Cinema: Swann’s Way

MY FAVORITE YEAR Directed by Richard Benjamin Screenplay by Norman Steinberg and Dennis Palumbo

He is not exactly a noble ruin. An affable ruin? A self-amused ruin? A cuddly ruin? Somehow, Peter O’Toole seems to require a modifier all his own, because in recent years he has turned into an utterly unique comic actor, a man who seems to have dedicated himself to the cause of giving decadence a good name.

Spindly, pallid, shrewd, vulnerable and yet rather grand, he appears at his sweetly domineering best in My Favorite Year (1954, by the way). The role is that of an Errol Flynn-like movie star named Alan Swann whose swash has buckled to the point where the IRS is forcing him to choose between deportation and a back-tax-paying appearance on a TV comedy program. This show bears a more than coincidental resemblance to Sid Caesar’s old Your Show of Shows. The perils it presents to a man whose joints have been vulcanized by excesses of meaningful booze and meaningless sex are substantial: an erratically egomaniacal star (Joseph Bologna); an aggrieved hoodlum (Cameron Mitchell), convinced he is being satirized in one of the regular sketches and determined to have violent revenge; a writing staff headed by a man (Bill Macy) who knows only three emotions—panic, depression and obsequiousness; the general hysteria surrounding the weekly production of a program that is broadcast live, without benefit of retakes. To guide him through all this in more or less upright condition, Swann is placed in the hands of a junior writer named Benjy Stone (Mark Linn-Baker) who is also a senior admirer of Swann’s dashing screen image. They make an odd, but affecting couple: Swann teaching the boy something about the joys of irresponsibility, Benjy showing the star something of the pleasures of responsibility.

“Dying is easy, comedy is hard,” Swann intones at one point, claiming this switch on an ancient show-biz truism is an expiring actor’s last words, but My Favorite Year’s writers and director are sometimes too determined to make it seem as comfortable as possible. The script occasionally ladles warm chicken soup over situations where a spritz in the face would be more appropriate. There are times when Actor Richard Benjamin, making his debut as a feature-film director, is too content with a scene’s obvious values to find a handle to twist the comedy tighter.

On the other hand, the film’s guileless manner becomes a kind of tribute to the underrehearsed lunacies of the comedy era it nostalgically celebrates. The humor of Your Show of Shows was based on what funny people thought was funny about the world they lived in. Because matters like demographics did not enter anyone’s calculations, authentically crazy, therefore authentically human things occasionally burst through the box to startle us out of our living-room stupors; O’Toole’s uninhibited inventiveness suits that atmosphere perfectly. One has to scramble back beyond the ’50s to find a comparison with what he is doing in pictures like this and The Stunt Man. It is, of course, to John Barrymore, offering up his very self to parody the charm and bravado, the intelligence and weakness of the character behind a classic leading man’s profile. The result, now as then, is work that goes beyond laughter into the more sublime realms of honest and poignant self-revelation. —By Richard Schickel