Colin Welland hacked this script from the B-plots of a thousand war pictures, in the process forgetting to write a story. This is the part of the war movie not quite as well done as the real show, the part you sit through only so you can watch tanks blow up. Here we get two and a half hours of that level of mediocrity. A Redgrave can do a lot without good dialog or interesting situations, but not everybody has such chops. This director, for instance, never rose above the level of his screenplays: if he had Waldo Salt or William Goldman at the typewriter, he was fine.
YANKS has faults endemic to John Schlesinger's latter work - primarily it seems to be suffering a head cold. Not as spectacularly awful as DAY OF THE LOCUST, it is nearly as dumb. Now it's slapstick silliness, now it's brutal gravity, now it's just dull. If the individual scenes often work, a general Hallmark cloy drizzles over all. Richard Gere is at his prettiest. The acting is all pretty good, some of it better than that. And it looks very handsome, mostly shot through filters for a sheen of period nostalgia. But I find the movie not very watchable as document or elegy, and not at all as entertainment.
The production is grimed with dissatisfaction, which certainly works thematically; it's about the "chin-up" attitude that replaces happiness in wartime. (If we believe Loach, Hodges and every postwar British director who never worked for Cubby Broccoli, not to mention T.S. Eliot, resignation is a British attitude not exclusive to wartime.) But theme and style are separate issues, and they do not compliment each other here. There's an almost interesting interplay between war-weary Brits and callow Yanks; almost, because nothing's investigated in any depth.
None of the love stories is convincing. This is the major problem. So the movie is, unintentionally I suspect, rather hopeless. That's fine, but you can't fly on intention. Regardless of subject matter, competence is always a virtue.
YANKS has faults endemic to John Schlesinger's latter work - primarily it seems to be suffering a head cold. Not as spectacularly awful as DAY OF THE LOCUST, it is nearly as dumb. Now it's slapstick silliness, now it's brutal gravity, now it's just dull. If the individual scenes often work, a general Hallmark cloy drizzles over all. Richard Gere is at his prettiest. The acting is all pretty good, some of it better than that. And it looks very handsome, mostly shot through filters for a sheen of period nostalgia. But I find the movie not very watchable as document or elegy, and not at all as entertainment.
The production is grimed with dissatisfaction, which certainly works thematically; it's about the "chin-up" attitude that replaces happiness in wartime. (If we believe Loach, Hodges and every postwar British director who never worked for Cubby Broccoli, not to mention T.S. Eliot, resignation is a British attitude not exclusive to wartime.) But theme and style are separate issues, and they do not compliment each other here. There's an almost interesting interplay between war-weary Brits and callow Yanks; almost, because nothing's investigated in any depth.
None of the love stories is convincing. This is the major problem. So the movie is, unintentionally I suspect, rather hopeless. That's fine, but you can't fly on intention. Regardless of subject matter, competence is always a virtue.