My Favorite Year **** (1982, Peter O’Toole, Mark Linn-Baker, Jessica Harper, Joseph Bologna) – Classic Movie Review 5039

The favorite year is 1954, and, in America’s golden age of television, a hard-drinking, dissolute Hollywood matinée idol star, Alan Swann (Peter O’Toole), is slated to appear on a Sid Caesar-style live TV variety show. Screen-writers Norman Steinberg and Dennis Palumbo’s story is based on a real-life incident involving the hard-drinking star Errol Flynn.

A superlative O’Toole gives a delightful performance that is an expert mix of over-the-top fun and heart-tugging pathos. His performance revived his popularity and his career and he was Oscar nominated as Best Actor for the seventh time. There was an eighth and final Oscar nomination for Venus (2006) but O’Toole never won, and had to be content with his 2003 Honorary Award for his ‘remarkable talents [that] have provided cinema history with some of its most memorable characters’.

Director Richard Benjamin’s excellent 1982 comedy has a good situation, compelling story and interesting characters, lots of funny lines, a rousing fighting finish, a great star turn, and fine support, especially from Joseph Bologna in the Caesar role of the egotistical King Kaiser. Executive producer Mel Brooks wrote scripts for Caesar on TV in the Fifties.

Also in the cast are Mark Linn-Baker, Jessica Harper, Bill Macy, Lainie Kazan, Lou Jacobi, Cameron Mitchell, Anne DeSalvo, Adolph Green, George Wyner, Basil Hoffman, Tony DiBenedetto, Selma Diamond, Jenny Neumann, Corine Bohrer, George Marshall Ruge, Barbara Horan, John Welch, Richard Brestoff, Jed Mills, Ted Grossman, Teresa Ganzel, Philip Bruns, Archie Hahn, Karen Haber and Priscilla Kovary.

The cinematographer Gerald Hirschfeld also worked with Brooks on Young Frankenstein.

RIP Gerald Hirschfeld, the veteran cinematographer who shot Fail Safe and Young Frankenstein in beautiful black and white, and notably also My Favorite Year. He died on 13 February 2017 of natural causes at his home in Ashland, Oregon, aged 95.

Sid Caesar, comedian, saxophonist, composer, actor and musician, winner of two Primetime Emmys, died on 12 February 2014, aged 91.

Joseph Bologna, Actor, Oscar-Nominated Screenwriter and Playwright, known for My Favorite Year, Blame It on Rio, The Woman in Red and Big Daddy, died on 13 August 2017, age 82.

© Derek Winnert 2017 Classic Movie Review 5039

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