Joseph Sargent is not exactly a household name when it comes to directors despite the fact that he accomplished something that neither Spielberg nor Scorsese has yet to achieve directing a film with a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. That film is the original version of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three. Of course, it must be mentioned that Sargent also directed Jaws the Revenge which holds a Rotten Tomatoes rating of zero. So, the question at hand: is Sargent a great director or a terrible director? The answer is complicated because aside from that zenith and nadir, he only directed a handful of other theatrical releases. His reputation therefore rests upon his career as a director of television episodes and—more specifically—made-for-TV movies.
As of summer of 2020, Sargent still holds the record for the most Director’s Guild of America nominations for television movies. With eight nominations and his closest living competitor (of which there are many) sporting only four nominations, it seems fairly assured that he will continue to hold that record for some time to come. In 1990, the Emmy Awards experienced a tie for the honor of Outstanding Comedy/Drama Special and both winners were directed by Sargent. As such it is within the realm of the made-for-TV movie that his influence is most visibly on display in Maybe I’ll Come Home in the Spring.
Ironically, that influence arrives in the form of making a TV-movie which really does have the feel of a low-budget theatrical film. Yes, the close-up is the predominant choice for camera placement, but it doesn’t feel like the typical overabundance because Sargent mixes things up so much. The story is not told in a linear fashion, featuring flash-cut that leap back in time which often last no more than a few seconds, presented without contextual dialogue. In addition, the film also features a number of standard flashbacks, but in an almost subversive defiance of convention, are not prefaced as such by traditional optical effects alerting the viewer that they are about to leap backward or forward. Scenes in the present cut back to the past without the usual wibbly-wobbly special effect which characterized the era in which the film was produced.
In another break from even his own standard working procedures on episodic TV drama, Sargent lifts the ambition—if not necessarily always the final result—of the severely limited scope of early 70’s made-for-TV filmmaking by structuring the film as an exercise in duality not just by telling two stories at once—the past and the present—by directly drawing parallels and contrasts between the past and the present within the same sequence. One particularly vivid illustration of this approach occurs early in the film after the older daughter has just returned from her experience as a runaway when a scene taking place in the present with the younger daughter at the center is juxtaposed with a scene taking place in the past involving the older daughter in which the father voices the exact same parental complaint to each of his offspring: “If we could trust you, we wouldn’t have to do this!”
While hardly worthy of comparison to Sargent’s work on The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, this made-for-TV movie reveals a talent working at a significantly higher degree than the man behind the camera of the sequel which killed off the Jaws franchise for good. Well, so far, at least.
