Recalling my first viewing of "The Great Santini" with great fondness back in 1979, I couldn't forget Robert Duvall's sense of authority, directness and full control as Col. Bull Meechum. Duvall is one of the national treasures of American cinema since his startling, powerful Arthur "Boo" Radley in "To Kill a Mockingbird" to his amoral network boss Frank Hackett in "Network" and everything else in between and beyond. Watching "The Great Santini" again, Duvall is clearly tailor-made for his role as Meechum though there is a subplot that threatens the narrative and feels tacked-on for reasons never made clear. Despite that, Robert Duvall rules in a role few could tackle so honestly.
It is the pre-Cuban Missile Crisis era of 1962 and Lt. Col. Bull Meechum is a troublemaker in the Marine Corps, playing all sorts of pranks and tomfoolery on recruits and generals. One such incident involves a vomiting act at a restaurant where the Colonel substitutes Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup (it took me years to be convinced to eat that type of soup again since it made me sick thinking of this scene). Another involves literally dragging a recruit from a bathroom stall and reminding him of how many were attacked while taking a crap during Pearl Harbor and that wiping yourself after a dump requires more than two...well you get the idea.
Col. Meechum moves his family to South Carolina to a spacious house in a military base town. His close-knit family includes his pliant wife (Blythe Danner) and their four kids. One of them, Ben who is the oldest (an exceedingly good Oscar-nominated Michael O'Keefe), is consistently harassed and bullied by his father. This notably happens when they play one-on-one basketball and the Colonel is losing to his son - the Colonel cannot accept defeat during a time when there is no war. A war is what this man needs to feel justified in his military career so he goes to war with mostly his son (one unforgivable scene, after cheating on the game, has the Colonel bouncing the basketball off of his son's head). When the Colonel drinks heavily, he fights with his wife (he also has a habit of waking up the household at 4 am and gathers them together as if we was rallying the troops). He needs a war and he will not find it in this small town. This is especially true when he almost wrecks his Ben's basketball game at school - a scene that made me cringe at the truthfulness of it since Ben decides to nearly the break the arm of another player just to irritate his father.
The scenes of hostility with Bull's treatment of his son and his family hits close to home, all based on Pat Conroy's autobiographical novel. Yet when we get to a character known as Red Pettus (David Keith), an absolute racist who bullies and threatens the stuttering Toomer Smalls (Stan Shaw, who also played a stutterer in "Harlem Nights"), I felt as if this inclusion to the narrative hindered everything else that I love about "The Great Santini." The characters of Toomer and Red also appear in the novel and there is a similar tragedy but I felt as I walked into some other movie (Toomer and Ben become friends and there is a mutual trust). Just because it is set in the South though doesn't entail such a troubling subplot with Red - it almost feels as if it came out of left field. Perhaps it is to indicate the differences between father and son in a moment of crisis (Bull wished his son listened to his direct orders rather than coming to Toomer's aid) but I felt the differences were more properly aligned with Ben and his father's personal relationship than with Ben and Toomer.
I still have great admiration for "The Great Santini" and for Robert Duvall's astonishingly realistic performance. Blythe Danner also offers ample humanity as the wife who is frequently apologetic for her wild husband's digressions - you know she could never leave him but she will not stand for incessant bullying. Michael O'Keefe hits all the right notes as the son who could love and hate his father equally - the scene where he brings his drunk father home is one for the ages. Also must mention the acerbic Lisa Jane Persky as one of Bull's two daughters who tries her father's patience. Duvall stands tall in this movie and it is one of his greatest roles ever. The Great Duvall, indeed.
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