An Officer and a Gentleman

Until I saw An Officer and a Gentleman, I thought that Richard Gere is type-cast as a lover who never really showed his acting skills, but enjoyed an enormous amount of erotic scenes, even though you would not think of him as the type. However, after seeing this film I have to say he performed probably the best role in his career. At first glance the film appears as that kind of a mix between romance, comedy and drama, which it actually is. The romance plot did not ruin it, quite the contrary. It’s not as bittersweet as might seem. Even a commander of an infantry regiment appears in the film – the actor Louis Gossett Jr., and I totally understand why he got an Oscar for this part. I wouldn’t think that this actor from the Stargate has such an acting history – hats off. I really enjoyed this film. After all, it has a kind of a male spirit that the films nowadays lack so much. (13/05/2019)

One of the reasons the 80s film industry looked the way it did was undoubtedly because that's when men with war experience or just seduced by the military propaganda of the late 60s and early 70s began to take executive positions, opposed only by a minimal counterculture exhausted by the activist 70s and drug binges. Combined with the ubiquitous Reaganite politics of individualism, this created the perfect breeding ground for films of this type, see Taps, Stripes, Private Benjamin, Up the Academy, and The Lords of Discipline. An Officer and a Gentleman, then, is a perfect example of the kind of film that the baby boomer generation grew up on. It's cynical, arrogant, misogynistic, and espouses the values of male friendship, discipline (overseen by tough but fair military authorities), and hard work. This, by the way, is also what makes this film amusing today, because in its ignorance it is unable to fundamentally rethink anything it stood for from the beginning, so it is virtually devoid of development and only works in individual episodes. These surprise you not only by how well they’re shot, but perhaps also by the surprising naturalism for this type of film. This actually makes the film quite adept at disguising what a terrible piece of crap it is, right up until the end, when it thankfully reveals its true colors in a finale with all the pomp and circumstance and even applause. Either way, Sergeant Foley's waterfalls of insulting drill speeches convince me once again that I should start collecting the film's parade ground scenes. (21/04/2020)