Asri-unix.227
net.movies
utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!menlo70!sri-unix!mclure
Tue Dec 15 15:05:44 1981
Taps
n065 1526 07 Dec 81
BC-REVIEW-''TAPS''
(Newhouse 011)
Film review, suggested for use when ''Taps'' opens at local theaters
By RICHARD FREEDMAN
Newhouse News Service
(UNDATED) If only Henry Fonda were president of the United States
and George C. Scott our top military leader, we'd have nothing to
worry about at home or abroad. Or would we? They'd probably loathe
each other as cordially as Truman and MacArthur did.
These idle speculations are raised by ''Taps,'' a taut, exciting
drama concerning a military academy about to be sold to make way for
condominiums after 141 years of turning out loyal, honorable youths
for the nation's officer corps.
Scott, who saw previous service as the hilarious martinet Gen. Buck
Turgidson in ''Dr. Strangelove,'' and the less hilarious martinet
Gen. George S. Patton in ''Patton,'' is here Gen. Harlan Bache,
commander of the beleaguered Bunker Hill Military Academy.
He is not happy about the situation, but he has a year's grace in
which to grit his teeth and ponder a solution. Meanwhile, he has a
fine, upright cadet major in Brian Moreland (Timothy Hutton). The kid
worships him.
Then a terrible thing happens. Outraged by some local louts who are
jeering at the cadets and their dates as they arrive for a
fancy-dress ball, Bache inadvertently kills one of them and promptly
succumbs to a heart attack.
The shooting causes one of the ugliest town situations in the
history of academe. The police confiscate the school's weapons and
order it closed immediately. Moreland, as ranking cadet, takes over
the place with about 100 loyal followers, and the battle is joined.
Ignominiously, Moreland's own father - a hard-as-nails career master
sergeant (Wayne Tippett) - is brought in to argue with him. But
Moreland Jr. can never forgive him for having allowed him exactly 15
minutes to mourn his mother's death when he was only 12 years old.
National Guard leader Col. Kerby (Ronny Cox) then appears on the
scene, with enough military clout behind him to refight the Battle of
the Bulge. Moreland remains adamant, although some of his younger
followers sneak off into the night.
At what point, the movie asks, does such a hero cease to be a man of
entrenched honor and become a dangerous death-lover?
For before the campus mutiny reaches its predestined end, many are
needlessly killed, including the brave young plebe (Brendan Ward) who
idolized Moreland as Moreland had idolized Gen. Bache.
''Taps'' deals with the seemingly unique situation of a campus
takeover by students determined to keep the institution going,
instead of bringing it to its knees. Unlike the student protesters of
the '60s, the cadets of Bunker Hill believe in a military code of law
and order. It's the civilians - and the more experienced military
brass - who want to compromise with our slack, self-indulgent times.
Yet, for all the seeming originality of its premise, ''Taps''
basically is an effective rehash of William Golding's novel, ''Lord
of the Flies,'' showing the disastrous results when idealistic youth
determines to reform society free of adult intervention.
What the youths consider a corrupt willingness to compromise may, in
fact, simply be the wisdom of keeping society going in an imperfect
world.
With a script derived from Devery Freeman's novel, ''Father Sky,''
these issues are not merely debated in the film - they're richly
dramatized.
Timothy Hutton, who won an Oscar for his performance as a troubled
adolescent in ''Ordinary People,'' is equally effective as a gung-ho
born leader forced by circumstances to act before his fervor can be
fully tempered by experience.
And although Scott disappears from the film before the halfway mark,
his Bache is a memorable addition to his gallery of obsessed military
leaders.
To watch him, in his uniform festooned with medals, testing himself
by taking apart and reassembling his service pistol blindfolded, or
imbuing his pet cadets with the proper sense of discipline and
tradition over their after-dinner port, is to watch the military mind
at its finest - and most limited.
So whatever one's attitude may be toward military schools or student
rebellions, ''Taps'' is a vividly dramatic, thoughtful movie about
the place of a rigidly conceived honor in a society gone generally
soft.
X X X
FILM CLIP: ''Taps.'' George C. Scott as the iron-jawed commander of
a military academy, and Timothy Hutton as the gung-ho cadet who leads
a student revolt, make this a taut, absorbing drama of military vs.
civilian codes of honor and survival. Three and a half stars.
RB END FREEDMAN
nyt-12-07-81 1825est
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