Finny returns for the winter semester; refuses to accept the wartime influences permeating Devon; and, though his own athletic career is finished, starts to train Gene for the Olympics.

Finny continues to be resistant to the fact that a war is raging in the world until another student, "Leper" Lepellier, returns absent without leave and corroborates the horrible stories that are only now beginning to be relayed via a first-person narrative.

Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote:[2] Larry Peerce's film version of A Separate Peace is so good and true in small, subsidiary details of costume, music, weather and such that the ultimate banality of what it's all about is just that much more apparent, and just that much more difficult to accept without seeming unnecessarily ill-tempered [...] Peerce is very good with his almost completely nonprofessional cast, especially with John Heyl, a stocky, handsome young man whose face reflects the profound cheerfulness of someone who will never grow old.

As he displayed in Goodbye, Columbus, Peerce has a positive talent not only for period detail, but also for knowing when and how to cut around and away from the performances of non-actors so that Heyl, Stevenson and a large proportion of the Exeter student body manage to come up trumps.

Film historian Leonard Maltin denounced the picture in his annual Movie and Video Guide: "Supposedly sensitive story of two roommates in a 1940s prep school, taken from John Knowles' overrated novel, is enough to make anyone gag.