Actors and Scripts

...Gutcheon's novel was roundly and properly blasted by critics for crassly exploiting the real-life case of Etan Patz, the boy who vanished in lower Manhattan a few years ago and has never been seen since...

...Eyes flashing, lips curling, Susan scornfully replies with the hauteur that has become Nelligan's trademark: "Where the hell do you get off telling me how I feel...

...The bad upperclassmen are unfairly harassing the poor plebes, and the honorable Will (Keith) must put a stop to it...

...As Will, he is just boyish enough to believe in the academy's honor and be disillusioned by the secrets he uncovers, and just determined enough to carry off his one-man coup, the script deficiencies notwithstanding...

...Nevertheless, Susan is so insufferably self-satisfied throughout that the role seems to have been created with Nelligan in mind...

...The only reason to see Independence Day is Keith, who's on his way to becoming a real star...

...This year, in Plenty on Broadway, she has been portraying a similar woman with unintentionally ridiculous feelings of superiority to her husband (a dullard), her work (beneath her) and her country (not what it used to be...

...It was right in the end, Gutcheon is proclaiming, for Susan to abuse Graham—he wasn't as good a father as she was a mother...

...Keith also stars in The Lords of Discipline, directed by Franc Rod-dam...

...Mother knows best: That is the apparent moral of Without a Trace...

...Some of the moments of adolescent male camaraderie are well done, if unstartling...

...Her willful winsomeness is pretty hard to take after a few minutes, especially since she's not the precocious adolescent she was in I Never Promised You a Rose Garden and Lifeguard...

...In last year's laughable Eye of the Needle she played a holier-than-thou housewife who heroically bore the burden of both an abusive, crippled husband and a charming lover who turned out to be a Nazi spy...

...Moreover, she has been typecast on screen and stage...

...A few years back another Conroy novel, The Great Santini (centering on a career Air Force pilot), found its way to prominence via a circuitous route...

...As Susan Selky, the mother of young Alex (Daniel Bryan Corkill), who mysteriously vanishes one day, she flaunts her passions shamelessly, less to reveal a confusing welter of emotions—a mother's guilt, fear and helplessness—than to demonstrate how much better a person she is compared with all the callous boobs around her...

...Along with William Hurt, he could be the first non-ethnic, or at least nonethnic-appearing star to come along since the crew now in their 40s and 50s: Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, Robert Redford, Clint Eastwood, Burt Reynolds...

...You never cared enough to stop screwing around," Susan says, triumphantly countering with proof of his insensitiv-ity...

...Nancy sends away her kids for the day, turns on the stove and oven, extinguishes the pilot lights, waits for her husband to come home, and then strikes a match, blowing up herself and him...

...These shortcomings are even more evident in the film because the first 90 minutes consist of little more than Nelligan's self-indulgent theatrics—mere prelude to a drawn-out reunion between mother and son, painfully milked to leave no eyes in the theater dry...

...Soap suds also clog Alice Hoffman's works—her novels, such as the recent White Horses, as well as her original screenplay for Independence Day...

...by pure chance, a crank call turned out to be genuine...

...Not the best of the lot(The Grreat Santini was), The Lords of Discipline is not the worst either (that distinction belongs to Taps...

...She smokes cigarettes in a holder, wears a beret and dresses like a holdover from the beatnik era...

...Nor did it...

...Last year came An Officer and a Gentleman (about naval officers' flight school) and Taps (about a military academy, too...

...One of Will's roommates, an amusing hulk nicknamed Pig, is particularly well played by Rick Rossovich...

...Perhaps shecould better be described as a rhinestone...

...She was justified in dumping her best friend, Jocelyn Nor-ris (Stockard Channing, looking grotesquely bloated), for daring to suggest that life has to go on, that obsessive concern would not bring Alex back...

...Manetti, of course, was wrong to turn his attention to other, more pressing crimes...

...an aspiring photographer, Mary Ann wants to study in Los Angeles, because "they got standards there...

...Her foolish hopes and condescension are retrospectively vindicated, as is her unpleasantness to everyone else...

...Someone named Robert Mandel directed, like Stanley Jaffe, in a manner appropriate to one of those solemn TV movies with a social conscience about wife-beating and women's liberation...

...By that time the film has lost its point and, no doubt, its audience...

...At one point, Al Manetti (Judd Hirsch), the police lieutenant investigating the case, makes the mistake of telling her, "I know what you're going through...

...As the third lead in An Officer and a Gentleman, he (and Debra Winger) stole the picture from the nominal star, Richard Gere...

...There are only so many ways she can toss her head and smirk before the act wears thin...

...What little there is comes in a rush of about 10 minutes at the end, when Will discovers that his best friend is a member of the long-established secret society conducting the clandestine rituals, and that the commandant of the academy, a member of the same cabal during his days as a cadet, condones its activities...

...Her fight for independence is intended, I suppose, as a tragic counterpoint to Mary Ann's eventually successful flight to freedom...

...Independence Day then meanders back to Jack and Mary Ann...

...In the recently released Without a Trace, Nelligan once again struts her self-righteousness...

...The boy is improbably found alive, the victim of a kidnapper who needed someone—get this—to keep his crippled sister company while he was at work...

...In Independence Day, he supplies what is missing from Hoffman's script: the complexity beneath the surface of a good ole boy, the depth that makes him attractive to, and attracts him to, the town's ugly duckling misfit...

...Jack's aspirations do not extend beyond working as a mechanic and drag-racing his '69 Camaro on the desert...

...Beth Gutcheon did—first in her novel, Still Missing, and subsequently in her screenplay based on the book, produced and directed by Stanley Jaffe in the pedestrian style of a made-for-TV movie...

...Of course, Nelligan did not dream up those lines or their motivation...

...One such diamond in the rough is Mary Ann Taylor (Kathleen Quinlan), a frustrated and eccentric denizen of Mercury, New Mexico...

...Her specialty is symbol-laden sentimentality about colorful small-town folks who would do great things if only their necks weren't so red...

...That is obviously not enough conflict to last a whole movie, so about halfway through, Hoffman throws a curve...

...Before she leaves, however, she focuses her lens and her interest on the local hot-rod king, Jack Parker (David Keith...

...From behind his placid expression, a brute force occasionally reveals itself in a frown with a hint of menace...

...Yet rather than functioning as integrated subplot, this story is unconnected and totally silly...

...And the coincidence of the actress' and the character's snootiness underscores the sleazy cant of Gut-cheon's enterprise...

...The effect of this upbeat conclusion is to make a virtue of Susan's irrationality...

...In an utterly improbable climax, Will breakes up the torture ring and forces the commandant to resign by threatening him with disclosure...

...Jack and Mary Ann's differences temporarily disappear in a romantic haze and a new story line emerges, one concerning the doomed struggle of Jack's sister, Nancy (Dianne Wiest), against her husband, Les (Cliff De Young), a sadistic womanizer...

...In fact, Keith's youthful amiability gives him an edge...

...With his reddish hair, freckles and upturned nose, he looks at first glance like the Ail-American boy, a Huck Finn for the 1980s...

...For good reason, many readers found Gutcheon's happy ending particularly contemptible, cynical and commercially inspired...

...But The Lords of Discipline belongs to Keith...

...If only reward and punishment, luck and misfortune, were in fact so patly apportioned...

...Instead of exploring the anguish and uncertainty that actual parents of missing children must endure, Gutcheon has given us complacency disguised as faith...

...Still, the violence generates a surprisingly small quantity of drama...

...Then her estranged husband, Graham (David Dukes), unthinkingly reminds her that, as Alex's father, he too is suffering...

...Of late we have witnessed a miniboom in movies concerning martial values and young men...

...Quinlan lost me a long time ago...

...Now all he needs to do is avoid typecasting (as a redneck, a military cadet, or both) and find a stronger vehicle...

...The screenplay by Thomas Pope and Lloyd Fonvielle is based on Pat Conroy' s novel about life in a Southern military academy, circa 1964...

...Initially a flop, it was a surprise hit when shown on the airlines, of all places, and was then rereleased...

...After all, the others simply gave up, concluding that the passing of several months without a clue meant the chances of locating the boy were next to zero...

...she's determined to go, and her ambitions are encouraged by her noble dying mother (Frances Sternhagen) and her equally saint-like father (Josef Sommer, wildly miscast as a hick philosopher...

...If you felt the way I do, you'd be screaming...

...Perhaps inevitably, though, the film is pretty standard fare, pablum familiar from, say, Brother Rat (featuring Ronald Reagan 40 years ago...

...As usual, the actors are about 10 years older than the 17-18-year-olds they are supposed to be...

...No less horrifying is the suicide of another cadet (white), who can't take the abuse and jumps headfirst off a ledge overlooking the main courtyard of the academy...

...This unfortunate racial pioneer is forced to do pull-ups over a sword held between his legs and later, at a hideaway known as The Hole, he is electro-shocked in the preferred manner of South American despots (electrodes taped to the body and wired to a car battery and a crank handle...

...He wants her to stay...

...For his role De Young is adequately violent, and Wiest is almost too perfect a victim, too harrowing to watch...

...What is different in The Lords is the explicitness of the hazing, especially the indignities directed at the first black cadet at the academy, Pearce (Mark Bre-land...

...This is the worst kind of soap opera, where everything ends well because the heroine is such a worthy person...