Review: Biloxi Blues

Part two in Neil Simon’s trilogy of stories featuring the life and times of one Eugene Morris Jerome (Matthew Broderick). This one centres on his time in basic training at the tail end of WWII, having to contend with a possibly psycho drill instructor named Sgt. Toomey (Christopher Walken) for ten gruelling weeks. This guy is the kind of DI who when he catches you screwing up, will ask you to name someone else to carry out a suitable punishment, and knowing you’ll select a weakling or close ally (Hello, Casey Siemaszko), will ignore your answer and choose the big bully to do the punishment. Basically, he’s a prick. Meanwhile, we also see Eugene’s desire to lose his virginity, visiting a husky-voiced hooker (Park Overall, in the only performance of her career that isn’t irritating) with his fellow soldiers, before romancing a Catholic ‘good girl’ (Penelope Ann Miller, pretty much ditto) while on weekend leave. Corey Parker (who later played Jerome in “Broadway Bound”) plays uptight Jewish intellectual recruit Epstein, frequently bullied by the other men, and hardly helped by Jerome, a fellow Jew who is too busy writing everything down in his journal (The group begin to resent Jerome for this, feeling like he sees himself as better than them). Michael Dolan plays the sensitive peace-keeper of the group, Hennessey, who harbours a potentially dangerous secret. All of this is set in the title town in Mississippi, as some kind of combo between coming-of-age story and “Stripes”.

 

Directed by Mike Nichols (“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”, “The Graduate”, “Wolf”), and scripted by playwright Neil Simon (“The Odd Couple”) from his own semi-autobiographical play, this 1988 basic training flick is frequently hilarious (unlike Nichols’ rather dull, absurdist “Catch-22”), nostalgic, somewhat observant, and always entertaining.

 

The opening half-hour, in particular, is really quite brilliant, even if the basic story is nothing new. Also, is this the first example of the now typical Christopher Walken performance? Both scary and funny, he eschews the loudly belligerent R. Lee Ermey route (much as I love Ermey) instead playing the drill sergeant as relatively quiet spoken, but nonetheless a seriously hard taskmaster. He’s absolutely brilliant at any rate (steel plate in his head and all), and Matthew Broderick’s line in sarcasm is almost as amusing as it was in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” (He narrates both films as well, this one nostalgically).

 

An extremely underrated film that might well be one of the best films of its type. It’s certainly better than “Private Benjamin”, “In the Army Now” and countless others I could name (probably about on par with “Stripes”, though). Definitely a must for Walken fans in particular, as it’s one of his best performances. There’s no pocket watch monologues, but most of the usual Walken-isms are here in their infancy.

 

If you saw this film back in the 80s, you might just find that you’ve forgotten how damn good it is. I know that was the case for me.

 

Rating: B