Taps (1981)

Taps is Harold Becker’s 1981 military academy drama. Cadets at the fictional Bunker Hill Military Academy seize the campus when trustees announce closure for condominium development. George C. Scott plays General Bache, the academy commandant. Timothy Hutton plays Cadet Major Brian Moreland, who organizes the takeover. Sean Penn and Tom Cruise appear in supporting cadet roles. Darryl Ponicsan and Robert Mark Kamen wrote the screenplay, adapting it from Devery Freeman’s 1979 novel Father Sky. Twentieth Century Fox released it in December 1981.

The work runs hot when it lets the cadets fall apart and cold when it reaches for grand statement. Hutton holds the dramatic center with restraint the screenplay sometimes asks him to abandon. The young Tom Cruise gets fewer minutes than the film’s reputation would suggest but plays them with the same hot intensity that would define his next decade. Scott collects a paycheck. The result is uneven but justifies its eventual gravity through committed young-cast performance instead of through the screenplay’s clumsier moments.

Taps belongs to its young cast, and it should.

Hutton, Penn and Cruise play it with such conviction that I believe the takeover even when the script gives me no good reason to. My reservation is the screenplay. It wants to make big statements about militarism and hasn’t done the work to earn them.

The Hutton Performance

Timothy Hutton plays Cadet Major Brian Moreland as a kid who has internalized the academy’s values so thoroughly that he can’t see them as values. The character believes the takeover is the honorable response to dishonorable authority. The film lets Hutton play this conviction straight through the runtime without ironic commentary. The audience watches the conviction harden against accumulating evidence that the takeover is producing the opposite of honor. The performance trusts the audience to read the gap.

Hutton was 21 during production and brings the particular tightness of a young man trying to perform adult command before he has the experience to back it.

The uniform looks like a costume he’s wearing, and that uncertainty is the performance’s principal achievement. Moreland is a kid playing at leadership in conditions where the game turns deadly serious. I find him heartbreaking, because he never once suspects he’s in over his head.

The Cruise and Penn Support

Tom Cruise plays Cadet Captain David Shawn as an unhinged true believer whose appetite for violence outruns the situation. It’s a featured part with perhaps fifteen minutes of screen time, and what he does with it announced that the next thing was coming.

It’s the early version of the manic intensity he’d use across the next decade. The performance is too hot for the film around it, and I wouldn’t cool it down a degree, because every scene he’s in wakes the picture up.

Sean Penn plays Alex Dwyer at lower intensity than Cruise’s Shawn.

Penn’s character works as Moreland’s moral conscience and the audience’s primary access point as the takeover deteriorates. The two young actors work at distinct tones that don’t blend into ensemble work. The film benefits from the contrast. Hutton’s steady command, Cruise’s mania, and Penn’s growing horror give the cadet leadership internal range that single-tone casting would have weakened.

The Screenplay Problems

The screenplay has problems, and they bug me more than anything else here. The trustees who close the academy are cardboard villains. The condominium plot is too convenient as a motive. The jump from takeover to live fire is rushed through decisions that need more groundwork than the runtime gives them. The film gestures at an argument about American militarism and youth indoctrination and never builds the foundation that argument needs.

The cast covers for the screenplay across most of the runtime. The cadet performances make the dramatic situations land even when the underlying logic is weak. The final fifteen minutes nearly recover whatever the middle act loses through the simple weight of accumulated investment in young Hutton’s face. The film survives its screenplay because the performances are stronger than the words they have to deliver.

Does Taps still hold up?

Taps is a flawed but committed military academy drama raised by its young cast. Hutton holds the center through screenplay problems a weaker actor would have exposed, and Cruise and Penn announce careers the film can’t contain. It’s a 7 because I care about these boys by the end even though the script never justifies the gunfire, and the last fifteen minutes hit harder than the middle deserves. Scott’s paycheck performance doesn’t help.

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