Unsung Auteurs: Larry Peerce
Cara Nash
FilmInk salutes the work of creatives who have never truly received the credit they deserve. In this installment: director Larry Peerce, who helmed The Incident, Two-Minute Warning and The Other
FilmInk
By Erin Free

FilmInk salutes the work of creatives who have never truly received the credit they deserve. In this installment: director Larry Peerce, who helmed The Incident, Two-Minute Warning and The Other Side Of The Mountain.

Like so many directors featured in the Unsung Auteurs column (including the likes of Stuart Rosenberg, Martha Coolidge and many more), it’s difficult to comprehend why Larry Peerce is so under-known considering the list of strong and impressive films that make up his resume. While his position as something of a “journeyman” (there are a lot of telemovies on his CV) might have something to do with it, there is a very strong throughline that runs across Larry Peerce’s work in terms of style, content, thematic concerns, and even casting, with the director enjoying strong collaborative relationships with actor Beau Bridges, himself a truly underrated talent, and Marilyn Hassett, a now near-forgotten star of the 1970s.

Larry Peerce was born in The Bronx, New York in 1930 to operatic tenor Jan Peerce and talent agent Alice (Kalmanowitz) Peerce, and attended The University Of North Carolina before moving into directing for television, where he first worked on a variety of music projects, the most famous of which was 1965’s concert film The Big TNT Show, which featured the legendary likes of Ray Charles, Bo Diddley, Ike & Tina Turner, Joan Baez and The Byrds. Peerce made his feature directorial debut in 1964, with a landmark film that remains largely forgotten today. Tender and sensitively handled by first-timer Peerce, One Potato, Two Potato was an early film to deal with the then very divisive subject not just of an interracial relationship (Bernie Hamilton and Julie Cullen star), but one which has also produced a child.

A brave and finely tailored film that deserves way more credit today for the manner in which it questioned the racism of the time, Peerce delivered a powerful follow-up (after a few years of hard graft on the small screen) to One Potato, Two Potato in 1967 with The Incident. Another forgotten gem, this low budget drama also trades in difficult, topical themes as its simple tale of two thugs (Tony Musante and Martin Sheen in his big screen debut) who terrorise the passengers on a subway train leans into issues of urban fracture, personal responsibility, cowardice, crime and punishment. The film also marked Peerce’s first collaboration with Beau Bridges, who excels as a war veteran alone in standing up to the two thugs. After this very strong, one-two opening salvo – which really should have set him up as a major talent primed for big movies – Larry Peerce then continued for the rest of his career to jump from high quality telemovies and episodic work to feature films.

Often topical and frequently incisive in their brand of social commentary, Peerce’s films may not have lit up the box office, but they certainly indicate a thoughtful, highly articulate, keenly intelligent director unafraid to deal with difficult material: 1969’s Goodbye Columbus stars Ali McGraw, Richard Benjamin and Jack Klugman and deals with the loosening of social mores of the time; 1971’s The Sporting Club garishly satirises the differences in America’s social classes; 1972’s A Separate Peace is a highly effective coming of age drama; and 1973’s Ash Wednesday was highly controversial upon release for its graphic scenes of facial plastic surgery, the striking results of which prompt Elizabeth Taylor’s unhappy wife to embark on an affair with a younger man. Though now either completely forgotten or dismissed simply as camp, there is – as with several of Peerce’s films – an importance and audacity to the ahead-of-its-time Ash Wednesday that should have seen the director afforded more attention.

In the mid-seventies, Larry Peerce both cemented his relationship with Beau Bridges and discovered young actress Marilyn Hassett, who the director would later marry. Hassett and Bridges starred in Peerce’s (again, now largely forgotten) 1975 hit The Other Side Of The Mountain, which tells the true story of Jill Kinmont, a young ski champion paralysed after a devastating accident. The film was so popular, in fact, that it spawned a 1978 sequel, The Other Side Of The Mountain II, which Peerce and Hassett returned for. Peerce also directed Hassett in his poorly received 1979 adaptation of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, and in 1976’s absolutely cracking Two-Minute Warning, a disaster-movie-style thriller in which Charlton Heston’s cop engages in a battle of wits with a murderous sniper (Timothy Bottoms, who also appeared in The Other Side Of The Mountain II) stalking the star-filled crowd at a big match at a huge football stadium.

Though occasionally waylaid by lighter material (the 1980 oddball social comedy Why Would I Lie?; the 1984 Rick Springfield music vehicle Hard To Hold), Peerce remained committed to difficult, challenging material with 1982’s tough true story Love Child (which features a stellar, gutsy turn from the underrated Amy Madigan as a woman who ends up in prison, gets impregnated by a guard, and then has to fight to keep her child) and 1989’s Wired, the director’s much maligned biopic of comic titan John Belushi, played by then-unknown Michael Chiklis. Based on Bob Woodward’s divisive book, the film was pretty much persona non grata in Hollywood, and suffered a sorry release and derisive reviews. It would be Peerce’s final feature film, though the director continued to work solidly in television, helming excellent mini-series and telemovies including Elvis & Me, The Court-Martial Of Jackie Robinson, Child Of Rage and more. Larry Peerce – an excellent and criminally unheralded director of admirably tough and difficult films – retired in the early 2000s, but is still alive today at the age of 94.