Cinema: Sour Notes

TAPS

Directed by Harold Becker Screenplay by Darryl Ponicsan and Robert Mark Kamen

Shed a manly tear, sound a mournful bugle call, maybe even fire off a several-gun salute for good old Bunker Hill Military Academy. For a century and a half it has been turning out cadets who have exemplified duty, honor, country, that sort of thing. Now, however, times having changed, those qualities are regarded as antiques, and the trustees have voted to shut the place down and sell it to condominium developers.

Over, as it turns out, the dead bodies of General Harlan Bache (George C. Scott), the commandant, and Brian Moreland (Timothy Hutton), the ranking cadet officer, who reveres the bonkers brigadier. After Bache is invalided out of the film (much too early for fans of Scott’s mad-militarist mode), the youngster turns the academy into an armed camp to protest its demise. Besieged by police, National Guardsmen and anxious parents, he vows not to surrender until the trustees negotiate with him.

Among the many improbabilities of Taps is the nonappearance of that group. Surely in dealing with a military academy that is literally up in arms, chat-chat is preferable to rat-tat-tat. Moreover, the film never decides whether it has come to praise or bury the military tradition. Its ambiguity is apparent in casting the likable Hutton as the rebel leader. He tries, but one just cannot believe he is the kind of ramrod who would, or could, take his peers to the brink of armed confrontation and beyond. What with Director Becker lingering too long over various photogenic ceremonies, and the writers pumping out yards of motivational dialogue. Taps takes far too long to reach its bloody, predictable conclusion. Its big guns are loaded with nothing more lethal than Hollywood nerve gas.