Film

...and a denouement designed to satisfy every poor working girl's fantasies—the bewinged pilot, in dress whites, literally sweeps her off her feet, carrying her away to a happily-ever-after of PX privileges and military country clubs—and you have a movie which conscripts just about every effort in the subgenre going back to the 1930s, such as Navy Blue and Gold and / Wanted Wings...

...In the name of "pride, honor, dignity," Don Braulio (Roland Gilbert), the clan patriarch, has sent out one son after another to kill Barbarosa and "bring back his cojones on a stick...

...Barbarosa, played by a gnarled Willie Nelson, who brings to the role a reputation as "outlaw" country-and-western musician, is an aging bandit plying his trade among the hills and valleys of the Rio Grande basin...

...Not one of them entertains even the slightest doubt that a life as a Navy flier will be the answer to all his or her dreams...

...An Officer and a Gentleman suggests that however strapped one might be as a kid, the route to better things will open to the worthy and willful...

...At a wedding reception she chooses an ideal candidate, although he's unaware of his selection...

...Success" is reckoned at the box office, and the producers of this film seem to have bet that today's audience would be more responsive to a portrayal of young people rushing happily into uniform than to a drama of enlistment as last resort against unemployment, or a story revolving around the no longer fashionable resistance to registration and the coming draft...

...Barbarosa, meanwhile, pivots his horse Lone Ranger-style in nervous circles, and irritably reminds his soft-touch apprentice that he has "a reputation to maintain down here...

...In the course of their wanderings Karl is taught the tricks of survival (how to catch an armadillo by the tail), does duty as a perpet-uator of the Barbarosa legend, and learns to live by the Mexican saying that what cannot be remedied must be endured...

...And for many Bel Aire Cassandras the disappointing fizzle of The Long Riders and the colossal failure of Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate proved the point...

...The answer, it seems to me, is that the values of some of the most conventional movies of the 1930s have been dusted off and repackaged for the Reagan era...

...Directed by Alan Parker, that sensitive soul who gave us Midnight Express...

...In one of my favorite bits, the two bandits descend upon an aged Mexican couple leading a burro...

...And will the plucky but slight female trainee make it through the required obstacle course...

...This is a very contemporary comedy about building castles in Spain...

...An Officer and a Gentleman is such a movie...

...There are great shots of the rugged South Texas landscape...

...Pink Floyd: The Wall Dramatization of the storyline of the chart-busting rock album...

...n at least one major respect, Barbarosa goes against the grain...

...observers of the New Australian cinema will note that they resemble certain stretches of the Outback...

...More than one scene left me with a lump in my throat and, despite my better judgment, my eyes watered at the finale...

...Paradoxically, all Barbarosa has ever wanted is to be part of this family—so despite the ever-present threat of in-law assassins he's stuck around, paying secret visits to his wife and child, and awaiting reconciliation...

...There is virtually no dialogue...

...This military training romance asks these questions, though the answers are never really in doubt: Will the young man (Richard Gere) with a miserably deprived childhood survive the rigors of naval aviation officers candidate boot camp, win his wings, and replace the chip on his shoulder with an ensign's epaulet...

...But Karl prevails, and the old folks go their way...

...There are no exhilarating chase scenes here, no "epic" long shots of a lone rider crossing the plains...

...I've seen a lot of films of late which I didn't like—but this one I hated...

...And there are more than the usual number of close-ups affectionately framing vital details of locale...

...corral), nor a "revisionist" western (The Left-handed Gun, portraying Billy the Kid as a psychopath), nor a dramatization, as was popular in the 1960s, of the end of the frontier (Lonely Are the Brave, in which, while crossing a highway, Kirk Douglas and his horse are flattened by a tractor trailer...

...FILM Michael H. Seitz Scheming Flyboys and Honest Outlaws t isn't news that Hollywood panders to the least sophisticated mass tastes, and that the studios play on the desires and expectations of the broadest possible movie-going audience...

...The problem is to get reality to take the shape of desire...

...As a young man he had wed into a large Mexican clan, but the shooting of one of his in-laws in the midst of the wedding celebration (there were exculpating circumstances) had unleashed an insatiable frenzy for blood vengeance...

...A film of rare intelligence and economy of means, it makes brilliant use of settings and locations (Le Mans and Paris...

...But once in a while a picture comes along which seems such a consummate product of commercial calculation that this aspect of the work becomes its most arresting feature...

...Add to this ragout of cliches a hard-as-nails drill sergeant with the obligatory heart of gold (winningly played by the talented Louis Gossett Jr...

...Flounders in the second half...

...And despite an extensive literature portraying peacetime military service as a grinding bore—one might not expect the trainees to be aware of this, but the writer and director certainly should be—An Officer and a Gentleman is as sophisticated in its grasp of the realities of military life as a recruiting film...

...Delightful lead performance by Beatrice Romand, whom Rohmer fans will recognize as the precocious gamine in the early 1970s films Claire's Knee and Love in the Afternoon...

...The film was directed by Fred Shepisi, the tough-minded Australian director of The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith, and written by Texas-born William Wittliff (Raggedy Man)—an odd and fruitful collaboration which has gone some way toward breathing life into the venerable western...

...The filmmakers (Douglas Day Stewart, writer...

...Of course not...

...The trainees, for their part, are remarkably untouched by post-Vietnam attitudes toward the military—even Taps had more on the ball in this respect...

...Barbarosa instructs Karl to rob them of their money, but their pockets turn up but a few pathetic coins...

...Second-rung questions: Will the scheming chippie (Winger's co-worker in the plant) manage to ensnare a pilot husband...

...But the handsome young man gets his wings only after he learns, unaccountably, to be less selfish...

...Although it comes with most of the genre's traditional elements—frontier settings (the deserts and mountains of the Rio Grande, circa 1885), men on horseback, gunfights—Barbarosa'% modest originality and unpredictability make it a difficult work to categorize...

...Natch...

...And rather than celebrating or promoting a legend, the film investigates the human tendency (and need) to spin legendary tales...

...The mill here appears every bit as crushing as the southern textile plant in Norma Rae, but it doesn't occur to these exploited women (or to the filmmakers) that there is any way up and out except marriage to a socially superior pilot trainee...

...he will not take a couple of hard-earned pesos from these poor, dotty peasants...

...But Barbarosa has survived—thus becoming the stuff of legend—and as each of the would-be avengers is killed off, the fires of vendetta are rekindled...

...M Hits stud Misses te Beau Marriage Second in a newly launched group of films, "Comedies and Proverbs," written and directed by New Wave filmmaker Eric Rohmer...

...I've become so used to this that I rarely give it much thought...

...As in all Rohmer's films set in the present, the dialogue is abundant and incessant (both more mundane and infinitely more interesting than that in My Dinner with Andre...

...Will the sexy but oh-so-sweet-and-considerate young chick from the other side of the tracks (charming Debra Winger) win the handsome flyboy-to-be and a passport out of the local paper mill...

...It later turns out, however, that the couple are couriers for a gang of Mexican cutthroats, and have been carrying bags of ill-gotten gold...

...the sexy mill hand wins her pilot only after proving that she will not stoop (to dirty tricks) to conquer, and the female candidate, despite all her luck and determination, makes it through the obstacle course, but with a leg up here and there from her more capable male classmates (a dash of trendy feminism, discreetly tempered with condescension...

...This is, moreover, neither a 1980s version of the classic western (such as John Ford's My Darling Clementine, the unsurpassed treatment of the showdown at the O.K...

...The Nest Best foreign picture Academy Award nominee by talented Spanish writer-director Jaime De Arminan...

...Strong acting by Hector Alterio as the unfulfilled, quixotic widower, and a bewitching performance by Anna Torrent, the child star of The Spirit of the Beehive and Cria...

...A flier in the press kit for Barbarosa insists that this is not a "message" picture (such films are currently in low regard, and are thought to frighten off viewers), but those who care to look will find several interesting ideas and attitudes in the western, no conventional horse opera after all...

...It is cinematically pretentious (zillions of special optical effects and process shots, pseudo-Eisensteinian shock montage, strained subjective camera work, animation, etc...

...This is the age of Private Benjamin...

...For the past decade or so, received wisdom in Hollywood has had it that there's no longer a mass audience in America for the western...

...thematically self-indulgent (promoting the neo-Romantic myth of rock star as alienated artist), and the music, when not simply ear-splitting, is droning and monotonous...

...Taylor Hackford, director) knew what they were doing...

...But I resent this sort of cheap emotional manipulation, and find myself wondering what else the film promotes as it wangles its audience into rooting for the protagonists...

...One of an uncountable number of recent films (among them Manhattan, Beau-pere, La Drolesse, La Femme-enfant) dealing with older males captivated by determined, barely pubescent females—and to my mind the most intriguing and intelligently realized of the lot...

...Gere's best buddy opts out, but only because he comes to see that he's just been trying to meet family expectations...

...Beautifully set—in the Salamanca countryside—and very Spanish...

...The old outlaw is joined in his homeless peregrinations by a farmboy on the run, Karl (Gary Busey), who is also on the lam after the accidental killing of an in-law...

...Sabine, liberated, young, and leading a bohemian life, quits her married lover, and decides (in principle) that she is going to get married...

...Karl rebels...

...The slut gets what she deserves, and, it seems, is consigned forever to the mill's tedium and din...

...Just about everyone in this film is burning either to escape the deadend drudgery of the paper mill or to find refuge and fulfillment in military service...

...The gunfights are brief, and are never exploited for their potential as spectacle...

...The script is more wittily written than most, and takes a number of delightfully unexpected turns...