Ann Dusenberry

Psychotherapist Kramer (Richard Jordan) convenes an all-male chat group, including former baseball star Cavanaugh (Roy Scheider), businessman Solly (Harvey Keitel) and prudish Harold (Frank Langella), to open up about women, work and life, but the civil cocktail hour soon dissolves into an all-out frat party. When Kramer's wife, Nancy (Stockard Channing), returns home to eject the lot, they decide to trade idle talk for high-priced action.

Burned-out beach-bum Richard Bone (Jeff Bridges) and his best friend, disfigured Vietnam veteran Alex Cutter (John Heard), stumble on a murder cover-up involving a powerful landowner in director Ivan Passer's brooding crime thriller. But Bone gets more than he bargained for when Cutter insists on blackmailing the suspect, who forces them into a cunning cat-and-mouse game that ignites a full-blown war. Lisa Eichhorn plays Cutter's neglected wife.

Postwar America was a time of status quo, a conventional era at which three unconventional people thumbed their noses, lives foreshadowing the social and sexual upheavals of the 1960s: Jack Kerouac. Carolyn Cassady. And Neal Cassady, the free spirit who became the heroic model for Kerouac's landmark novel On the Road. Nick Nolte, Sissy Spacek and John Heard star in writer/director John Byrum's atmospheric portrait of the trio that marched to the sound of the Beat Generation before it was labeled by the media. In bringing to heartfelt big-screen life this poignant three-way love affair, each star gives an impressively revealing performance. All roads in mainstream America once led to tract homes just like those in Heart Beat. But Jack, Carolyn and Neal threw that road map away.

In the waning carefree days of high school, senior super jock Will Armer (Lane Caudell) faces the most important decision of his young life when he must choose between the safe college route and the coveted but risky shot at a baseball career. Influenced by his parents (William Windom and Julie Adams) and supported by his girlfriend (Ann Dusenberry) and best buddy (Darby Hinton), Will knows that he alone will have to live with his decision.