An Officer and a Gentle Man

 

1936-2024

Lou Gossett Jr was a film and T actor who I usually felt was better, sometimes a lot better, than the film or TV productions themselves. For instance, take the movie that won him an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, from which this post derives its title. Gossett was great in that, but I didn't really care for the thing as a whole. Or even understand it. Like, I never got what the climatic fight between Gossett's character, a drill instructor, and Richard Gere's Navy Aviation Officer Candidate was all about. When I asked people who also had seen the movie if they knew, the reply was usually something along the lines of "Richard Gere was immature and needed to be taught a lesson." Oh, so it's a basic training version of a spanking (though this time the misbehaving child gets a few good licks in himself.) Really, Gere's character comes across most of the time as nothing more than a smart ass, of which there's a great many in this world, but because it's the military, that smart assness becomes a potential threat to national security. Whatever. Besides, I think the steamy sex scenes between him and Debra Winger (proof at least of Gere's physical maturity) had as much to do with the film's great success as did anything it had to say about honor or duty.

Enough of Gere. We're here to talk about Louis Gossett Jr. Here he is alongside Eddie Murphy:

What's ironic about the above clip is that Gossett indeed would become stereotyped, but not the way the Saturday Night Live skit suggests. Remember, he didn't win that Oscar playing a ghetto father but a military man, and for a while there...

...he continued playing military men.

Praise the Lord (after all, tomorrow's Easter) and pass the ammunition. I actually prefer this kind of nonsense to the supposedly more profound An Officer and a Gentleman. Or maybe I should say I preferred, past tense. Watching this clip this time, I find the nonsense tries my patience more than it used to. A war movie can be very exciting, but now with the real-life war (or horror) movies going on in the Ukraine and the Middle East, and here in the United States the undeclared wars against innocent bystanders that break out every time somebody walks into a shopping mall, school yard, or Super Bowl celebration armed to the gills, that excitement quickly turns into nausea. None of this is meant as a dig against Louis Gossett Jr. Like most of us, he just went where the work was. And there were times when that work worked toward peaceful ends.

Gossett started on the stage and appeared on Broadway alongside Sidney Poitier and Ruby Dee in A Raisin in the Sun (a work that was equal to his talent) and was in the film version as well. Did you know Gossett could sing? He was in the Broadway musical The Zulu & the Zayda with Ossie Davis and a Yiddish theatre actor by the name of Menasha Skulnik. Former MGM mogul Dore Schary directed. I confess to never having heard of this production until now, but it must have been good as it ran for 179 performances. In addition to singing on the stage, Gossett for a time had a side career in folk music. In 1967 (when a war movie titled Vietnam looked as it might never get to the closing credits) Gossett covered the oft recorded "Where Have All the Flowers Gone", and his somewhat soulful rendition holds its own nicely to the better-known versions by The Kingston Trio and Johnny Rivers. Listen:

May your Easter be a happy and thoroughly unexciting one.