Sleeper Films: “The Great Santini”

I thought it might be interesting this week to bring to the attention of the GITS community favorite movies of ours that might have slipped beneath the radar. They could be indie features, foreign movies, or older films, but while they may not have achieved much in the way of notoriety, something about them clicked with you — memorable characters or scenes, compelling plots or dialogue. What are some of your favorite ‘sleeper’ films?

My recommendation today is the 1979 drama The Great Santini. Written and directed by Lewis John Carlino, based on the novel by Pat Conroy, this is a movie for any and all military brats. Here is the IMDB plot summary:

The four Meechum kids and their mother move from Marine post to Marine post, following their father, a pilot, in the peaceful years before the Vietnam war. Bull Meechum, the self-described “great Santini,” is manic: a martinet at once enthusiastic and abusive of his family. In Beaufort, South Carolina, Bull is assigned to whip into shape a squadron of pilots, and Ben makes friends with Toomer, a slow-talking Black youth. Racial and family tensions explode in violence, and Ben must find a way to make peace with his father.

The movie stars Blythe Danner, Michael O’Keefe, David Keith and in the title role Robert Duvall. This should give you a taste of what Bull Meechum is all about:

And here is pivotal scene in the movie where father loses to his teenage son at one-on-one basketball for the first time:

It’s interesting to read this 1980 NY Times review by Vincent Canby of the movie:

Mr. Carlino, who wrote the screenplay and directed it, attempts to cram more melodrama into the movie than it can easily absorb, especially when the melodramatic devices are not of the first freshness. He also isn’t particularly tough on himself when it comes to discarding dialogue that doesn’t fit in with the rest of the film’s carefully observed detail. Further, there is something decidedly wrong with a movie when it has to be brought to an end by an accident.

Those reservations are real, but my admiration for ‘’The Great Santini’’ outweighs them.

The film is as perceptively moving and funny about family life as anything I’ve seen since Arthur Miller’s ‘’The American Clock’’ and, before that, ‘’The Price’’ and ‘’Death of a Salesman.’’ It does slop over into bathos with increasing frequency near the end, but each time it recovers itself. Putting up with it is a little like putting up with Bull, who is worth attending to even when he is being most obnoxious.

Canby is right. The movie does drift into melodrama toward the end. However the core relationship between father and son is a powerful one, a series of memorable moments.

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