Question of the Day — New England Flicks

~ Laura

Sitting in lounge chairs on the Cape Cod beach, Steve and I tried to think of the best movies set in New England. Here’s our list:

1. Mystic Pizza. Five points went to me for noting that Matt Damon has a small walk on scene.
2.Mystic River.
3. Good Will Hunting
4. The World According to Garp.  Still chuckle at the "gradual student" line.

But that’s as far as we got. Strange, huh? I could easily think of fifty movies set in NYC.

Question of the Day: Can you think of more movies set in New England? If you guys can’t flesh the list out, then explain why Hollywood hates Beantown.

Published by Laura

22 thoughts on “Question of the Day — New England Flicks”

  1. The Departed is the most obvious recent one. That movie even won praise for the accuracy of its Bahston accents, if nothing else.
    In the Bedroom is another, far superior one. (Radio broadcasts of Red Sox games often substitute for background music.)

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  4. *You Can Count On Me*. IMDB says “Catskill town,” but there are signs saying “New Hampshire” all through the movie.

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  6. Next Stop, Wonderland. Really nice film that didn’t get enough play. Worth a Netflix rental if they have it. Jaws was filmed largely on Martha’s Vineyard (saw the filming when I was vacationing there as a kid with my family). Not sure if they ever told you where the actual setting was or it just was a vague Northeast beach town. Also remember that New England is more than Beantown. RI has been trying (fairly successfully) to recruit both movies and TV to little Rhody. Shot in and set in, of course, are two different things. Underdog was shot entirely in RI. There’s Something About Mary had scenes shot in RI. Amistad and Meet Joe Black had RI filming if not setting. Currently the Showtime series, Brotherhood, is being filmed in RI.

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  8. Good call, Amy P. It reminds me to include Dolores Claiborne, a King novel turned movie in Maine.
    But Drew: I don’t think that “shot in” counts. Underdog is not, as far as I know, about the surroundings at all. Neither is Meet Joe Black, which was largely filmed in Warwick, Rhode Island. But the Brotherhood: definitely counts.

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  12. Cider House Rules
    Hotel New Hampshire
    any other adaptation of John Irving out there
    Some movie with Julia Roberts as a Seven Sisters professor
    Animal House

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  16. In “Please Don’t Eat the Daisies” (1960) Doris Day persuades her rising-star NYC drama critic husband (David Niven) to move their family of boys out to a decaying white elephant of a house in rural Connecticut.
    It’s not a perfect movie, but I liked it, and I think it resonates with a lot of 11D themes, for instance moving from cramped NYC quarters to a house needed renovation. Asked why she chose to move them into a dilapidated mansion, Doris Day replies that they couldn’t afford a smaller house. I also love the monologue David Niven gives to the principal of the children’s new school, who is obviously expecting major outlays of volunteer work from the parents. Niven gives a rousing speech about how school exists to give parents free time, and how it is the right of every red-blooded American parent to drop their kids off at school and not be further involved. I strongly suggest harvesting that particular scene, because I think it would be fun to include in a talk.

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  18. Prep schools and colleges in movies are presumed to be New England unless proven otherwise.
    Simon Birch
    Mona Lisa’s Smile (ugh)
    Taps
    A Separate Peace
    The Ice Storm
    School Ties
    almost certainly The Emperor’s Club, but thank god I never saw it so I don’t know
    [most of] Love Story
    Legally Blonde
    also:
    Federal Hill
    [most of] Primary Colors
    The Door in the Floor
    One Crazy Summer
    Our Town
    The Devil and Daniel Webster
    To Die For
    For my top five, I’d say On Golden Pond, To Die For, Mystic River, Mystic Pizza… and probably Witches of Eastwick. (I remain too conflicted about The Departed.)

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  19. A couple more– special Harvard division:
    With Honors
    Harvard Man
    Stealing Harvard
    Soul Man (I hope *not* on anyone’s top five list!)
    plus Legally Blonde and Love Story, already noted.

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  20. Laura’s right, of course, that there’s a huge difference from NYC, even with all these.
    In New England, we’ve got:
    college settings
    prep school settings
    Cape Cod/ Martha’s Vineyard/ beach settings
    Connecticut suburbs
    working-class Irish, Portugese, or Italian urban settings (Departed, Mystic River, Good Will Hunting, Federal Hill)
    generic rural settings (Golden Pond)
    times when you need stuffy puritanical neighbors (Witches of Eastwick)
    and the special cases of Steven King and John Irving movies.
    Class conflict movies are especially likely to go to New England: town-gown conflicts, or obnoxious wealthy college kids on summer vacation surrounded by plucky ethnic working-class kids, or moving to the safely white and upper-class Connecticut suburbs from New York.
    “Next Stop Wonderland” is a rare exception for being a movie about non-working-class adults that *could* have been set in New York, or any other urban area, and happened to be set in Boston to good effect. One of the only non-college romances on the whole list.

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  22. I’m really glad that at least two of you saw Next Stop Wonderland. Good flick. And I went to high school with Hope Davis.
    If we want to include made for HBO series, there’s Empire Falls, which was okay. The book was much better. It’s got the class conflict theme, but it’s much more than the southies v. harvard kids cliche.

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