The Wave

Ben Ross teaches history at an American high school. He is teaching Nazi Germany and the students ask how people allowed it. Instead of explaining, the teacher decides to show them. He starts a movement in the class; a slogan, a salute, an emblem. The rules are simple: discipline, community, action. The students join quickly. Within days the movement spreads through the school; those who do not belong are shut out, and a student who objects is threatened. The teacher loses control and has to stop the experiment. Alexander Grasshoff directs. Bruce Davison plays Ben Ross. Lori Lethin and John Putch are in the cast. Norman Lear and Virginia Carter produced. It is an American production. The film rests on a real experiment carried out in April 1967 by Ron Jones, a history teacher at a high school in Palo Alto, California. It was shown on television on 4 October 1981 and reached seventeen million viewers. The production won the Emmy for outstanding children's programme in 1982, and a Peabody award as well. The matter it treats is the wish to belong; what draws the students is not ideology but the ease of being part of a group. The film holds the teacher responsible too and does not make a hero of him. The narrative is short; it was made for television and runs under fifty minutes. The final scene in which the experiment is ended is still the strongest thing in it. The production is plain; it never leaves the corridors, the classroom and the gymnasium. Its limit is scale; the acting is at television level, the characters thin, and the narrative closes fast. Who it is for: people looking for something to show alongside a history lesson. Who it is not for: the production is plain, it is short, and the ending instructive.