Peter Yates (1979)

A third viewing of Peter Yates’ comedy-drama, several decades on from the second.  Breaking Away, one of my favourite films of the late 1970s, has aged well.  These days, I seem always to be saying that a Hollywood hit of the past couldn’t be made now.  That thought did occur to me re-watching this one, but not for the usual reasons of political (in)correctness.  It’s true that the population of Bloomington, Indiana, where Breaking Away is set, doesn’t feature a single non-white face (that I noticed); that all the principals are decidedly straight; that the male characters’ attitudes towards the female ones are hardly enlightened.  But Yates’ film, written by Steve Tesich, wouldn’t work well today chiefly because other elements that made it fresh and funny forty-plus years ago, have since been drained of charm – for this viewer anyway.

Cycling fanatic Dave Stohler (Dennis Christopher) is a regular sight speeding around the streets of Bloomington on his Masi bike, and does long rides on the roads beyond the city.  When he’s at home, only child Dave brings the precious bike indoors.  This doesn’t exasperate his father Ray (Paul Dooley) as much as his son’s mania for all things Italian, which is part and parcel of Dave’s cyclophilia.  His road-racing heroes are the pro Cinzano team.  There are Cinzano posters on his bedroom wall.  He uses a Cinzano ashtray as a food bowl for the family cat – renamed Fellini by Dave, though his father insists the cat is still Jake.  Dave plays and sings along to opera; ‘Eyetie music’, Ray complains.  Much of Dave’s conversation at home is peppered with (basic) Italian phrases; even speaking English to his parents, he puts on a cod Italian accent.  His mother Evelyn (Barbara Barrie) finds it a bit wearying, but she’s calmer than her husband and son – she’s an experienced peacemaker as well as homemaker.  Evelyn reminds Ray that, before Dave started riding, he was ‘a very sickly kid’ but is now in great physical shape.  The interweave of Dave’s obsessions in Breaking Away is completely engaging and enjoyable.  When this film was made, keeping fit wasn’t the cultural obsession that it now is, and the wellness industry wasn’t big business.  Gung-ho amateur cyclists weren’t a widespread menace on suburban streets (including pavements).  TV shows extolling Italian food, family, fiamma, etc, were few and far between.  (In Britain at least, there are now even more of these than when I moaned about them in the note on Il Postino.)

Ray Stohler is unimpressed by his son’s hard work in the saddle.  He thinks Dave, who finished high school a year ago, should get a job – if anyone will have him, which Ray doubts.  When he’s not on his bike or at home, Dave is usually in the company of three friends from school – Cyril (Daniel Stern), Mike (Dennis Quaid) and Moocher (Jackie Earle Haley).  They joke, bicker, swim in waters on the site of what was once a limestone quarry, and resent their more privileged contemporaries in Bloomington – the out-of-town students at Indiana University.  Dave and his mates aren’t sure what to do next with their lives.  Mike and Moocher aren’t college material; Cyril, despite a witty way with words, is no academic high-flyer either.  It seems Dave was the best high-school student among them but, affable as he is with everyone he knows, his animus towards ‘college boys’ is as strong as short-fused Mike’s.

College girls are another matter.  Moocher is the only one of the four boys with a steady girlfriend – his high-school sweetheart Nancy (Amy Wright) will soon become his wife – but as soon as Dave claps eyes on Katherine (Robyn Douglass), he’s smitten.  He pretends to her that he’s an Italian exchange student, and she (none too believably) believes what he says.  Dave even turns up outside her sorority house to serenade ‘Caterina’, accompanied by Cyril on guitar.  When Katherine’s jock boyfriend Rod (Hart Bochner) gets wind of this, he and his friends arrive and rough up Cyril.  After a fight in the student canteen – where Mike, Moocher and Dave turn up with Cyril to avenge his black eye – the Indiana University president (John W Ryan) decides to take the matter in hand.  The university’s long-established annual cycling race, the ‘Little 500’, is normally restricted to student teams.  The president announces that this year the town will be invited to put forward its own team of cyclists to take part.  This, as well as paving the way for Breaking Away’s thrilling climax, brings the story’s tensions into sharper focus.

Limestone quarries were the foundation of Bloomington’s economy and the locals style themselves ‘cutters’ – the same term is used, disparagingly, by the college kids.  Dave’s father, though he now runs a used car business (‘Cutter Cars’), was once a stonecutter in the quarries, alongside Cyril’s, Mike’s and Moocher’s fathers.  We start to see in a different light Dave’s and Ray’s shared dislike of the university, what Dave’s Italian pretensions mean to him, and why they so infuriate his father.  The very idea of becoming a college boy in Bloomington seems to Dave to an act of treachery; but that Italian persona, comical as it is, is also a kind of denial of his Midwest blue-collar background.  Ahead of the Little 500 race, events start to shift Dave’s and Ray’s attitudes and relationship.  Dave takes the university entrance exam just to prove that he can pass it – which he does.  Ray, after a brief spell in hospital with heart trouble, confides in his son that he helped build the university campus but never felt comfortable on the premises.  To his great excitement, Dave’s Italian idols come to town to take part in a specially organised exhibition road race, in which local cyclists can also participate.  Dave does too well for the Cinzano team’s liking, and they force him off the road, leaving him with a bloody leg and a shattered fantasy.

When I first saw Breaking Away, it appealed to me as something of a one-off.  In retrospect, it’s more comparable than I’d realised with George Lucas’s American Graffiti (1973).  Four boys who became friends at school, now about to go their different ways; one a more developed character than the other three (Richard Dreyfuss’s Curt is Dave’s equivalent in Lucas’s film), and doubtful about going on to tertiary education.  (There are big differences between the films, too:  American Graffiti’s timeframe is only a few hours, from early one evening to next morning; the girls – ironically, given the conception – register as strongly as the boys, which doesn’t happen in Breaking Away.)   Like American Graffiti, set in George Lucas’s hometown (Modesto, California), Steve Tesich’s story is semi-autobiographical:  Tesich was a student at Indiana University, where he was part of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity cycle team in the Little 500 race.  A main reason why I still much prefer Breaking Away to American Graffiti is that, while both mine personal experience from the early 1960s (Tesich and Lucas were near contemporaries), Peter Yates’ film is set in the present and feels that way.  Lucas views 1962 through a prematurely nostalgic lens.  This approach paid handsome commercial dividends – made for less than a million dollars, American Graffiti took $140m – but the nostalgia is cannily imposed.

It’s one of the added charms of Breaking Away that those of us who saw the film on its original release can, returning to it getting on for a half-century later, feel genuinely nostalgic – not least for the clear storytelling and a collection of well-written characters.  In the early stages, Dave’s parents have a mainly (and quite broadly) comic purpose.  It’s impressive that the father-son relationship gradually develops into something richer, and crucial to the story’s town-versus-gown dynamic.  What happened to the chief contributors to Breaking Away, after the success they enjoyed with it, prompts other kinds of regret.  Peter Yates’ early cinema showed striking range – he moved from One Way Pendulum (1964) to Bullitt (1968) with only one picture in between.  Yates did have another hit after Breaking Away with The Dresser (1983), though that screen version of Ronald Harwood’s fine stage play is no great shakes.  None of Yates’ several subsequent films was able to combine commercial and critical success.  One of them, Eleni (1985), had a screenplay by Steve Tesich, and this was their third collaboration in six years (the 1981 thriller Eyewitness was the second).  Breaking Away was playwright Tesich’s first screenplay and won him a well-deserved Oscar.  He wrote only five more films thereafter (his adaptation of John Irving’s The World According to Garp in 1982 is the best-known) and returned to writing for the stage for the rest of his short life.  Steve Tesich died suddenly in 1996.

As for the cast, it’s a great shame (in both senses of the word) that Dennis Christopher didn’t enjoy the career that his talents deserved[1].  He’s just delightful in Breaking Away – funny, intensely likeable, as emotionally supple as he is physically athletic.  Although he was twenty-seven when he made the film, Christopher is completely convincing as a late teenager.  (He was over a decade older than Jackie Earle Haley; Daniel Stern was twenty and Dennis Quaid twenty-four.)  Christopher never had another film role to compare with this one.  His last noteworthy appearance in a cinema film was in a small part that Quentin Tarantino (a fan) wrote for him in Django Unchained (2012). Dennis Christopher hasn’t acted even on television since 2016 and, according to Wikipedia, is now retired.  That he was subsequently less successful than all three other main young actors in Breaking Away is compelling evidence that there’s little or no justice in Hollywood.  Dennis Quaid has had the biggest screen career of the four but his playing in Breaking Away foreshadows his persisting limitations.  As Mike, Quaid (whose best performance would come in The Right Stuff (1983)) is an undeniably strong presence but on top of the character rather than inside it.  While neither Barbara Barrie nor Paul Dooley may have had another part as good as the one they played in Breaking Away, both continued to work regularly for many years afterwards.  It seems that Barrie, who’s now ninety-five, retired a few years ago, but Dooley is still working – at the age of ninety-eight!

Peter Yates’ Bullitt features a famous car chase.  A decade on in Breaking Away, Yates directs a variety of transport pursuits with flair and humour.  Dave, out riding on a highway, pedals furiously to keep up with a Cinzano lorry.  He succeeds so the amused lorry driver puts his foot down to up the competitive ante; a police car joins the chase, to pull the driver over for speeding.  (Breaking Away has a splendid soundtrack of classical music favourites.  Mostly by Italians, of course – Verdi, Rossini, Donizetti – but Mendelssohn’s ‘Italian Symphony’, which accompanies the highway chase, is the musical highlight.)  And Yates’ handling of the climactic cycle race is wonderful:  he and his editor, Cynthia Scheider, turn Breaking Away into one of the most exciting sports films I’ve ever seen.  The Little 500, comprising 200 laps of the Indiana University course (fifty miles), involves teams of four riders, though there are no rules as to how they divide the laps among them.  Dave’s teammates are, needless to say, Cyril, Mike and Moocher, though they expect Dave to ride the whole thing.  Also needless to say, the race doesn’t turn out quite like that, so that all four must have a go taking on the might of the Phi Kappa Psi quartet and other student teams – but it’s Dave, injured and strapped onto his bike, who finally wins the race for the Cutters team.  The inevitability of all this doesn’t matter a bit – it makes the result more elating, for the viewer, as well as for Dave, his friends and his proud parents.

Steve Tesich’s script is a shade over-explanatory at the start, and it’s a stretch to believe, at the other end of the story, that the Stohler family’s new lease of life will include a new baby for Evelyn and Ray, twenty years after Dave’s arrival.  But nearly everything else in between works, and Breaking Away’s happy ending is a rare triumph – a feelgood finale where the good feeling is fully earned and credible.  Paul Dooley’s remarkable longevity is a nice irony.  For most of Breaking Away, Ray Stohler is presented as a model of unhealthy living – he likes to eat the wrong things, is seriously overweight, even more stressed out.  In the film’s postscript, though, Ray is evidently changing for the better: he’s heading home from work on a bicycle, though he nearly falls off it when greeted by his son, on the opposite side of the road.  Still a cyclist, Dave is now a freshman at Indiana University.  He’s riding alongside a good-looking French girl student (Lisa Shure), waxing lyrical about French cyclists and the Tour de France.  As he spots his father, Dave calls out, ‘Bonjour, papa!’

28 June 2026

[1] Maybe I was already fearing this when, just a couple of years later, I wrote about Chariots of Fire, where Christopher had a minor role as the American Olympic sprinter Charley Paddock (‘Christopher makes Paddock enjoyably eccentric; it’s to be hoped he’ll get better roles than this in future’).