What to Watch This Weekend: ‘School Ties’

Every Friday, our resident film fanatic Alex Aciman will dig deep into the pile of cinematic masterpieces and fish out one forgotten classic you should watch soonest.

One morning during my freshman year of high school I missed a first period class because School Ties was on TV and I needed to know how it ended. This movie is the story of a Jewish high school quarterback (played by Brendan Fraser in one of his first screen roles) who is recruited to a prestigious New England prep school in the 1950s. I am Jewish, and so were most of the kids at my prep school, but that didn’t inoculate me against feeling out of place, like I didn’t belong in a world where children were dropped off at school by chauffeurs and summered in places whose names I couldn’t pronounce. School Ties is about feeling out of place, it is about the feeling that some part of you needs to be hidden. Fraser’s football coach urges him to keep his Judaism a secret. In another scene Fraser’s dad insists that he get to temple to pray on Rosh Hashanah, and so Frasier sneaks into the school chapel at night to pray.

Indeed, Fraser spends most of the film trying to hide his Judaism from wealthy, Ivy-bound classmates, all of whom are products of a postwar American culture that perpetuated casual and institutional anti-Semitism. School Ties recounts the American Jewish narrative that so many of us wish to forget. You don’t want to remember that your parents or grandparents either had to hide the fact that they were Jewish, or were very simply barred from certain parts of the world. It’s a reminder that life in America, even after the war, was not always easy for Jews.

Charmed by scenes of an idyllic New England fall, Fraser’s character is as enchanted with his new surroundings as he is afraid to lose this world teeming with beauty and opportunity. The secret does get out, and it ends up as badly as he had imagined.

By far the craziest part of this film is that it launched not only Fraser’s career, but also those of Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, and Chris O’Donnell. Stranger yet, School Ties was scored by Maurice Jarre, the composer responsible for some of the most iconic movie soundtracks in history, such as Lawrence of Arabia and Dr. Zhivago.