Screen
Westerbeck, Colin L Jr.
Screen EARLY RETIREMENT ENCOUNTER WITH TWO SENIOR CITIZENS Being A young curmudgeon myself, I'm always glad to make the acquaintance of an old curmudgeon. I always try to treat him with the...
...then he has a heart attack - things like that...
...Norman is getting on to eighty, and he has a wife named Ethel (Katharine Hepburn) who's no spring chicken herself...
...In light of this beginning, the best moment in the movie has to be when Bache, a few scenes later, complains bitterly to Mr...
...When Norman asks him what he likes to do at home in California, the kid has the spunk to tell the truth...
...Even the one I took a liking to - Norman Thayer, Jr...
...He pores over the help-wanted ads in The Local Astonisher looking for gainful employ...
...If he's not flirting with Ethel, he's flirting with senility...
...Unfortunately, like Norman's memory, or his angina palpitations, the comedy in this movie comes and goes...
...The whip-persnapper in Bache's life is Cadet Colonel Brian Moreland (Timothy Hutton), the commander of the corps at Bunker Hill Military Academy, where Bache is commandant...
...He is exactly the kind of fool that Norman won't suffer gladly, so why should I? Poor George C. Scott...
...Norman's got other plans...
...They have the kind of conversation we might imagine Abraham Lincoln would have with Richard Nixon...
...I walked out...
...Recently, I ran into two old curmudgeons at the movies, and for a while there I had high hopes for one of them...
...Taps turns into a right-wing version of Lindsay Anderson's If..., which was already pure nonsense in its original, left-wing version...
...The board of trustees decides behind the general's back to sell the school for development into condos...
...and after that's cleared up, he's under the impression that Bill would like to sleep with Ethel...
...For the first twenty minutes or half hour of the movie, Norman really had me going...
...Norman gets Bill's goat first thing by playing dumb...
...Bache is involved in the shooting of a civilian teenager...
...It's Billy's arrival that causes senility to set in to the movie itself - not only to Thompson's script, but to Mark Rydell's direction as well...
...The deterioration inside his body has finally reached a state of equilibrium with the mess that he always knew existed outside, in the rest of the world...
...Bache hasn't got the makings of a hard heart, just hard arteries...
...Bill is a dentist, and the boyfriend of Norman's daughter Chelsea (Jane Fonda), who is stopping off for a family visit on her way to vacation in Europe with Bill...
...Moreland about how today's movies always portray military leaders as madmen...
...I don't see how Norman could stand it...
...Since bad luck always comes in bunches, other catastrophes at once follow upon this one...
...And sure enough, although Billy starts out being auspiciously hostile and surly about this turn of events, Norman wins him over in two shakes of a bunny's tail...
...First he pretends to think that Bill is asking him to let Billy sleep with Chelsea...
...Why, in no time at all he's got Billy out fishing with him...
...He could make you believe that growing old might not be so bad after all...
...Actually, Billy doesn't look half bad himself at first...
...The result is not exactly what I would call inner peace...
...After what I'd seen in the first few reels, I assumed that nothing General Bache could do would bring him back to life...
...One reason Norman can get away with these monkeyshines is that he sometimes doesn't know whether he's coming or going, either...
...Still, if I'd had any sense I'd have realized right off that a man can't be perfect if he lives some place as sappy-sounding as "Golden Pond," the location which Ernest Thompson's adaptation of his hit play retains for the movie...
...Bill and Chelsea take off for Europe, leaving Billy in Norman and Ethel's care until they return...
...But it's given Norman a cranky, delightfully crabby wisdom about life...
...Despite a really promising beginning, in fact, it soon became apparent that Norman was not an old curmudgeon at all, but an old softie, a regular lamb in wolfs clothing...
...I figured that the movie was never going to top that remark...
...It's revolting...
...So I left...
...What's more, Billy comes with a perfect straight man in the person of his father, Bill Ray (Dabney Coleman...
...Basically, though, he just passes his time being a sourdough...
...He thinks chauffeur might be good, or maybe sales clerk...
...When Bill stumbles all over himself trying to ask whether it's all right for him and Chelsea to sleep together in Norman's house, Norman willfully misunderstands just what arrangements he's supposed to give permission for...
...In about the same amount of time it took On Golden Pond to get me hooked on Norman Thayer, Taps managed to lose me forever...
...He seems as if he's an obnoxious enough kid to give Norman a run for his money...
...Henry Fonda), who spends his summers out On Golden Pond - turned out to be a lot less flinty than he at first seemed...
...I always try to treat him with the courtesy to which I feel his age and bad temper entitle him...
...General Patton is never going to die...
...GENERAL HARLAN BACHE (George C. Scott), the senior citizen in Taps, is never really in a class with Norman Thayer, Jr...
...But in most of the rest of the movie, Norman's relationship with the kid renders them both depres-singly harmless...
...But Moreland and the rest of the corps rally behind him...
...Anybody living in a place with a name like that is bound to have a little sunshine fall into his life sooner or later, and the sunshine that falls into Norman's is a kid named Billy Ray (Doug McKeon...
...The way I figure it is, if a man doesn't suffer fools gladly, no matter how long it's taken him to learn such intolerance, he deserves my respect and admiration...
...At one point, he loses his way walking back from the end of his own road...
...But I'm sorry to say neither of them worked out...
...What a disappointment...
...After a few minutes of this little chat with Norman, Bill doesn't know whether he's coming or going...
...Fact is, she's about the only thing in life he does love, even though she's so spry and chipper and full of gumption, it's enough to drive you nuts...
...Taps opens with General Bache addressing the corps in stentorian, not to say Pattonian, tones...
...Bill is the humorless, overly earnest type who is Norman's meat...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...George is just going to fade away as an actor playing the role over and over and over again...
...They do more than that: they seize the enormous arsenal of grenade launchers, automatic weapons, and anti-tank guns Bache has built up for his kids to play with, and they take over the academy...
...She's forever sending him out to pick wild strawberries for lunch, or dreaming up some other nonsensical task for him to do...
...Norman loves Ethel quite a bit...
...I'm sorry I can't tell you the outcome of this fascinating dilemma...
...The only kind of stories more tedious than those about a boy and his dog are the ones about a boy and his gramps...
...Another time, he picks up a picture of himself with his family when Chelsea was little, and he can't figure out for the life of him who the heck those people in the photograph are...
...Cruise girls," he tells Norman, "and suck face" (you know, kiss...
...Belgium, huh," says Norman skeptically, "Does the fella speak any English...
...The only thing Bache has in common with Norman, in fact, is the insufferable devotion of a youngster...
...Norman does have an occasional relapse into his old, awful, wonderful self, as when Chelsea returns from her trip to Europe with Bill and announces that she got married in Belgium...
...It's more like a standoff...
Vol. 109 • January 1982 • No. 1
