Tesich’s Film Four Friends: An Immigrant’s Rites of Passage Viewed through a Prism of Race, Class, and Privilege

Steve Teisch was a brilliant screenwriter who kept his finger on the pulse of American culture in an intimate and earnest manner that allowed him to portray our American complexities, strengths, and contradictions externally and from deep within.

The film “Four Friends,” written by my East Chicago Roosevelt High School classmate, Steve Tesich, is an American coming-of-age genre film narrative. It’s set in East Chicago, Indiana, an industrial melting-pot town near Chicago.

As with many immigrants whose families arrived on Ellis Island in New York Harbor and eventually settled in America’s vast expanse of cities, villages, and hamlets, a new experience awaited the film’s protagonist.

The social mores and customs of one’s native “old country” are tested and often sublimely scrutinized by the dominant influences of the adopted new homeland and cultural context. In this great period film, set in the 1960’s Serbian-born writer Tesich draws upon the era’s prescient cultural and social issues of class, gender roles, family conflict, upward mobility, and the undercurrent of racial tension and anti-Semitism that was under broader scrutiny during Civil Rights decade in America.

In one scene from the film, the first-generation young Serbian American witnesses in utter dismay a hostile fight prompted by racial epithets hurled during his annual Senior Class Picnic at Lake Michigan’s Indiana Sand Dunes, now a National Park. This is a powerful scene that captures the undercurrent of the early 60’s and echoes our important national discourse on race and racism in America today.

D. Day Media 6.11.20