I moved to central Massachusetts eight years ago. Early on, I heard that a diner in this town was used briefly as a set in the movie School Ties, so I thought I would someday watch this movie to check it out. I had not heard of it before I lived here. Today was the day.

The story takes place in the mid-1950s. We can tell the timing because of the bulby cars on the street and the beginnings of rock 'n' roll music on the radio. A local theater is showing Rebel Without a Cause. David Greene (Brendan Fraser) is a winning high school quarterback from Scranton, Pennsylvania. He has been recruited by St. Matthew's Academy, a small private prep school in Massachusetts, to spend his senior year there and hopefully lead the football team to a long-overdue victorious season. Coach McDevitt (Kevin Tighe) is responsible for bringing David to the school. His decision doesn't sit well with Charlie Dillon (Matt Damon), who HAD been the starting quarterback. Charlie likes it even less when David starts besting him in other endeavors.

What the rest of the seniors don't know is that David is Jewish. His is a fish-out-of-water story in several ways. He's not from the same monied class as most of the other St. Matthew's boys. He doesn't have a family lineage attached to a specific Ivy League college. His only expectations are to lead a successful football team, get a good education, and be accepted to Harvard. He will have to work hard to master these goals. What will happen if David's religion is revealed in this very WASPish environment? Will his classmates accept him because they already know him as a friend and a colleague? Or will old stereotypes and assumed prejudices surface quickly? We'll see.

Yes, one day, David agrees to meet his love interest, Sally Wheeler (Amy Locane) at the diner. And yes, I have eaten there too, many more times than they did. I also recognized the bus stop as an old train station located several towns away from here. It's now a convenience store. But it still carries the window sign marking it as the “Scranton, Penna. Bus Depot,” more than 30 years after the movie was made. I have often seen the lettering and wondered if buses actually stopped there. Now I understand the connection.

Something that bothered me were the numbers on the football uniforms. David is a quarterback. Yet, according to his old school jacket, he wore number 34 at Union Hill High School. Here at St. Matthew's, he's wearing number 42. Really? Shouldn't he have been assigned a much lower number? He's passing the ball off to players with jersey numbers in the 20s. I can't find a good source for when the uniform numbering protocols were established for high school football players. And no one reacting to the International Movie Database listing for this film has brought up this issue. Maybe it's just me. Maybe such standards weren't yet established in the 1950s. Maybe the producers did their research and knew this. Or maybe they didn't concern themselves with such details. After all, football is only PART of the story here. It's not the main focus.

School Ties is an okay film. Watch it if you want to catch glimpses of a few notable actors who were then in their early 20s and were just starting their careers. Ben Affleck and Chris O'Donnell also portray members of the senior class. Watch it if you want to see them all resort to nasty schoolboy fisticuffs. Because of its setting, the story shares a few hints and a few situations found in other prep school movies, like Dead Poets Society (1989) and Finding Forrester (2000). You might decide to choose to watch one of them, instead.