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But perhaps this wholesale amnesia is only appropriate. Raucher’s portentous mood the last time around decreed a life-transforming/affirming/negating romantic experience from which no Hollywood sequel could successfully extrapolate. Or this could be the unacknowledged mundanity of the rest of his life writ small, his inability to deal with the elephant in the room laid bare for the world to see. The movie hems and haws and meanders ceaselessly but only really stumbles in its final act, as Hermie is informed of and reacts to the death of his father. This would be Class of ‘44’s chance for a shameless catharsis, but for one minor detail: the audience has not met the father. Not in Summer of ’42 and not now.

The only substantiation of Hermie’s parentage comes in a handful of lines uttered by his mother off screen in the former film (voice supplied by Maureen Stapleton from All in the Family) and mother and father glimpsed from the inside of the taxi taking Hermie and Oscy off to college. It becomes impossible to identify with Hermie’s conflicted emotions about his relationship with his father and from there to discern how a night on the town drinking in toast to the old man, winds up in a table-smashing fist-flying barroom brawl. The only purpose the death seems to truly serve is to supply him with gravitas that allows him to reunite with Julie as he returns to finish out his freshman year. The final image posits this re-merging as a lonely fuck inside a darkened stalled car outside a closed train depot. My mind can only wander ahead 10 years or so on Hermie’s behalf and imagine him wondering out loud to Oscy or Benjy or the new neighbor down the street in the burgeoning world of suburbia how he wound up “running a day care with someone I used to sleep with.” (Apologies to Linklater.)

I have not read either Love Story or Oliver’s Story. The former clocks in at around 131 pages and could perhaps be completed in the time it takes to view the 99-minute film. Oliver’s Story (in hardcover) runs about three times as long while the film clocks in at nearly ten minutes shorter than its predecessor. I am uncertain whether the extra pages are devoted to more romantic entanglements or more tears of loss and longing. The cinematic version does its best to incorporate both in a minimum amount of time.

The film begins at Jenny’s funeral and then leaps ahead 18 months as it follows an Oliver so desperate to keep Jenny’s memory alive he has all but cocooned himself in introversion. He is reluctantly pulled out of his shell by a brash divorcee (played by Candice Bergen) who he comes to discover has a “shocking” secret - she is a businesswoman and board member and heir(ess) to a family fortune and industry, the same as him. While this may not seem the most enticing romantic entanglement - watching two rich people fall in love - director John Korty, who also receives co-screenplay credit for his additions and alterations to Segal’s script, pushes the material in an unexpected direction. The true block to Oliver’s future happiness comes not from his pining over a lost love, but at his embarrassment over all that he has. He atones for his “sins” by working on tenant’s rights cases at his law firm, and can’t understand how Marcie can so unapologetically enjoy her status.

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