Three O'clock High, and notes on "Trying"

Buddy Revell: You know what Mitchell? You're the biggest #$#^%^& I've ever seen in my life. You didn't even try. How does that FEEL?


Watched a great, if tragically overlooked, film a few nights ago, On Demand.

Three O’Clock High.


A story about a pretty regular high school kid who manages to piss off the new-to-school bully before 9am, and spends the rest of the day going to ridiculous extremes to avoid having to fight him after school.


Pretty basic plot, but was done in a very entertaining manner. Great little nuances, like how the camera flashes to the clock with increasing frequency as 3pm draws near. Or the fact that Buddy may be a hyper-violent psychopath, but is also secretly a bright student. Add to this some minor characters that don’t quite fit into the John Hughes mold, and other creative camera work, and it was a pleasure to watch.


It ends up being not so much a story about a day in the life of a high school kid, as it is a story about how your life can change, when you decide to man up, so to speak, and simply… try.

From a movie pacing standpoint, the referenced quote’s the midpoint. The Main character was going in one (very bad) direction right up until this point. Then he switches gears / goals - the actual plot changes.

It didn’t strike a big chord with me, when I as 21 and probably not 100% sober and watched it one night at the dump I shared with three other guys at college. It was just a movie, y’know?

But watching it from my current perspective, it resonated.

All the important shit, the big stuff, the A-list things in my life that I value.., they were HARD.
It would have been much easier, at each turn, to not put myself out there, so to speak. Less scary, too.

But if I hadn’t have even tried, I’d probably not have my wife, nor my daughter (certainly not my daughter), nor the job I have.

As examples.

I wish I’d have been so wise, when I was 17, 19, 22….


Switching gears a bit, I’ve a class reunion coming up.

The end of this movie reminded me of something that happened 25, maybe 26 years ago.

There was a guy who showed up for one year. This was not unusual. Our school collected the odd guys; someone who needed a change of venue from wherever they had been going to school. Usually it was an issue of hoping that our school would provide more discipline for the person. Those people rarely stuck around.

Other times, like in the case of Eric, I’d guess someone had hoped that he’d be treated nicer in a smaller, more stable environment…..

He was a dork.
That’s my 17 year old brain memory of him. Goofy, didn’t dress very well, didn’t do particularly well academically, didn’t have very good social skills, bad skin…

My 43 year old brain can assume that by the time he got to us, he was used to playing a role, filling an un-desirable spot on the food chain. We were not his first rodeo.

He suffered through the year, not a lot of friends, probably getting picked on by those who enjoyed that sort of thing. And then it was the last day of school, and he was free of us.
You’d expect a quiet exit, maybe, a sigh of relief as he slides into his car and drives out of the parking lot for the last time.

Nope.

In the parking lot, after school, he gets into a fist fight with one of his biggest tormentors.
And even though he had to have known he was going to lose, he stepped up.
He… tried.

Of course he lost the fight. And he drove out of the parking lot for the last time sore and bloodied. I can only hope that he did so with some pride, having met the adversity head on.
Maybe it changed his life for the better, the notion that a bloody nose, real or metaphorical, stops hurting and bleeding after a bit, but the results of NOT trying can last you a lifetime.
Hiding from your problems can become a lifestyle…

I’m probably over-analyzing it, and over-romanticizing the event.
I’ll let you make up your own mind about that.

And to be honest, I’d not thought about it all for 25 years, until after watching the movie again.
I hope I’m right, though, and that Eric ended up doing well in his life.

Oh, and watch the movie already. It's worth 90 minutes of your life.