1980 Week: Private Benjamin

          After years of sharing top billing with male costars, Goldie Hawn finally scored a major box-office hit of her own thanks to Private Benjamin, the military-themed comedy that she also helped produce. Hiding a multilayered feminist message beneath a silly farce about a Jewish American Princess becoming a soldier, the picture has just enough substance to make up for the paucity of laugh-out-loud jokes. And while supporting players including Armand Assante and Eileen Brennan excel in juicy roles, Hawn‘s goofy appeal anchors the picture. Private Benjamin is all about the ridiculous spectacle of a tiny blonde with doe eyes running around obstacle courses in fatigues, complaining about damage to her fingernails and the unsatisfactory accommodations in her barracks. If there’s a major flaw in Private Benjamin, it’s that the movie lacks a big mission that tests the title character’s mettle—essentially, the sort of third act that was contrived for the following year’s military-themed comedy, Stripes (1981). However, Private Benjamin is only nominally about the Armed Forces, because soldiering is just a phase the title character passes through on the way to self-actualization.

          The movie begins with a lively wedding sequence, during which spoiled Judy Benjamin (Hawn) suffers a surprising loss: Her brand-new husband, Yale (Albert Brooks), dies of a heart attack during wedding-night sex. Devastated and lost, Judy meets a friendly stranger named Jim (Harry Dean Stanton), who offers a new life filled with adventure and luxury. By the time Judy realizes Jim is a military recruiter, she’s fallen for his vision of Army service as an extended vacation. Basic training sets her straight, especially when Judy clashes with stern Captain Lewis (Eileen Brennan), but Judy soon realizes she needs to see this thing through because she’s never accomplished anything. Her journey is complicated when she meets dashing Frenchman Henri (Assante), so a dramatic question takes shape: Will Judy discard her newfound sense of pride by settling back into the narcotizing cycle of domesticity and wealth?

          The script for Private Benjamin is shallow, and the writers tend to portray men as one-dimensional ogres. (Cowriter Nancy Meyers, later to become a rom-com titan, received her first credit—and her first Oscar nomination—for Private Benjamin.) Yet Private Benjamin works. The movie presents a steady stream of lighteheated moments, some of which contain a measure of sociopolitical resonance. Oscar-nominated Brennan makes a strong impression as a woman succeeding in a man’s world through pure toughness, while Assante explodes with energy and machismo, playing a special kind of dreamy jerk. Hawn floats through it all, coming across as bubbly even when her character is despondent, and setting the mood with her seemingly effortless comic skill and a touch of solid dramatic acting. She was rewarded with such impressive box-office success that a Private Benjamin TV show soon followed. Running from 1981 to 1983, the show replaced Hawn with Lorna Patterson, although Brennan reprised her supporting role.

Private Benjamin: GROOVY

1980 Week: Little Darlings

          Despite being utterly conventional in terms of storytelling and technical execution, Little Darlings is unusual because it presents a sensationalistic premise without lapsing into vulgarity. Yet the film cannot be described as sophisticated, because the characterizations are one-dimensional and the picture often gets mired in nonsense along the lines of uninspired physical comedy. So perhaps the best way to describe Little Darlings is to say that it’s not nearly as offensive as it could have been, given the confluence of juvenile actors and salacious subject matter. Set at a typical American summer camp for girls, the film revolves around the tense relationship between Angel (Kristy McNichol), the chain-smoking tomboy daughter of a promiscuous single mother, and Ferris (Tatum O’Neal), the naïve and pretentious daughter of a wealthy couple undergoing a separation as a prelude to divorce. The instant the young ladies meet each other on the bus headed for camp, they hate each other. Upon their arrival in the woods, both girls inadvertently reveal to bitchy beauty Cinder (Krista Errickson) that they’re virgins, so Cinder takes bets on whether Angel or Ferris will be the first to have sex over the course of the summer.

          Angel happens upon Randy (Matt Dillon), a tough kid attending a nearby boy’s camp, while Ferris sets her sights on Gary (Armand Assante), a grown-up counselor at the girls’ camp. The picture unfolds in a lighthearted manner, with brightly lit scenes set to a thumping pop soundtrack featuring tunes by Blondie and the Cars (among other Top 40 acts of the era) until the climactic scene when one of the girls consummates her flirtation with the man she’s chosen. That sequence is handled with restraint and even a kind of unvarnished reverence, thereby elevating the rest of the otherwise pedestrian movie by association. McNichol, who gained fame on the ’70s TV series Family, and O’Neal, who earned an Oscar for her screen debut in Paper Moon (1973), work on different levels—McNichols’ performance is raw and vulnerable, whereas O’Neal plays a amiable caricature. Assante mostly seems as if he’s struggling to avoid looking embarrassed, and Dillon exhibits the brooding quality that made him a star just a few years later, complementing the fine work he does in another 1980 release, My Bodyguard.

Little Darlings: FUNKY

Paradise Alley (1978)

          While Paradise Alley is unmistakably a major ego trip for Sylvester Stallone—he wrote, directed, and stars in the picture, and he even (over)sings the theme song—his onscreen presence is more muted than one might expect, given the circumstances. A cornball ensemble piece about three Italian-American brothers living in Hell’s Kitchen circa the late ’40s, the film as much a showcase for costars Armand Assante and Lee Canalito as it is for Stallone. In fact, Canalito gets the showiest part because he spends much of the movie in a wrestling ring, playing the same sort of undereducated underdog that Stallone did in Rocky (1976) and its endless sequels. Yet if Stallone demonstrated restraint by ensuring that Paradise Alley wasn’t entirely about his character, that’s the only restraint he demonstrated—in every other regard, Paradise Alley is florid, overwrought, and schmaltzy.

          Our hero, Cosmo Carboni (Stallone), is a street hustler who anachronistically wears long hair and an earring while he pulls one scheme after another because he doesn’t want to work for a living. His brother Victor (Canalito) is a gentle giant who hauls ice up apartment-building stairs for a living—which means that, of course, we get an epic, sweaty scene of Victor lugging ice, only to have it fall down and shatter (in slow motion). Their other sibling, Lenny (Assante), is a haunted war veteran with a limp who works as an undertaker. Because, you see, he’s dead inside. Subtlety, thy name is not Stallone. As the turgid narrative unfolds, Cosmo courts Lenny’s ex, dancehall girl Annie (Anne Archer), and Cosmo gets into hassles with local mobster Stitch (Kevin Conway, giving the film’s most cartoonish performance). Eventually—which is to say, halfway through the movie, once Stallone remembers to generate a plot—Cosmo asks Victor to become a wrestler so the family can get rich. Inexplicably, this decision transforms Lenny into an avaricious prick, allowing Stallone to twist the story so his character can grow a conscience. 

          After several diverting but pointless sequences—Lenny decides he wants Annie back, Cosmo bonds with a broken-down wrestler (Frank McRae), and so on—the movie climaxes in an interminable wrestling match that is set, for no reason except that Stallone wanted a visual flourish, during a rainstorm. Cue repetitive shots of Canalito and his sparring partner flipping each other into puddles for maximum slow-mo splashing! The great cinematographer László Kovács shoots the hell out of Stallone’s absurd scenes, making the movie look better than it deserves, and the acting is so flamboyant that many scenes have energy. However, Paradise Alley is both clichéd and confusing—it’s as if Stallone couldn’t decide which old movies he wanted to pillage, so he copped something from all of them. Combined with the excessive storytelling style, the haphazard cribbing from vintage cinema turns Paradise Alley into an unappealing jumble.

Paradise Alley: LAME

Prophecy (1979)

Creature-feature stinker Prophecy is hilarious because no one involved seems to realize they’re making an awful movie. Set in northern Maine, the story concerns a clash between pollution-generating white folks and tree-hugging Native Americans, with a big-city physician (Robert Foxworth) and his knocked-up missus (Talia Shire) caught in between. So far, so good. But then the Natives start talking about a legendary nature spirit that’s angry with the way the local woods are being defiled, and the titular prophecy comes true when a pollution-spewed monster arrives to take out the reckless palefaces and anybody else who gets in the way of its goo-covered talons. Aside from a generally histrionic tone, the first clue the movie has gone off the rails is the appearance of Irish-Italian actor Armand Assante as a Native American; not only is he preposterously miscast, he overacts like someone put crank in his morning coffee each day. Foxworth is beardy and serious, offering a typical sane-in-a-world-gone-mad routine, while Shire tries to retain her dignity playing an underdeveloped character who’s mostly around to get endangered. Only the terrific Richard Dysart, playing an employee of the polluting mill, hits the right campy tone. John Frankenheimer, the venerable Manchurian Candidate director who spent much of the ’70s and ’80s making trash beneath his station, ensures unintentional humor by playing everything in Prophecy straight, like the scene of a giant mutated salmon leaping from the depths of a lake to chomp on a duck, or the absurd climax in which a mutated bear-thing tromps around while covered in glistening muck. Steadily building from silliness to outright stupidity, Prophecy is a must-see for fans of genre-movie train wrecks.

Prophecy: FUNKY