Given Hollywood’s well-documented obsession with youth, the abundance of films set in high schools and colleges comes as no surprise. But cinematic depictions of community-college life have been few and far between, which leaves distinguished filmmakers like Rocky director John Avildsen and Nashville screenwriter Joan Tewkesbury to uncover the seamy underbelly of some of America’s least-respected places of higher learning. In A Night In Heaven, Lesley Ann Warren stars as a prim community-college instructor who, against her better judgement, allows free-spirited sister Carrie Snodgress to drag her to a local strip club. Her defenses lowered by the demon white wine, Warren turns beet-red when she recognizes one of the club’s many buff crotch-thrusters as one of her students. “Oh my God, I just flunked that kid!” she screams upon spying satin-pants-sporting part-time student Christopher Atkins. She soon comes to regret this academic rejection, once she learns just how gifted he is at humping the club’s stage amid a wonderland of dry ice, neon, and bubble machines. Their illicit desire, fueled by Animotion music and Atkins’ eagerness to grind those satin pants into Warren’s face, leads teacher and student to share a steamy kiss. But the path of true love seldom runs smoothly for golden-haired striptease artists and repressed community-college instructors, and Warren is torn between her attraction to Atkins and her love for depressed husband Robert Logan. After a night of passion with Atkins ends with the Pirate Movie star copulating with a female stripper in the same motel shower he once shared with Warren, Warren decides to leave her student lover behind once and for all. No longer in sway to Atkins’ hypnotically thrusting groin and cocky charm, she reconciles with Logan, settling in for a long, happy, and presumably stripper-free life together.
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