The Fred Niles Collection

FILM 10

STRAT

A film about Stratford Presley Sherman, the son of a wealthy businessman and a student at The Choate School, and the people surrounding him. Set in Southport, CT, the film focuses on a life of privilege and achievement, as Presley and his friends discuss their efforts to make the most out of their education at a school whose alumni include Adlai Stevenson, John F. Kennedy, and John Dos Passos. We get a glimpse of chapel services and student life at Choate, including the founding of a radio station by Sherman, and the efforts at revising the school’s dress code and other issues, as well as the subject and his friends’ resistance to the stuffiness of life in Southport, and its fixation on sailing and golf. Despite the rarified atmosphere of the environment, the film is compelling in its quiet way--the figures focused on within the film come off as real people, not caricatures of the wealthy or privileged. The period detail is also very vivid--there’s no mention of the Vietnam War, but the undercurrent of tension between the generations is depicted.

SHOTGUN JOE

Another, different side of life in Connecticut--a portrait of a career criminal. Shotgun Joe is what he’s called, and he’s not yet 30, and stands before the camera calmly telling us of beating and robbing people, and of his love of his sister and his hatred of his mother. Guards describe him as very affable and likeable, but also extremely dangerous, and even Joe, in the course of telling us of his temper, admits to once having broken the ribs of the sister he loves. It’s a sad but spellbinding picture of a walking time-bomb that starting ticking when he was 16 years old and attacked his mother for the first time. Joe is, by turns, funny, outgoing, and entertaining, and threatening, vicious, and brutal in his cheerful accounts of attacking men and women.