My Favorite Year (1982)

Directed by Richard Benjamin; produced by Michael Gruskoff

In 1954, Benjy Stone (Mark Linn-Baker) is a young but rising writer on tv’s “Comedy Cavalcade”, hosted by the frenetic and frantic ‘King’ Kaiser (Joseph Bologna). Benjy is ecstatic to learn that his movie-idol, Alan Swann (Peter O’Toole) is going to appear on an episode. The trouble is that Swann, a legendary and extremely popular star, is a dissolute inebriate and womaniser, and when he arrives falling-down drunk for a meeting with Kaiser, it is only with difficulty that Benjy manages to retain him on the show. But the young man must keep the actor out of trouble for the week until the broadcast. Will Swann be able to make the show? And will Benjy’s adoration of the older man survive knowing him?

In the immediately previous entry on this blog, I reviewed Wings of Fame, which also starred Peter O’Toole and dealt, unsatisfactorily, with popular renown. Eight years before, O’Toole made this much better movie which, along with providing more insight into fame - and notoriety - was also a lot of fun. I decided to review it, too, to contrast and compare, and to cleanse the palate…

The one good moment in Wings of Fame comes during an interview featuring O’Toole’s character, Cesar Valentin, who relates an incident when he was portraying Othello on stage. The audience applauded as soon as he appeared: they were cheering the actor, not the part or his performance. People cared little for his roles but loved him. Alan Swann’s problem, in My Favorite Year, is the opposite: people love his roles; so much so that they think he is whom he portrays. By this time in his career, Swann is unsure whether he is himself, or his characters, or both.

As you may appreciate, My Favorite Year is a comedy, but goes deeper into people, motives, personality and relationships than Wings of Fame tried to do. Swann is a charming man and generous: there is a scene in which he dances with an elderly fan (Gloria Stuart) to fulfill a dream of hers, putting his own evening on hold. The scene is almost beautiful in its simplicity, but also shows what Swann is made of. Then he is off to get drunk and carry on with another man’s girlfriend, publicly frolicking in a fountain. That’s what he’s made of, too. Swann contrasts his traits with his characters’, and the movie questions what an actor is, what a ‘star’ is, and how much different actors put of themselves into their roles.

Much of My Favorite Year’s appeal comes from the characters, which are well-drawn and involving. Alan Swann is modelled consciously on Errol Flynn; the climax of Swann’s fictional movie Captain from Tortuga is a re-shot version of the finale of Flynn’s The Adventures of Robin Hood. Benjy Stone represents Mel Brooks (executive producer of My Favorite Year) and Bologna’s character is patterned after Sid Caesar (Sid Caesar = King Kaiser…) “Comedy Cavalcade” fills in for “Your Show of Shows”, which was a hotbed of later famous comedy writers, including Brooks, Woody Allen and Neil Simon, and was also the model for the series on which Dick Van Dyke’s character worked on his eponymous tv series.

An interesting feature here is that quirky characters comes across successfully. Usually, the very term ‘quirky’ in movies or television series indicates a self-conscious attempt by writers to make memorable personalities; they are rarely natural or real. In My Favorite Year, however, these characters are comics, writers, actors - all people whose affectations and attempts to stand out are sometimes artificial and obvious. Therefore, their oddities (eg. Basil Hoffman as a writer who speaks only in whispers to his confederate (Anne De Salvo)) appear genuine here, within the context of their lives and work. The characters are mostly likeable or benign, which helps.

Richard Benjamin is not among my favourite directors. (He worked in the 1950s at NBC-TV headquarters, where the fictional “Comedy Cavalcade” is produced.) I find most of his comedies heavy-handed and crude (in the sense of being roughly fashioned, unpolished). This was his first feature film behind the camera, and that may have permitted him a lighter touch. The laughs, when not driven by the characters, are not particularly strong, slapstick and physical humour not demanding much from the audience.

What makes My Favorite Year such a winning comedy, though, is the juxtaposition of the serious and Shakespearan-style acting of O’Toole, with amusing situations. Like Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie (reviewed on this blog last year), the role needed a dramatic actor, not a comic performer. When O’Toole delivers a punch-line, after a set-up given as if on stage at the Old Vic, it is almost inevitably funny. It may have helped that O’Toole’s sense of humour allowed him to ridicule both his profession and himself.

Add to this a good-to-very good supporting cast, including Lainie Kazan, as Benjy’s mother, and Bologna as the manic Kaiser, and a sure feel for the early days of television, and My Favorite Year is a delight; funny and thoughtful, as many of the best comedies are.