‘For the Boys’: Real-Life Morale Booster

There’s a wonderful new movie playing in theaters around town, but a lot of intelligent moviegoers, who are too smart to fall for expensive advertising hype and glowing reviews from soft movie critics and rely on the Los Angeles Times in general--and on Times film critic Kenneth Turan in particular--to recommend a movie, are going to miss it.

It’s “For the Boys,” and after reading Turan’s review (Calendar, Nov. 22), all but the most non-discriminating Bette Midler fans would be understandably forgiven for refusing to spend either time or money to see it.

And they would miss one of the great moviegoing experiences of their lives.

A lot--an awful lot--can go wrong between the time when a proposed movie project gets its first tentative go-ahead and critics are invited to review the completed picture.

As one who has toiled for 30 years in the Hollywood vineyards, I am all too aware of this painful fact of celluloid life.

But when everything goes gloriously, magnificently, miraculously right, how can a critic as perceptive as Kenneth Turan not see it?

Is it possible that an evil alien being has inhabited the body of the Kenneth Turan who ended his brilliant review of “Cape Fear” (Nov. 13) with the Pulitzer Prize-caliber sentence: “Have our lives truly become so hollow that this kind of unapologetic bludgeoning of our sensibilities passes for jolly weekend entertainment?”

Apparently.

“It is impossible to say with any degree of certainty what the film ‘For the Boys’ is about,” says the impostor pretending to be Kenneth Turan.

Not to the audience who bought their way into the biggest theater at the Beverly Center one recent day, it isn’t.

To them--and to me--it’s about the best motion picture we’ve seen.

Ever.

Except possibly for “On Golden Pond,” which the bogus Kenneth Turan, in the lead paragraph of his “For the Boys” review, lets us know he also disliked.

Lighten up, Kenny. What’s to dislike? In more than 50 years of seeing, loving, hating, making out at, studying, discussing, dissecting, complaining about, praising, sending friends to, keeping children away from, denouncing, falling asleep at, walking out of, staying-to-see-again movies, I have rarely--if ever--seen one that affected me as deeply as “For the Boys.”

I entered college (CCNY) in September, 1941, three months before Pearl Harbor. I was a GI in the European Theater of Operations when entertainers like Eddie Sparks and Dixie Leonard, the fictional characters James Caan and Bette Midler portray in “For the Boys,” came over to perform for us. Believe me, that’s how they behaved and that’s how we reacted.

More than two dozen good friends of mine were killed in World War II. I thought about them as I watched “For the Boys.” I wondered if I had done enough to keep other boys from being sent to fight--and die--in other wars.

I sat trembling at the end, tears streaming down my face as I watched a diverse audience of all ages (including what I assume were two war veterans in wheelchairs) cheer and applaud as the end credits rolled.

See “For the Boys” with a paying audience, Ken.

If you do, maybe when you’re editing the book galleys of your “Collected Movie Reviews” you’ll be tempted to remove the part that says: “ ‘For the Boys’ can’t manage to connect with anything like genuine emotion.”

Because it simply isn’t true.