An Officer and a Gentleman Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.5
Video		4.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		4.0
Overall		4.5

An Officer and a Gentleman Blu-ray Movie Review

On Blu-ray Where It Belongs

Reviewed by Michael Reuben May 10, 2013

Because of its romantic subplot and famous ending, An Officer and a Gentleman is often regarded as a classic helping of Hollywood corn, but in fact Hollywood didn't want to make the film. The script by Douglas Day Stewart, who was himself a former Naval officer and a veteran of the training procedures detailed in the film, had been kicking around the studios for eight years before it was handed to director Taylor Hackford. The president of Paramount, Michael Eisner (later an infamous CEO of Disney), was against the project, but executive Don Simpson (later one half of power producing team Simpson-Bruckheimer) championed Stewart's script. Still, the film remained a poor stepchild throughout its production, and the budget was limited to $6 million, a small amount even in 1981.

The result shocked everyone, including the director and his cast and crew, by grossing almost $130 million domestically, taking the third highest box office slot of 1982. The film won Oscars for best supporting actor Louis Gossett, Jr. (the first African-American actor to receive an Academy Award since Sidney Poitier in 1963) and for the song "Up Where We Belong", a number one hit that cost Don Simpson a $100 bet that the song would flop. (According to Hackford, Simpson never paid up.)

Much of the resistance to Stewart's script came from the military setting. Star Richard Gere initially did not want to take the part, because he feared the movie would be little more than a recruiting tool for the Navy. (In fact, the Navy was so troubled by the script that it refused to support the production.) However, Hackford saw something deeper in Stewart's tale, which drew heavily on Stewart's experiences, but spoke to Hackford as well, who had joined the Peace Corps instead of the military. Hackford saw the story of a troubled young man seeking a better life, who chose a path commonly followed by working class youth. In the process, though, he had to face parts of himself he'd been hiding from since he was a child—and, ultimately, find out what he was made of.

Zack Mayo (Gere) is the son of a career enlisted sailor, Byron (Robert Loggia). In an eerie opening sequence, we watch the adult Zack rouse his father after a night of drunken carousing. While the father gradually regains consciousness, the son recalls when they first met after Zack's mother died, and the young boy (Tommy Petersen) flew to the Philippines to live with Byron amidst whorehouses and bars—that is, when Byron wasn't at sea, which was most of the time. Now, in the present, Zack informs his hungover dad that he's enrolled in Aviation Officer Candidate's School so that he can fly jets. Byron is incredulous. He tells his son he's not officer material. Zack storms out.

As will shortly become apparent, Zack has spent his entire life up until that point learning to be self-sufficient, because he's had no choice. He aspires to be an officer to prove—to his father, to the world, most of all to himself—that he can be a better man. But his master plan runs up against a mammoth obstacle on the very first day of training in the person of Drill Instructor (DI) Gunnery Sgt. Emil Foley (Gossett), who will be his commanding officer for the next thirteen weeks.

Stewart based the part of Foley on his own DI, who was a short, white Southerner, but the production couldn't cast anyone of that description with a sufficient level of intimidating energy. Further research revealed that, by this point in history, many DIs were now black, which led to Gossett's casting, but the genius of his portrayal is how Gossett makes race irrelevant. He simply plays the character as written: fierce, determined and uncompromising. His Foley is a superb mechanic, except that the machines on which he works are human beings. As he repeatedly tells his trainees, his job is to break them down systematically, piece by piece, ensuring that every officer who emerges from the school has zero defects. If someone is going to crack under pressure, the military would prefer to know it before that person is put in charge of enlisted personnel or billions of dollars of valuable equipment.

Every candidate in the program has the option at any time during the thirteen weeks to be DOR'd ("dropped on request"). From the moment Foley lines up Mayo and his classmates and begins barking insults at them, he is sizing up their responses, probing for weak spots, then pushing where it hurts the most. The candidates who provide a core group of characters—Perryman (Harold Sylvester), Della Serra (Tony Plana), Daniels (a baby-faced David Caruso), Seeger (Lisa Eilbacher), or "Ci-gar" as Foley immediately dubs her, and Worley (David Keith)—are an array of vivid personalities, each with their own potentially disqualifying vulnerabilities. Some of them will make it through, and some of them won't, but Foley immediately zeroes in on Mayo as a pretender. During one of the many punishment sessions that Mayo incurs, Foley tells Mayo he knows all about him; he's looked through his file. Then he boils down Mayo's history and his character to a few quick sentences of such devastating accuracy that you wonder how Mayo will recover. Mayo's zig-zig response, for which the base's obstacle course is a literal metaphor, is half of the film's major arc.

The other half arrives through the adventures Mayo shares with fellow candidate Sid Worley, an Oklahoma boy desperate to measure up to an older brother who died in Vietnam and a veteran father. Sid may be Mayo's first true friend. Together, they attend a formal dance on the base, where they pick up two so-called "Puget Sound debs", local girls employed at the nearby paper factory hoping to land a future pilot as a husband. Still, Lynette Pomeroy (Lisa Blount) and Paula Pokrifki (Debra Winger) couldn't be more different. Lynette is a cold-eyed operator who latches onto farmboy Sid with the skills of an experienced jezebel, while Paula lets herself have feelings—and quickly begins to have them for Mayo. When Mayo feels something in return, he doesn't know what to do. Their arguments are raw without being violent, and their love scenes are frank without being pornographic (although the MPAA initially disagreed). It takes a significant crisis for Mayo to acknowledge that he actually cares for someone, especially a woman.

An Officer and a Gentleman has a deeply sentimental streak, but its sweetness is cut by the astringency of Gossett's Foley. Not once does Foley breach the professional distance he maintains between himself and his trainees, not even at the end when their positions reverse at graduation, and they become his superiors. Every time I watch the film, I study Gossett's expression during those scenes, because there's something passing across his face as he salutes each new graduating officer, especially one in particular who caused him a lot of extra work. This time around, I decided it was professional satisfaction in a job well done and successfully completed. After all, someone in Foley's position can't afford to get attached to any trainee. Another batch is already waiting, and the last time we see Foley, he's starting all over with the arduous job of building a new group of officers.

An Officer and a Gentleman Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

An Officer and a Gentleman was shot by DP Donald E. Thorin, whose intriguing Eighties resumé also includes director Hackford's Against All Odds and Michael Mann's Thief. Thorin made the most of the production value supplied by the locations in the town of Port Washington, and his work is crisply and clearly represented on Warner's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray of this Paramount film. The image is fine-grained, detailed and richly colored, with the kind of film-like appearance that sometimes appears "soft" to eyes conditioned by digital photography and post-processing. But pay close attention, and you'll observe that all of the minute elements of uniforms, landscapes, machinery and expressions are fully resolved without the harsh edges that the digital age often imparts. The sole exception is Gossett's face, because it is frequently shaded under the drill instructor's wide-brimmed hat (a major lighting challenge to the DP, as Hackford notes in his commentary). Even so, Gossett's performance is so vivid that he makes the occasional darkness work in his favor.

The sole criticism—and it is so minor that most viewers probably will not notice—is an occasional flicker on complex backgrounds (e.g., a shot behind Foley and Mayo during the "six to ninety" exercise) that resembles aliasing. Otherwise, no artifacts were observed. The average bitrate is an impressive 29.93 Mbps.

An Officer and a Gentleman Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Paramount's 2000 DVD offered the film's original mono soundtrack in Dolby Digital. The studio's "special collector's edition" DVD in 2007 offered a choice between 5.1 and mono tracks, both in DD. This Blu-ray from Warner offers a single 5.1 option in English, which has been encoded as lossless DTS-HD MA 5.1.

The omission of the film's original mix is unfortunate, but at least the 5.1 remix has been handled conservatively. The sound remains in front, with the soundstage expanded across the three front channels and the dialogue firmly anchored to the center. Dynamic range is excellent, with deep extension that really brings out the bass notes of the orchestrations and the bass drums of a military band. Sound effects are somewhat less pronounced, however. During scenes at the paper factory, for example, the machinery doesn't roar with the kind of authority that is characteristic of such industrial devices in real life. These limitations are undoubtedly inherent in the original mix, with its tight budget.

Jack Nitzsche's score sounds wonderful, as do the various period-specific pop tunes rendered either as source music or as soundtrack selections, including Pat Benatar's "Treat Me Right" (which supplies an ironic undercurrent to Paula's and Lynette's ride to the base) and Van Morrison's "Hungry for Your Love".

An Officer and a Gentleman Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

The extras have been ported over from Paramount's 2007 "special collector's edition" DVD, although the director's commentary and trailer first appeared on the 2000 DVD. The only item missing is the photo gallery.

• Commentary with Director Taylor Hackford: Recorded in London in 1999, Hackford's lively commentary is full of interesting details about the making of the film. Some of the content is repeated in the various documentaries, but much is unique to the commentary, e.g., how the film's opening was restructured in the editing room, the impact of local weather on the look of the film, how an automobile accident nearly prevented the completion of principal photography and several key changes that Hackford made in response to reactions from preview audiences (notably to the critical scene involving a karate match between Mayo and Foley).



• An Officer and a Gentleman: 25 Years Later (1080p; 1.78:1; 28:05): Although Debra Winger and Lisa Blount (who has since passed away) are sorely missed, this retrospective documentary boasts an impressive array of participants, including director Hackford, screenwriter Stewart, Gere, Keith, Gossett, Eilbacher, Plana, Sylvester and Caruso. Among the topics discussed are the difficulty of getting the film greenlit, the studio's lack of faith in the project, the MPAA's initial X rating (which Hackford was able to get changed to an R without any cuts; he explains how), and the reluctance of director, star, producer and then-studio executive Simpson to shoot the now-famous conclusion of the film. Hackford changed his mind when he tried a rehearsal and heard behind him the sound of a group of female extras (local citizens recruited for the film) laughing and crying. One interviewee quotes a male patron he overheard exiting a theater: "That's the worst ending to a film I've ever seen—and I've seen it five times!"



• Return to Port Townsend (1080p; 1.78:1; 12:20): In 2007, Gossett returns to the town of Port Townsend, Washington, which served as the film's principal location, and reminisces about filming specific scenes as he revisits the spots where they were filmed. Many local residents come out to greet the actor; some of them appeared as extras. Intercut with Gossett's footage are interviews with Hackford, Gere and others, reflecting on their experience in the town.



• True Stories of Military Romance (1080p; 1.78:1; 7:10): Interviews with two military couples on the challenges of maintaining a successful military marriage.



• The Music of An Officer and a Gentleman (1080p; 1.78:1; 9:16): Jack Nitzsche, Jr. (son of the film's late composer), lyricist Will Jennings, song producer Stuart Levine and former Paramount VP for music Joel Sill recall the process of creating the film's soundtrack, with special attention to the Oscar-winning song, "Up Where We Belong", which Jennings assembled from pieces of Nitzsche's soundtrack, to which he then added lyrics, after watching an early cut of the film.



• Gere and Gossett: Hand-to-Hand Combat (1080p; 1.78:1; 3:18): Gere and Gossett recall their training and preparation for the karate match between Mayo and Foley.



• Theatrical Trailer (1080p; 1.78:1; 2:34).

An Officer and a Gentleman Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Warfare, technology and the military have all changed in the last thirty years. I doubt, for example, that many current DIs are still using Sgt. Foley's "steers and queers" line. But An Officer and a Gentleman has held up well, because the drama at its core is as relevant now as it was then. People still try to better themselves, and many of them discover that the real challenges always lie within. If they're lucky, the right mentor appears at the right moment, though not always in the friendliest of guises. Jobs are easy; character is hard. Highly recommended.