I remember the talk in the hallways at school the morning after ABC-TV reran “Brian’s Song” sometime in the mid-’70s. Every kid who watched it, or caught it the first time in 1971, said the same thing, more or less, the boys especially. Some variation on a theme of awkward, stupidly embarrassed admission:
Gotta admit, got kinda choked up there at the end.
That was James Caan’s doing. He made a nation choke up en masse, in his deathbed scene opposite Billy Dee Williams.
