Puerile Pilgrimage

By J.C.

In the hall of the big house, the child cries out for his mother. No answer. Then he looks up the stairs and sees her stumbling down toward him, arms outstretched, screaming. As she comes closer the boy can see that her throat is cut; blood is spilling over her slip and onto the staircase. She falls and dies at his feet, eyes open in horror.

Going Home, the movie that opens with this scene, is rated GP (parental guidance advised), presumably because it contains no nudity and little cussing. Such things, according to the Motion Picture Association of America, traumatize young minds. The murder of a mother apparently does not. The rating is only one of many piquant curiosities about Going Home. Another is how it ever got made. Except for the above scene, the script by Lawrence B. Marcus is the sort of thing that might have shown up years ago on Philco TV Playhouse as "strong adult drama." Indeed, the director-producer of Going Home, Herbert B. Leonard, served a lengthy apprenticeship in television. Too lengthy, perhaps. Both he and Marcus never develop their characters, as if they thought nuance could be provided with a twist of the fine-tuning knob.

The plot is like a Freudian case history rewritten for the Reader's Digest --The Most Unforgettable Psychopath I Ever Met. After that trauma on the staircase, young Jimmy Graham's father Harry (Robert Mitchum) is eventually convicted of his wife's murder and sent to the state pen. Jimmy is dispatched to an orphanage. Fifteen years later, Jimmy (Jan-Michael Vincent) goes looking for his father. He has been paroled, and is now scratching out a living as a mechanic in a small town on the New Jersey shore, sustained by his girl friend (Brenda Vaccaro). Vengeance, not forgiveness, is the reason for the son's pilgrimage.

The actors barely try. Vaccaro is strident, Vincent swishy and Mitchum somnolent as usual. It is often said that Mitchum is a fine actor who has seldom had a role to really challenge him. He has been extraordinary at least twice: as the deranged preacher in Charles Laughton's Night of the Hunter and as the inebriated deputy in Howard Hawks' El Dorado. In his multitude of other roles, he has mostly looked sullen and talked tough; one has the sense, watching him, that he thinks acting is a hell of a way for a man to earn a living. . J.C.

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