Buddies (Arthur J. Bressan Jr., 1985)

Geoff Edholm and David Schachter in Buddies

Cast: Geoff Edholm, David Schachter, Billy Lux, David Rose, Libby Saines, Damon Hairston, Tracy Vivat, Susan Schneider, Joyce Korn. Screenplay: Arthur J. Bressan Jr. Cinematography: Carl Teitelbaum. Film editing: Arthur J. Bressan Jr. Music: Jeffrey Olmstead. 

Sure, the performances in Arthur J. Bressan Jr.'s Buddies could be more nuanced, and the lack of a generous budget shows, but this first ever feature film about AIDS holds up splendidly after almost 40 years. It's far more moving and effective than glossier treatments of the subject like Philadelphia (Jonathan Demme, 1993), if only because it was made when the urgency of the syndrome was at its height. Both writer-director-producer-editor Bressan and Geoff Edholm, who plays the bedridden Robert, died of complications from AIDS a few years after the film was made. Bressan made a wise choice in treating the film as a two-hander. Although other actors than Edholm and David Schachter, who plays Robert's "buddy," David, are credited, they're mostly voiceovers -- the few who appear on screen are carefully kept out out of the center of the frame. The effect is to internalize and intensify the drama. In fact, the scenes that move out of the hospital room, even the flashbacks to the healthy Robert and the concluding scene in which David fulfills Robert's dying wish, felt intrusive, the way scenes from a play that has been turned into a movie often feel. But if Buddies had been a play and not a film we might have lost this record of a sad and terrible moment in time.