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Asri-unix.227 net.movies utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!menlo70!sri-unix!mclure Tue Dec 15 15:05:44 1981 Taps n065 1526 07 Dec 81 BC-REVIEW-''TAPS'' (Newhouse 011) Film review, suggested for use when ''Taps'' opens at local theaters By RICHARD FREEDMAN Newhouse News Service (UNDATED) If only Henry Fonda were president of the United States and George C. Scott our top military leader, we'd have nothing to worry about at home or abroad. Or would we? They'd probably loathe each other as cordially as Truman and MacArthur did. These idle speculations are raised by ''Taps,'' a taut, exciting drama concerning a military academy about to be sold to make way for condominiums after 141 years of turning out loyal, honorable youths for the nation's officer corps. Scott, who saw previous service as the hilarious martinet Gen. Buck Turgidson in ''Dr. Strangelove,'' and the less hilarious martinet Gen. George S. Patton in ''Patton,'' is here Gen. Harlan Bache, commander of the beleaguered Bunker Hill Military Academy. He is not happy about the situation, but he has a year's grace in which to grit his teeth and ponder a solution. Meanwhile, he has a fine, upright cadet major in Brian Moreland (Timothy Hutton). The kid worships him. Then a terrible thing happens. Outraged by some local louts who are jeering at the cadets and their dates as they arrive for a fancy-dress ball, Bache inadvertently kills one of them and promptly succumbs to a heart attack. The shooting causes one of the ugliest town situations in the history of academe. The police confiscate the school's weapons and order it closed immediately. Moreland, as ranking cadet, takes over the place with about 100 loyal followers, and the battle is joined. Ignominiously, Moreland's own father - a hard-as-nails career master sergeant (Wayne Tippett) - is brought in to argue with him. But Moreland Jr. can never forgive him for having allowed him exactly 15 minutes to mourn his mother's death when he was only 12 years old. National Guard leader Col. Kerby (Ronny Cox) then appears on the scene, with enough military clout behind him to refight the Battle of the Bulge. Moreland remains adamant, although some of his younger followers sneak off into the night. At what point, the movie asks, does such a hero cease to be a man of entrenched honor and become a dangerous death-lover? For before the campus mutiny reaches its predestined end, many are needlessly killed, including the brave young plebe (Brendan Ward) who idolized Moreland as Moreland had idolized Gen. Bache. ''Taps'' deals with the seemingly unique situation of a campus takeover by students determined to keep the institution going, instead of bringing it to its knees. Unlike the student protesters of the '60s, the cadets of Bunker Hill believe in a military code of law and order. It's the civilians - and the more experienced military brass - who want to compromise with our slack, self-indulgent times. Yet, for all the seeming originality of its premise, ''Taps'' basically is an effective rehash of William Golding's novel, ''Lord of the Flies,'' showing the disastrous results when idealistic youth determines to reform society free of adult intervention. What the youths consider a corrupt willingness to compromise may, in fact, simply be the wisdom of keeping society going in an imperfect world. With a script derived from Devery Freeman's novel, ''Father Sky,'' these issues are not merely debated in the film - they're richly dramatized. Timothy Hutton, who won an Oscar for his performance as a troubled adolescent in ''Ordinary People,'' is equally effective as a gung-ho born leader forced by circumstances to act before his fervor can be fully tempered by experience. And although Scott disappears from the film before the halfway mark, his Bache is a memorable addition to his gallery of obsessed military leaders. To watch him, in his uniform festooned with medals, testing himself by taking apart and reassembling his service pistol blindfolded, or imbuing his pet cadets with the proper sense of discipline and tradition over their after-dinner port, is to watch the military mind at its finest - and most limited. So whatever one's attitude may be toward military schools or student rebellions, ''Taps'' is a vividly dramatic, thoughtful movie about the place of a rigidly conceived honor in a society gone generally soft. X X X FILM CLIP: ''Taps.'' George C. Scott as the iron-jawed commander of a military academy, and Timothy Hutton as the gung-ho cadet who leads a student revolt, make this a taut, absorbing drama of military vs. civilian codes of honor and survival. Three and a half stars. RB END FREEDMAN

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