Katherine was a movie which I chose at random from the set and popped in with zero expectation or hope. I mean, to give a hint, this boxset was another installation of Mill Creek's "hey we got all these public domain movies, let's put them on a DVD and make money off them" sets a la Sci Fi Invasion boxset which I hold so near and dear to my heart.
Katherine begins, and... is that Sissy Spacek? It is! Sweet! Hey that's...the guy from Happy Days, that's Henry Winkler! And Art Carney and Julie Kavner in the credits. Wow, cool. And then the movie was really going, and completely out of nowhere it blindsided me by not only being good, but being super progressive, interesting, chilling, and genuinely fascinating.
The first thing I noticed was the style. You have what I can only describe to modern audiences as The Office-like approach. You know, sans comedy. Psuedo-documentary style film where you have a plot but then you cut away to the actors talking in character about what their screen character was saying or doing, about their feeling or emotions at the time, giving insight.
As the plot unfolds, we see a group of girls graduating from school. They're all young and naive, not knowing what to expect or what life holds for them. Sissy Spacek as Katherine decides to take some time and go to South America, which is her first taste of witnessing an oppressive government. She tries to help out the locals, and is disappointed and angry by the resistance she gets from the government. Then she comes back to the US and tries to solve her own government issues there.
My mom is a government-hating, outspoken woman similar to Katherine in the beginning of the film. Like Katherine, my mom goes to South America to try and help out. This movie did, in that way, feel "close to home" for me. Katherine comes back, hooks into the local hippie movement of the 60's, and start protesting regularly. She soon goes more extreme, however, going into the underground and having conflicts with the law.
The style, the pacing, the acting, and the film subject itself were all top notch. I knew I was in for a treat just because of Sissy Spacek's acting in several of the scenes. She was amazing to watch, and simply becomes Katherine. They also did a fantastic job of having her "look" slowly get more funkified and extreme as the time goes on, morphing from average woman to a rebel with strange glasses and hair and style of dress.
I am not sure what else to say about it, but the whole thing was an eye opening, wonderful experience. I genuinely feel like I actually learned something from it. In the end, when the movie finishes, I have to say the message perhaps gets changed a tiny bit, but it's a solid, great film which deserves to be remembered. What a way to kick off the set.
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