, as we see over the course of the film, he wishes he had died in his brother’s place.

Again, I like that the movie was adult enough to let us ponder this without a pat resolution.

A second storyline tells about the Sutherland character, Ace, and his gang’s belated attempt to recover the same body from the woods for similar goals of fame. Honestly, it’s a throwaway plot. Sutherland is ok as a psycho, but I think we’re all familiar with his psycho-acting by now. It’s a bit like Christian Bale being a Growly Toughguy Antihero or Christopher Walken playing a Strange Dude. In the 80s it must have been a lot fresher.

The converging quests lead to a fairly lame Dramatic Confrontation, and to a much more realistic and melancholy denouement afterward. A recent Family Guy parody of this and two other King movies pointed out a potentially murderous plot hole in this ending which I won’t go into detail with so as not to spoil the plot, but… I think they might be right. It doesn’t add up too well.

One final ambiguity comes in a debate about the nature of the film. Are these supposed to be real events that occurred in The Writer’s childhood (in which case, he’s an older Gordie), or are they fictional events written in a first person perspective? I got to thinking about this when wondering why, if it is Gordie, an aspiring writer as a kid, telling the story as a King-like-Adult, we don’t see him credited as Gordie Lachance. King himself, of course, wrote ‘The Body’, which is fiction, so if The Writer is acting a stand-in for King it brings the veracity of the entire story into question. Perhaps the reason it has a somewhat pat ending is the same reason that Gordie’s story-within-a-story has an ending the other characters question as being too simple; all stories have to have an ending, and endings are hard.

Plot issues aside, music issues aside, this is, finally, what I would again call a Good King movie. After Cat’s Eye and Max Overdrive and the underwhelming Silver Bullet, Firestarter, the splattery-silly Children of the Corn and the lush but vapid Christine, it was nice to have, like with The Dead Zone, a movie that I could recommend outside of the King theme of this project of ours, a movie that’s just good to watch on its own merits, and not as part of a set, or as a ‘so-bad-it’s-good’ horror movie marathon. Stand By Me isn’t perfect but it renews my enthusiasm and lifts my spirits for the Sundays with Stephen project, and gives me the strength to go forward.

Note on Next Week:
Technically, one might watch The Lawnmower Man next, if going off the IMDB page. However, as I think I mentioned way back when this project started, that’s not really a King movie. It has nothing to do with his style or his original story, and in fact he fought a lengthy court battle to have his name pulled from the silly CG piece of shit. The courts ruled in his favor, and so I expunge it from the list. Not because it’s a terrible, artless, soulless pile of stupid; in that regard it’s right at home with Maximum Overdrive. Because it really isn’t a King movie. Good or bad, there’s a certain King-iness that even the worst adaptations of his work usually maintain, and a ridiculous VR killscape just doesn’t qualify.

(What was with VR and the 80s anyway? Man, that never went anywhere in real life.)

So instead next week we go on to a Creepshow sequel, based on some more King short stories, including one of my favorite King shorts of all time. See you then.

Update: Added paragraph about the relationship between Gordie and The Writer, corrected some grammar/spelling issues.

Next Week – Creepshow 2? Yes! Or is it a No? The suspense is killing me!
Last Week – Maximum Overdrive, a reason to drink yourself to death.