The Freshman (1990)

The Freshman MB

“There are three types of people in New york, there are people who get paid a million dollars a day and get laid in some tower every night, then there’s the people who live in Time Square and eat Yankee Doodles off the sidewalk. And then there’s the guys like me, I call us the glue of society. We go? forget about it! all hell’s gonna break loose.”

Now this line is spoken by the one and only Victor Ray, (Bruno Kirby) at the beginning of the film, The Freshman (1990), it basically sums the movie up in a nutshell. This movie’s theme is: the important things in life, and the social hierarchy of New York City.

The movie is about a young man from Vermont, Clark Kellog (Matthew Broderick) about to move to New York to start his freshman year of college at New York University, “ a ‘good’ school”, as judged by Victor Ray. Victor Ray meets Clark just as he arrives into the center of New York, Grand Central Station. Clark is intimidated and scared and because he it looking up at the ceilings and staring in awe at all the people. He mistakenly trips over a homeless man sleeping on some steps and falls.

When he looks up, laden in a sleazy beige suit, bling and jingling bracelets, hair slicked back, and a thick mustache to top it off, there is Victor Ray, “of the Victor Ray car service.” He offers Clark the minimum price for an air-conditioned ride in a “mint condition Bonneville” Cadillac. Victor Ray drives off with all Clark’s luggage and the $500 his stepfather gave him to live on.  In his first fifteen minutes in New York, Clark has managed to get his money and all his clothes stolen.

He cannot catch up to him the thief, so he goes to NYU and visits his dorm room. When he walks in, he meets Steve Bushak who righteously teaches him that in New York City, everyone is a victim. Then Clark meets his professor, Fleeber (Paul Benedict), a wonderfully colorful character who thinks Clark is proposing a movie idea, when really he is telling him the truth! (about his “evil” step father Dwight, who gave him barely any money to live in New York and the “hoodlum” who took all his belongings). But, while talking to Fleeber in his office, Clark sees Victor Ray walking down the street with his stuff so he excuses himself and exits through the window, and then there is a great chase through the streets of Greenwich Village and through Washington Square Park. When he Clark catches up to him, Victor Ray offers him a job working for his uncle, Carmine Sabotini, “a great man.”

When Clark arrives in the “best neighborhood in New York”, according to Victor, he is surprised to find that Carmine bares an uncanny resemblance to Don Vito Corleone, which Victor tells him not to mention. Clark learns that his job is just to deliver a package from JFK to Cherry Hill, New Jersey, but the package brings them into quite a few tricky situations. Clark finds out that the package is a Komodo dragon which is an endangered species. He tells Carmine about Greenwald and Simpson, two agents from the “fish and wild life division” who are onto Carmine and his business in importing and serving endangered animals at the Gourmet Club. (His very exclusive restaurant supposedly serving endangered animals for no less than a couple hundred thousand dollars a plate. “Tip included!”) He runs this business with Larry London (Maximilian Schell.) On the last night of the Gourmet Club, action ensues, and as Clark beautifully puts it: “My heart was pounding as I crossed the dance floor. In a few minutes I would be free or dead… or Rodolfo Lasparri of Palermo, Sicily!“

The movie has a great ending, Carmine, Clark, and the Komodo dragon walk across a cornfield. It’s hard to pick a favorite scene or quote beacause every line and every shot in this movie is genius, but I think the most touching scene is when Carmine visits Clark in his dorm room and Clark tells the poem that his late father wrote. I find this scene so moving. It’s a great poem, and like Carmine, I like the last line.. “To the certainty of his fur”.

My favorite characters are Clark, Fleeber, and Carmine’s daughter, Tina played by the lovely Penelope Ann Miller.

This is definitely in my top 5 favorite movies. It’s a great film, I love it.

A+

Lucy