[50 years ago this coming weekend, the pilot episode of M*A*S*H aired. So in honor of that ground-breaking sitcom, this week I’ll AmericanStudy wartime comedies in various media, leading up to a special post on M*A*S*H!]
On three
competing yet ultimately intersecting layers to the hit 1980s wartime comedy.
The origin
point for Barry Levinson’s film Good Morning, Vietnam
(1987) was a pitch for a sitcom very much in the vein of (and likely even
inspired by) M*A*S*H. In 1979, former
Armed Forces Radio Service DJ Adrian
Cronauer pitched a sitcom based on his experiences during the Vietnam War;
no network picked it up, so he turned it into a TV movie script which became
the basis for the feature film’s
screenplay (if with significant revisions by screenwriter Mitch Markowitz,
who had in fact worked as a writer on M*A*S*H).
The whirlwind known as Robin Williams (on whom more momentarily) certainly
shifted things from there, but there’s a reason why the character name was and
remained Adrian Cronauer—this is a story intended to be grounded in reality, in
a historical figure’s actual experiences at the interesting and fraught intersections
of DJ and soldier, American rock music and Southeast Asian warzone, comedy and
tragedy. That history and humanity alike come through at key moments, and I’d
argue constitute the film’s most successful elements.
They’re
not the most famous one, though. Cronauer
once said of the film’s central casting that Williams “was playing a
character named Adrian Cronauer who shared a lot of my experiences. But actually,
he was playing Robin Williams.” Partly that seems to me an understandable critique
of Williams’ tendency to ham it up and treat film roles like excuses for
stand-up comedy, a problem that to my mind severely affects a film like Dead Poets Society (1989). But at the
same time, there’s no doubt that Williams was a profoundly talented actor as
well as comedian, and he brings both layers to his performance in Good Morning, Vietnam—infusing the
justifiably famous radio
sequences with humor and energy to spare (selling the audience entirely on
why this DJ would have become so beloved among his soldier-listeners); but gradually
and impressively making his Cronauer into a complicated and conflicted human being whose
mistakes and morals alike influence the film’s events. Williams was right in
the upward arc of his explosion into full movie-stardom in 1987, and there’s no
doubt that this performance and film both reflected and amplified that
trajectory.
That 1987 moment
was also amidst another striking Hollywood trend—the explosion of late 80s
Vietnam War films that I discussed as part of
this post, and which also of course included another 1987 film from
yesterday’s focal director Stanley Kubrick, Full
Metal Jacket. Good Morning,
Vietnam is of course by far the funniest of those films, which might also
make it seem like the least serious and/or the least focused on the war—but I
hope this whole series would offer a clear counterpoint to those ideas and a
clear reflection of the role that humor can play in cultural portrayals of
wartime histories and themes. The film has some overtly tragic events,
particularly those connected to Cronauer’s fraught friendship with the Vietnamese young man Tuan
(played movingly by Tung Thanh Tran). But I would add that its humor is
likewise an element of its portrayal of the Vietnam War, both in the necessity
of Cronauer’s broadcasts and in the challenge they present to official
narratives of the conflict. Just one more layer to this complex, compelling
wartime comedy.
Last
wartime comedy tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Other wartime comedies you’d highlight?
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