Screen
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
Screen HEAVY CASUALTIES DEBS & GRUNTS ZACHARY MAYO (Richard Gere) does finally become an officer, but not a gentleman. Zachary is in O.C.S. at the Mt. Rainier Naval Base in Washington state. He's...
...Foley has warned "all you sweetpeas," as he refers to the recruits in his platoon, about girls like Paula...
...Nine weeks...
...Unfortunately, Zachary doesn't listen to him, nor do Douglas Day Stewart and Taylor Hackford...
...That, I presume, is supposed to make it OK for things to work out well between Zach and Paula...
...Then they act as if there's nothing to it, a piece of cake...
...You'd think he was giving the mandatory lecture on hygiene...
...They settle into a relationship of pure sex at some sleazy motel every weekend...
...They are, respectively, the writer and director of An Officer and a Gentleman...
...Basic takes twelve weeks, so a deb figures she's got nine to make herself indispensable...
...When he drops out of basic to marry her, she doesn't want him anymore because he's not going to be a flier...
...This turn of events inspires him to go back to the sleazy motel, and kill himself...
...Between them, they have set this movie up as the most cliche proposition imaginable, one so cliche that even a man of Foley's limited vision can have only contempt for it...
...Foley spells all this out in detail...
...Five minutes after Zachary picks Paula up at a dance on the base she invites him to the beach for a quickie...
...It's about as unearned as a happy ending can get...
...He's trying to get into flight school, but first he's got to get through basic with a Marine drill instructor named Foley (Lou Gossett, Jr...
...But then, against all odds, and all belief, he suddenly does an about-face at the end...
...They think that all they have to do is show us a little tits-and-ass, and we'll see that Zachary and Paula are really in love in spite of everything...
...After graduating from boot camp, he gets on his motorcycle, rides to the factory where she works, and carries her out as the other people on the assembly line watch dewy-eyed and cheer...
...Foley's little speech to his sweetpeas is like a double dare Stewart and Hackford are delivering to themselves at the beginning of their movie: "OK, let's see you make something out of this hopeless situation...
...That means the debs are training and straining as hard as the grunts...
...Please, spare me...
...After that, the future fly boy will dispense with her because it's begun to dawn on him that he really will make it through the course and have a life after Foley...
...This is such a grim prospect that Zachary needs something to live for in the meantime...
...They flaunt the hopelessness by having Foley call attention to it...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...Soon she starts to take the relationship seriously just as Foley predicted,, and, sure enough, Zachary tries to dump her...
...They're what he calls "Puget debs," girls who work in a local dime store or factory and think of these flight-school-bound young innocents as their ticket out of poverty...
...He makes romance with a Puget deb sound about as attractive as a dose of the clap, and he recommends the same preventive measure against both...
...What's supposed to make it acceptable to us is the equally unbelievable bad luck of Zach's best friend, who also falls in love with a Puget deb...
...That something is weekend liberties with Paula (Deborah Winger...
Vol. 109 • October 1982 • No. 17
