Oscar-winning (Best Original Screenplay) Breaking Away (1979) is one of those movies that has always stuck with me over the years, and you rarely hear about it these days.
Breaking Away is a 1979 American coming-of-age comedy-drama film produced and directed by Peter Yates and written by Steve Tesich. It follows a group of four male teenagers in Bloomington, Indiana, who have recently graduated from high school. The film stars Dennis Christopher, Dennis Quaid, Daniel Stern (in his film debut), Jackie Earle Haley, Barbara Barrie, Paul Dooley, and Robyn Douglass.
Roger Ebert called it “a wonderfully sunny, funny, goofy, intelligent movie that makes you feel about as good as any movie in a long time. It is, in fact, a treasure… Movies like this are hardly ever made at all; when they’re made this well, they’re precious cinematic miracles.”
Awards:
- Oscar for Best Original Screenplay
- 1979 Golden Globe Award for Best Film (Comedy or Musical)
- Ranked eighth on the List of America’s 100 Most Inspiring Movies compiled by the American Film Institute (AFI) in 2006
- June 2008, the AFI also announced its 10 Top 10—the best ten films in ten classic American film genres—after it polled over 1,500 people from the creative community. In that poll Breaking Away ranked as the eighth best film in the sports genre
- It inspired a TV series starring Shaun Cassidy
Despite all of this, Breaking Away is extremely hard to find on physical media. Perhaps because it only earned $20 million in the box office and another $5 M from NBC for TV rights.
I consider it a lost classic because it seems to have fallen out of people’s collective memories.