THE GREAT SANTINI (65)

Directed by: Lewis John Carlino

Starring: Robert Duvall, Blythe Danner, Michael O'Keefe, Lisa Jane Persky

The Pitch: In the early 60s, a colonel in the Marine Corps has trouble adjusting to peacetime life, making life difficult for his family.

Theo Sez: Such a strange, erratic film. Definitely runs on too long, and some of it, like the saintly black boy who expands our teen hero's horizons (then gets martyred by rednecks) is horribly trite, no doubt why the film flopped with trendier critics on release ("It takes place in the TV land of predictability" - Pauline Kael). Yet the resemblance to made-for-TV drama also points up the differences, and reminds us how glib and degraded the genre's become in the decades since. We're not used to seeing a family dominated by a tyrannical macho father - a Marine colonel, to boot - shown without some reductive psychobabble buffer, maybe a scene where the father explains how his own Dad was equally unable to express his feelings. We're not used to seeing Mom clearly admiring her husband even as she tries to mediate between him and the kids - the long-suffering wife is almost always a victim in such films (you end up wondering why she married the sonofabitch in the first place), yet this one apes his military ways as if anxious to be worthy of him, getting the kids in formation with instructions on how to walk up to him when his plane lands (they rush all over him instead, and he's delighted). We're not used to seeing good times as well as bad in a clearly dysfunctional family, or a petty tyrant who runs his home like a barracks being portrayed with a hint of humour, an emotionally stunted prankster who gets a kick out of playing soldier : the film's best scene has Persky as the smart-ass teenage daughter trying to get his attention by needling him, making fun of his whole upright worldview ("Dad I'm pregnant!" she wails, falling at his feet. "I'm pregnant by a Negro, Daddy. His name is Rufus. He's a pacifist homosexual") - you wait for him to explode but he retreats behind his paper in embarrassment, as if aware, deep down, of his own ludicrousness. Partly nostalgia, I suppose - even the opening credits are refreshing, dispensing with corporate logos and So-And-So Presents, and the 70s film stock gives it a four-square, unpretty look - but it does seem uncommonly honest, closer to real family life despite its flaws and contrivances ; makes the easy caricature of AMERICAN BEAUTY and its ilk a little harder to swallow, at any rate.