There was no older Frank. When Frank, played by Jim Walton, arrived back at Lake Forest Academy to give his commencement address to the 1980 graduates, he was given his valedictorian speech from 1955 by the Lake Forest dean. He decides to read to the kids from it, and is embarrassed by his youthful idealism, but is clearly more disturbed by his failure to live up to the ideals he expressed back then. Then he gets to a sentence in his speech in which he said that he had found his life goal: writing music. The title song vamp starts. One of the Lake Forest graduates listening behind him stands up and becomes Mary and asks him a line she has in the rooftop scene: ”Frank, how does anyone write music? To me, that's the gift of gifts.” Then another graduate stands up and becomes Charley and says: ”You know what, buddy? Our songs are gonna change the world.” The song starts. Other graduates stand up as the song continues and become other people in his life, saying things to him, crucial things, that we will hear them say again as we move back in time.
There were some things about the third and final version that were improvements and perhaps some melding of the second and third versions would have been possible. (There were probably smallish changes to each version along the way, but three major versions, at least that I saw.) But Frank is in some ways very unsympathetic in the third version, telling the kids to give up on achieving their goals, and I think that is a problem. |
