Wasn’t our Tommy boy supposed to be in another Top Gun fest this summer? What’s that? Not a Top Gun? Another Mission: Impossible? They’re not pumping out TP (yes, it can mean “toilet paper,” too) sequels like pancakes after that last one saved Hollyweird?

By Paul Mavis

Well…on that cautiously hopeful note, why not go back to the movie that probably prodded Paramount to give the green light for Xenu 2: Electric Boogaloo‘s huge 1984 hit in the first place: Paramount’s equally stupid 1982 smash, An Officer and a Gentleman, from director Taylor Hackford, screenwriter Douglas Day “I actually put The Blue Lagoon on my resume” Stewart, and starring he of the shoe-button eyes and perpetual pout Richard Gere, Debra Winger, David Keith, and Louis Gossett Jr.

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Zack Mayo (Richard Gere) is a punk from the wrong side of the world who has somehow managed to graduate from a small, backwoods college. How he managed that is conveniently never explained…but then he couldn’t be a naval officer candidate unless he was a college graduate, so the script skips over inconvenient matters like that. His father (Robert Loggia) is a drunken lout of a chief petty officer who enjoys whoring around with his son—preferably in the same motel room with the same hooker. Fed up with his wastrel lifestyle, Zack rides off on his Triumph motorcycle to become, you guessed it, an officer and a gentleman in the United States Navy.

Naturally, though, this callow youth thinks the Navy game is just another dodge he can scam his way through; he’s got a lot of growing up to do before he can wear those dress whites. Making friends with “dumb Oakie” Sid Worley (David Keith), Zack still can’t leave his hustling ways behind him, setting up a polishing boonies-for-dough scam that could get him kicked out of the program if his tough-as-nails drill sergeant Emil Foley (Louis Gossett Jr.) ever found out. But of course, this is a movie, so the flip side of Foley’s snarling, sadistic personality is a big ‘ol softie who’s secretly pulling for our attractively troubled, gorgeous hero.

You see, Zack is actually a leader; he just doesn’t know it yet (with “leaders” like this in the Navy, you better learn Chinese). All he needs is a little love and understanding, and he’ll be as right as rain. As Foley tries to reach out to Zack, who keeps insisting on being a “rebel” and a “loner,” Paula Pokrifki (Debra Winger) not only reaches out to Zack, but snags herself naval cadet Zach for a boyfriend, the prize catch for a “Puget Sound Deb,” like townie Paula. Sid scores a “Deb” as well, in the form of “bodacious” Lynette Pomeroy (Lisa Blount). But whereas Paula actually cares for Zack, Lynette is a shrewd little hustler who dreams of living the high life of a naval aviator’s wife, stationed in ports of call all over the world, and she’s willing to lie about anything—including being pregnant with Sid’s baby—to achieve her dream.

Naturally, Zack has to go through many trials and tribulations—both personal and professional—including irrationally dumping Paula several times, before he can get his act together and fly right. It takes a personal tragedy to bring this message home to rebel Zack, the message being: no man is an island. Okay. Right. Now, having learned that profound lesson, he’s free to love Paula, and free to fly jets.

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The date movie of my high school years, director Taylor Hackford’s An Officer and a Gentleman plays even worse today than it did over 40 (!) years ago…and nobody who knew good movies liked it back then, either. You want real conflict? Skip naval aviator candidate Zack Mayo’s phoney on-screen posturing and try to explain to your disgusted teenaged date (“Why can’t you just enjoy it? Why can’t you show some emotion? Why can’t I have nachos?”) why An Officer and a Gentleman is nothing more than a warmed-over Warner Bros. programmer from the 1930s, with some nudity and foul language thrown in to make it hip. Now that’s conflict.

Banal and simplistic to beat the band, An Officer and a Gentleman took every military romance cliché it could find and shoehorned them into a supposedly “modern” take on love and personal redemption (read: nude scenes and the “F” word ladled over dramatics that were already camp in the 1930s), tricking a lot of kids who never saw an old movie into thinking they were experiencing something new and different. Well, I grew up Bill Kennedy At the Movies, so I was hip to the sham. I clearly remember alternately groaning and laughing at An Officer and a Gentleman when I first saw it (“God, you’re an ass…can I get some popcorn?”). However, to be fair, I’ve had enough experience to know that the years can change a lot of things when it comes to watching movies. Titles you loved as a kid can go sour, and stuff you hated back then can sometimes flower into meaningful titles when you’re more receptive to the experience. Unfortunately, An Officer and a Gentleman is just as hackneyed and dreary as it was back in ’82.

The director and screenwriter utterly fail to provide one shred of suspense as to whether or not Zack will make it through his two chief obstacles: the supposedly grueling training period, and the far more dangerous proposition of starring opposite Debra Winger. Of course he will, though, and the audience is ten steps ahead of the movie the whole way. They know exactly what will happen to Sid; they know exactly how Zack and Paula will resolve their differences. Playing like a souped-up After School Special, with an appropriately moronic, uplifting theme song that wells up constantly in the background (made even more hilarious by the mental image of Joe Cocker spastically emoting this arena-rock anthem), the romantic elements of An Officer and a Gentleman are laughably rote.

Enormously popular with young audiences who had never seen a “military romance” before (it was the third highest-grossing movie of 1982), An Officer and a Gentleman struck hard-core movie fans as nothing more than a sorry retread of every bromide in all those military fillers from the 1930s and 1940s starring the likes of Pat O’Brien and Jimmy Cagney…with even a couple of Abbott and Costellos thrown in for good measure. When this was pointed out by several critics at the time, I remember defenders of An Officer and a Gentleman saying this was a good sign on the part of audiences who were ready to re-embrace the military at the beginning of the so-called Reagan Revolution.

Of course that’s a false proposition, because the vast majority of the American movie audience never abandoned the U.S.military—they just hadn’t seen very many positive depictions of the armed forces coming out of traditional America-hating Hollywood in the previous decade or so. As for An Officer and a Gentleman being somehow “patriotic,” the movie studiously avoids being specifically gung-ho, with the Navy experience used more as a vehicle for Zack’s personal redemption rather than as an honored entity of traditions and service that Zack actively pursues (just like Top Gun. Zack never comes off as fighter for America; his mantra is a totally selfish, unexplained obsession to “fly jets,” but we’re never given even a peek into Zack’s psyche as to why that is so important to him.

I suppose the screenwriter felt it was a simple enough visual motif for Zack’s desire to rise above the common dirt of his life, but it would have been nice for the audience if they had at least tried to have Zack explain his desire to fly jets. As well, the Navy never seems that vitally important a destination to him. Rather, he joined it on a whim, as he says, and it becomes his last stop-gap measure before falling off into a personal abyss. As Zack bellows to Foley when he’s almost forced out of the program, “I got no place else to go!” (one of the all-time great movie lines for self-pitying losers to use on bosses and girlfriends ready to ditch them).

Indeed, that’s one of the major failings of An Officer and a Gentleman: its total lack of verisimilitude concerning the military experience. To anyone familiar with the Navy, or for that matter, any branch of the service, it’s obvious that the Navy denied full cooperation with the movie producers (critically, they refused to let the producers film at the real Aviation Officer Candidate School in Pensacola). The location work in and around Port Townsend is unconvincing, particularly the abandoned U.S. Army base Fort Warden looking decidedly funky for a supposedly spic-n-span naval air station, as well as a Boy Scout-approved obstacle course that seems more Club Med than grueling punisher.

Big, important chunks of Zack’s training are abandoned in the movie, particularly the dreaded “Survival Week” that everybody in the movie comments on…but the filmmakers never show (just like they never show him flying those big, expensive jets, either). And the conflicts between Foley and Mayo are laughably inept. Although Gossett Jr. won an Oscar for his portrayal as the tough/soft drill instructor, he’s one of the least convincing D.I.s you’ll see in a movie. Giving Zack a supposedly cruel, but in actuality a giggily creampuff nickname (“Hey, Mayo-nnaise!”), the interactions between Gossett Jr. and Gere never take off into the dangerous territory they desperately need to occupy. We never truly believe that Foley hates Mayo for even a second, and we never fear for Zack’s life—as we should in every military movie with a sadistic drill instructor. These are actors playing at soldiers; we never get transported past their unreality (watch Lee Ermey—who worked here with Gossett Jr. as an advisor—in Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket to see the difference. For that matter…even Jack Webb in The D.I. is more convincing).

Apparent softening and tampering in the script abound in An Officer and a Gentleman (in order to make a “Hollywood romance,” not a believable, gritty drama), with Winger’s Paula character coming off as the least believable. Is she a “good girl?” Or is she a whore, like her friend Lynette? Does that sound too simplistic a reduction? Well, the movie wants to play it both ways, with us believing that Paula more than knows her way around the officer cadets (she’s got the drill down pretty well). However, once she’s with Gere, she’s proclaiming she’s not really that kind of girl.

Well, is she or isn’t she? The movie won’t say, and what’s more, it doesn’t have the guts to spell it out, let alone the screenwriting ability of allowing her to be both—and more (Winger, a remarkable actress, is given nothing to do here). This isn’t intended character complexity; it’s poor scripting, and Winger comes off alternately as man-trap and simpleton, willing to take Zack’s abuse unquestioningly (no wonder Winger hates this movie—she takes just as much sh*t off her male counterpart as she did in the previous Urban Cowboy). The less said about Keith’s Sid Worley character the better; suffice to say, it’s of the most gross spuriousness. Instead of “Sid Worley” stamped on his uniform, they should have printed “Plot Device/Victim,” and saved us all the trouble.

There’s a germ of a character in Gere’s Zack Mayo, but frankly, after all the narcissistic posturing that forever-posturing Gere summons up instead of true emoting (granted, he has no help from the script), only the most masochistic teenybopper could possibly interest herself in his plight (thank god we were spared the sight of an attitudinized John Denver strutting around in dress whites—the star originally signed for the role). The only one who comes out unscathed from all this calculated audience pap is the believably grungy Robert Loggia as Mayo’s rundown father. There might have been a compelling movie in there, had the producers just followed Loggia and Gere’s downward spiral. Instead, he’s on and off before the movie even gets started, and his presence is sorely missed.

But hey…that don’t sell tickets. Instead, we’re treated to Gere managing to become a team player for America and more importantly, himself (yes!), graduating his course, and saluting his bestest newest buddy D.I. Foley, who comes close to breaking down from the shared emotion (steady, girls…). Cue that godawful song and the triumphant freeze frame as Zack, now literally a gallant white knight riding up on his Triumph cycle (he’s still such a rebel…) and dress whites, carries Paula out of her dreary factory job, and into the sunlight. Wait: you’re mad that I spoiled An Officer and a Gentleman‘s big finale? Come on…you knew the ending all along.

PAUL MAVIS IS AN INTERNATIONALLY PUBLISHED MOVIE AND TELEVISION HISTORIAN, A MEMBER OF THE ONLINE FILM CRITICS SOCIETY, AND THE AUTHOR OF THE ESPIONAGE FILMOGRAPHY. Click to order.

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