OF ALL THE films Saint Nicholas stuck in our stockings this year, I like James Bridges' "The Paper Chase" best.



Bridges' movie about a Harvard law student is current at the Broadway. If you go, which I recommend, you'll have a chance to join one of two groups.



An alleged ambiguity of ending splits this film's audiences into either groaners or head-shakers.
The groaners can't understand why Hart (Timothy Bottoms) sails his grades notification into the ocean.


The remaining half of the audience greets Bridges' closing scene with an up and down nodding of heads. They affirm — at least I took that to be the intent - Bridges' statement on the nature of
higher education in the U.S.



It is a statement which Bridges manages to make seem original, even if it isn't; and lie and the viewer have come to it after a long and vicariously harrowing trip
through the halls of Academe.



Why half should reject Hart's dismissal of his A in Contract Law — there's the interesting mystery. Hart knows what he knows. Bridges has led us more or less logically to Hart's filmending
fit of perception. Where's the surprise?



Could it be that some viewers of "The Paper Chase" must gasp out loud because much as they
disbelieve in the accuracy and meaning of grade ratings, they yet believe in the material or
estimable value of good grades?



Maybe so. Or perhaps it's the film that's at fault. Bottoms' Hart hasn't much heart, or even apparent growing inlelligence, so his act of self-confidence may come across as mere social defiance.



In which case, to a few viewers, "The Paper Chase" turns into a kind of off-the-road and more contemporary "Paper Moon." And the impact of Bridges' analysis and conclusion fades to the puffery of similar earlier films - their subjects being nothing weightier than the culeness of dissident youth.



But, no. Bridges is a more substantial film-maker than that, and "The Paper Chase" despite its flaws amounts to an informed and - enjoyable examination of the grade race.



Hart, an awed young midwesterner, starts out a loser. Through a developing sense of self-misapplication, he gains some ground. He joins a study group. He polishes the apple of superficial brightness and presents it eagerly to his awe-inspiring if killingly remote professor, Kingsfield (John Houseman).



Hart is on his way "to the top." Next station, the Supreme Court. Distractingly, however, he keeps receiving disillusioning pieces of information. Kingsfield, Hart's deity on Earth, has feet of very low-grade human clay.



All the photographs of Kingsfield with the great figures of his own young manhood cannot undo what Kingsfield hasn't done for his daughter (Lindsay Wagner), with whom Hart happens to be
sleeping.



Nor can Hart quite reconcile the conceit of his classroom success with his increasingly Socratic attitudes toward the desperation of his peers. What initially struck Hart as a proper weeding out of inferior minds takes on the qualities of extreme predatory behavior. Spines are cracked. Packs howl. Recitation begins.



Hart over-achieves. But not, finally, in the way he envisioned. He transcends competitiveness and idolatry to arrive at knowledge and perspective.



Bridges' film — his first directorial effort — hits at a time when many of us arr still
wondering how the lawyers of Watergate fame got trained. Hart's study group suggests a
nasty but plausible explanation.



There's an excellent side study as well, of a student's marriage going under. The agonies of an ex-footballer with a photographic memory and a wealth of marital responsiblities is outlined with almost disturbing compassion on Bridges' and the actors' parts.



Yet "The Paper Chase" is not, as they say, a thorough masterpiece. Through subtlely and not
so subtlely gained impressions, we know how and why Hart opts out of his mindless participation in Formal Education. But the decision seems abrupt, vaguely hasty, as pictured in the film.



Nor is Bottoms ideal in the role of Hart. The character calls for a guile and restlessness which Bottoms never makes felt, and the addition of a mustache is not, I think going to convert a horde of filmgoers into visualizing Bottoms as a would-be legal-genius.



Lindsay Wagner is better in the role of Kingsfield's daughter. She suggests

Tom Nickell