During the summer of 1942, sixteen-year-old Gene Forrester attends Devon School, a private New England Academy. His roommate is Phineas, a free-spirited and cheerful nonconformist who is loved by everyone he meets. Gene, an introvert, tries to stifle his growing jealousy but is unable to control his envy of Finny’s athletic skill, natural popularity, and above all his innate goodness. Unable to bear the knowledge that Finny is a better person, Gene apparently shakes a tree branch that Finny is standing on. Finny falls to the ground and breaks his leg, permanently disabling him. After the incident, Gene meets with Finny and attempts to confess, but he then realizes that Finny desperately needs the illusion of friendship, and that he must boost his fallen friend’s self-confidence. Finny returns for the winter semester, refuses to accept the wartime influences permeating Devon and, though his own athletic career is finished, he commences to train Gene for the Olympics. Finny is initially resistant to the fact that a war is raging around them until another student, "Leper" Lepelier, returns AWOL and corroborates the horrible stories that up until then have not been informed by first-person narrative. Another student, the judicious-minded Brinker Hadley, instigates an inquiry into Finny’s accident and convenes a kangaroo court of fellow students. During this hearing, Leper reveals the truth about what happened, as he had been looking up from under the tree when Gene apparently shook the branch. Finny begins to cry and in his effort to escape the tribunal, he falls down the stairs and breaks the same leg. This second disaster has a curious healing effect on both boys, and when Gene visits Finny in the infirmary, the two are reconciled. Finny accepts the fact that Gene never meant to hurt him, and Gene reveals his belief that Finny would have been emotionally unfit for war, anyway. During a second procedure on his leg, bone marrow enters Finny's bloodstream and travels to his heart, killing him. The surgeon tells a shell-shocked Gene "there are risks, always risks" and the surviving boy realizes a part of him has died with his best friend.
of The New York Times wrote: Film historianLeonard Maltin denounced the picture in his annual Movie and Video Guide: "This supposedly-sensitive story, from an overrated novel, is morbid enough to make anyone gag. The acting is incredibly amateurish, and the direction has no feeling at all for the period. A Total Bummer is more like it." The film received glowingly positive reviews from William Wolf in Cue magazine, Wanda Hale in the New YorkDaily News and Rex Reed, who at the time was also writing for the Daily News. Reed called it "one of the best films about youth ever made" and added, "I have seen the film three times, and I dare say I have more left in me."
