MY FAVORITE YEAR (1982) C widescreen 92m dir: Richard Benjamin

w/Peter O'Toole, Mark Linn-Baker, Jessica Harper, Joseph Bologna, Bill Macy, Lainie Kazan, Anne DeSalvo, Basil Hoffman, Lou Jacobi, Adolph Green, Tony DiBenedetto, George Wyner, Selma Diamond, Cameron Mitchell, Jenny Neumann, Corinne Bohrer, George Marshall Ruge, Amanda Horan Kennedy, John Welsh, Richard Brestoff, Jed Mills, Ted Grossman, Teresa Ganzel, Philip Bruns, Archie Hahn, Karen Haber, Priscilla Kovary, Eleanor C. Heutschy, Peter Paul Eastman, Fox Harris, Rieneke, Howard George, Bob Windsor, Gloria Stuart, Clyde McLeod, Harry Bill Roberts, Ramon Sison, Annette Robyns, Pearl Shear, Stanley Brock, Martin Garner, John Medici, Robert G. Denison, John Christy Ewing, Vincent Sardi Jr., Cady McClain, Norman Steinberg, Richard Warwick, Rex Benson, Denver Mattson, George Fisher, Bob Terhune, Nick Dimitri, Phil Adams, Richard E. Butler, Vince Brocato

From The Movie Guide: "A delightful film presenting a poignant portrait of television in the early 1950s. Benjy Stone (Mark Linn-Baker) is a fledgling writer for a live comedy television show hosted by zany, tough, yet soft-hearted King Kaiser (Joseph Bologna). Benjy is assigned to chaperone the unpredictable, boozing, onetime Hollywood swashbuckler Alan Swann (Peter O'Toole), who is to appear on television in a Kaiser skit. Arriving in Manhattan drunk and uncontrollable, Swann begins to lead Stone in a wild night of revelry, and over the next several days, the famous guest is involved in a series of escapades. On the show itself he staggers about with the near-DTs, forgetting his lines and getting into a fight with a bunch of union goons invading the set over Kaiser's past insults. O'Toole is superb as the former matinee idol, and Bologna is outstanding as the brusque and brawling comic. Linn-Baker, who would later go on to his own television series in 1986, is excellent, playing out a real-life incident where novice comedy writer Mel Brooks was assigned to chaperone the colorful Errol Flynn before he appeared on Sid Caesar's 'Your Show of Shows.' Cameron Mitchell plays a union crime boss with lead-foot accuracy and deadpans deadliness. Richard Benjamin's direction surprisingly provides a dizzy pace and inventive set-ups, aided greatly by cinematographer Gerald Hirschfeld and editor Richard Chew."

From the Cineaste magazine website (www.cineaste.com), this 2019 review of the film by Jonathan Murray:

"Sometimes, life does imitate art. But no one has yet come close to replicating the talents of Peter O'Toole. My Favorite Year testifies to both those truths. An unlikely real-life creative pairing --- New York actor-turned-director Richard Benjamin had never helmed a cinema feature before, while established Anglo-Irish star O’Toole had fronted some twenty-five --- produced a terrific odd couple comedy in which a rookie Brooklyn Jewish TV sketch-writer befriends an old school British matinee idol. Moreover, O’Toole’s character’s on screen situation was intriguingly similar to the actor’s off-screen equivalent at the time this movie was made. In it, dissolute swashbuckler and womanizer Alan Swann (O’Toole) makes a debut live television appearance only because movie offers have dried up. O’Toole quite possibly understood such industry power dynamics from direct experience. Pre-stardom during the late 1950s and very early ’60s, he acted mostly for television. During the two decades between his breakthrough performance in Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and My Favorite Year, however, he worked for the small screen only twice. Yet, the point that O’Toole’s career arc had reached by the time of the latter film is similar to that of Swann’s within it. During the first half of the 1980s, O’Toole’s television credits once more became more numerous that his cinema ones; TV then continued as the source of many of his remaining roles until his career’s posthumous end in 2015.

"Other Art-imitates-life parallels also inform My Favorite Year's plot and themes. Director Benjamin, for example, started his career at the time (early 1950s) and within the very premises (New York’s NBC Studios at 30 Rockefeller Plaza) that together constitute his film’s central setting. In 1954, freshman TV comedy writer Benjy Stone (Mark Linn-Baker) writes material for the weekly live revue of comedian King Kaiser (Joseph Bologna). Benjy’s dreams seem to come true when a childhood hero, English matinee idol Alan Swann, is booked to appear as a special guest. But Swann’s prodigious hellraising (which, of course, also echoes O’Toole’s popular reputation in real life) and phobia of live performance (his cinema success always enabled him to avoid it) threaten to turn showbiz coup into on-air catastrophe. Benjy gets the thankless task of chaperoning the inebriated, volatile Swann during the week-long rehearsals leading up to the latter’s guest appearance live on air. Against all odds, the two men become friends and Swann’s TV debut proves an anarchic triumph.

"My Favorite Year's likable combination of odd couple setup and affectionately rendered period setting established a template to which Richard Benjamin subsequently returned throughout his directorial career. Some of his better-known movies --- City Heat (1984), Mermaids (1990) --- reproduce the model in full. Others --- Racing with the Moon (1984), Little Nikita (1988), Made in America (1993) --- draw heavily on one or the other of its two elements. A late work, Laughter on the 23rd Floor (2001), a TV adaptation of Neil Simon’s identically named play, went so far as to replicate much of My Favorite Year's narrative content: both films depict the creative culture and experience of writing for East Coast live television comedy revues during the mid-1950s.

"This latter fact suggests just how personally important the milieu of Sid Caesar was for Benjamin. My Favorite Year wastes no time in communicating that same idea. Nat King Cole’s version of 'Stardust' soundtracks a self-consciously lovely opening title sequence during which the Brooklyn Bridge and Manhattan skyline’s iconic contours become materials for drawn images that recall the style of Norman Rockwell-era commercial illustration. Benjy’s opening voice-over narration then immediately strikes a comparably nostalgic note: 'You don’t get years like [1954] anymore ... TV was live and comedy was king.' But while unapologetically backward-looking, My Favorite Year is far from blindly so. For one thing, Benjamin and scriptwriters Norman Steinberg and Dennis Palumbo’s obvious love for this moment in American television history drives them to place its detailed mechanics and craftsmanship center stage. If Swann’s eventual live appearance dominates the film’s final act, many other elements of the production process --- script conferences, floor run-throughs, studio control room nerves --- are also depicted in detail. As a result, the movie often feels like a song-free backstage musical.

"While elements such as these provide diverting narrative color, My Favorite Year's openness about the personal and professional pressures inherent within the ostensibly exhilarating liveness of mid-’50s television contributes an equally welcome tonal complexity. Benjy’s immediate superior Sy (Bill Macy) bullies underlings in pursuit of the elusive grail he refers to only as 'FUNNY.' He is in turn bullied by his own superior, Kaiser, in the same fashion and for the same reason. Although a live-television virgin, Swann also understands the daunting obstacles encountered in any onscreen quest to make ’em laugh, confessing that 'comedy is such a mystery ... dying is easy, comedy is hard.'

"While valuable on its own terms, this reflective study of the Sid Caesar televisual area also allows My Favorite Year to widen out into a comparably thoughtful meditation on a broader, if related, facet of mid-twentieth-century popular culture: cinema’s irreversible ceding of significant commercial and cultural capital to television in the years immediately following the studio era’s end. The typically amusing nature of Benjy and Swann’s simultaneous on-screen introductions --- the former struggles to navigate an outsized cardboard cutout image of the latter through a crowded foyer --- readily demonstrates the film’s awareness of that moment’s complexity. Most obviously, the visual gag (Swann’s image is far too big for Benjy’s actual body) offers a knowing, slapstick-infused slant on the terminally nostalgic truism that small screen creativity is a diminished echo of its silver screen antecedent. But the same image also presages the terms of a diametrically opposed (but comparably absolutist) form of self-satisfied futurism. The cutout image of Swann is ungainly because utterly static; in these ways, it is a material and comic presentiment of the subsequently heard contemporary televisual dismissals, voiced by Benjy’s colleagues, of the historic models of cinema stardom and performance that Swann personifies ('Crap ... not acting --- kissing and jumping and drinking and humping'). Even Swann himself ('I’m not an actor, I'm a movie star!') frets that both his talents and the creative medium within which they were nurtured have been made instantaneously obsolescent by television’s mid-century rise.

"My Favorite Year's preferred way of responding to the historical fact of such mid-century Culture Wars can be dismissed --- even if also enjoyed --- as an act of flagrant wish-fulfilment. An equal partnership between the individual representatives of waxing and waning screen media is engineered when a series of misunderstandings sees Swann overcome his congenital stage fright and make a wildly off-script (but rapturously received) appearance on Kaiser’s live show. Watching Swann’s beaming image on a bank of control room monitors as he takes the audience’s applause, Benjy’s voice-over narration makes a return in order to bookend and finish the film: 'The way you see him here --- like this --- this is the way I like to remember him.'

"The teasing thing about Benjy’s remark is that it can be read in different ways. On one hand, it could be taken --- as, indeed, could the film’s entire climactic set piece scene --- as a direct acceptance of the thesis that television’s supplanting of cinema during the 1950s was a process of near-absolute popular cultural transformation. The only way to present it as anything other than the mass media equivalent of Regime Change is to deliberately deny, rather than objectively record, the reasons for and manner of its unfolding. Or, as Benjy might put it, there is always a difference between any historical moment as accurately remembered and that moment 'how I like to remember' it. Approached merely as an act of self-conscious comic fantasy (cinema and television kiss and make up), My Favorite Year's preferred version of mid-century popular cultural history is undeniably funny. That same version would become unavoidably laughable, however, the moment one tried to proselytize on its behalf with any degree of seriousness.

"But Benjy’s closing line about his preferred way of recalling Swann also alternately allows for a much more positive spin on the subjective tendencies and capacities contained within individual and collective memory acts. Leave aside for a moment the vexed question of if and how past people and processes actually possess an objective, unchanging reality --- to be prepared in the first instance to re-interpret, or even reimagine, these ('how we like to remember' stuff) expands our possible experiences and understandings of history and historical consciousness in potentially enabling ways. These become as much a matter of possibility --- these things people actively do with and to their past --- as one of predetermination --- what their past actively does with and to people. Within such strategically expanded historiographical boundaries, My Favorite Year's fantastical accommodation between past and present screen traditions comes to seem less like a fairy tale and more like an enterprising blueprint for scoping out filmmaking possibilities at the time of the movie’s production.

"In this regard, it feels telling that Richard Benjamin identifies (during the commentary track included as an extra feature on this Blu-ray release) Benjy as a fictional surrogate for the figure of Mel Brooks. Brooks wrote for Sid Caesar's Your Show of Shows during the ’50s and was also an uncredited Executive Producer on My Favorite Year. With these facts in mind, it’s not hard to see Benjamin’s movie as an exemplification (or at the very least, close relation) of the distinctive approach to early-twentieth-century American popular cultural history that Brooks employed during his 1970s and early-’80s directorial heyday. Classic Brooks films such as Blazing Saddles (1974), Young Frankenstein (1974), Silent Movie (1976), and High Anxiety (1977) loudly acknowledge, for comic self-advantage, the fact that numerous classical film genres and production systems were superseded by the emergence of new televisual aesthetic, industrial, and narrative forms as the century wore on. But these films also argue that the cinematic heritage that they spoof is anything but an obsolete and lifeless popular cultural artifact. Instead, Brooks demonstrated by example that a pretelevisual heritage remained capable of inspiring and engaging present-day filmmakers and audiences alike.

"Such comedic catholicity also shapes My Favorite Year but it isn’t the movie’s only major source of creative generosity. The film’s pronounced interest in the mechanics and pleasures of screen performance is as inclusive and open-minded as its preferred form of historical consciousness. Despite its plot turning on quasimystical notions of star charisma, not to mention the fact of Peter O’Toole’s showboating, Oscar-nominated lead performance, My Favorite Year is at pains to credit no fewer than fourteen actors during its deliberately leisurely opening titles. Analogous eulogies to ensemble-based models of creativity then pepper the film. Its backstage musical-derived narrative aspects structurally underscore the diverse range of people and talents necessary to produce a successful weekly live TV revue. Its central comic set piece scenes (Swann joining Benjy’s family for a culture-clash dinner in Brooklyn; Swann’s climactic and chaotic live appearance on Kaiser’s show) afford O’Toole the chance to shine precisely through extended interaction (and consequent sharing of the spotlight) with numerous other on-screen performers. Sure, My Favorite Year is undeniably and unapologetically an old-fashioned star vehicle with a sentimental story about an old-fashioned star. But it is also endlessly energetic and enterprising in carving out dramatic and comedic space for as many other protagonists and performers as possible to be brought along for the ride.

"The film’s fascination with ideas and practices of performance also stretches into more ideologically combustible territory. For all its cultivated Old World charm, My Favorite Year still feels relevant to a world of post-Judith Butler gender theory and politics. After all, this movie clearly understands gendered identities --- and heterosexual masculine ones in particular --- to be intensely performative in nature. The first piece of Benjy’s TV writing viewers hear discussed, for example, is a sketch involving a bullfighter. More obviously, the live skit that Swann finally contributes to at the film’s end involves show star King Kaiser performing a thinly disguised caricature (Boss Hijack) of a shady local union boss (Boss Rojeck). Kaiser dons an outsize suit and hat in order to do so; viewers can compare these garments directly with the actual dimensions of the attire of the real union kingpin, who appears during a single earlier scene. In the most general of terms, Kaiser’s stage costume suggests that screen satire characteristically exaggerates the contours of social phenomena in order to create and communicate acute interpretative observations of, and about, the latter. With far more specific regard to My Favorite Year's chosen themes, however, that stage costume’s outsized dimensions also posit that many social phenomena (in this case, patriarchal modes of masculinity) invite and demand satirical deconstruction precisely because the inherent grandiosity of their preferred workings and/or self-image renders them both ridiculous and dangerous to others.

"A structurally diffused articulation of that latter argument is also contained within the fact that, although possessed of very different personal backgrounds and levels of professional seniority, all of My Favorite Year's main male protagonists (Benjy, Kaiser, Swann) have adopted stage names and personae in their respective pursuits of public success. All three thus flirt (and, at times, seem aware of flirting) with the danger of becoming psychically subsumed by the terms of their performative professional selves. This is so not least because those masks are capable of polluting the triumvirate’s private identities, actions, and experiences. Benjy, for example, holds his family at a distance and frets that '"Benjy Stone" is not who he seems to be,' while Swann seems resigned to the fact that, several decades into stardom, 'I can’t tell where the bogus [life] ends and the real one begins.'

"As befits its status as a comedy, My Favorite Year scrupulously tries to play such serious stuff as much for laughs as it possibly can. But the idea that patriarchal masculinities are intrinsically performative phenomena also provides leeway for some more straightforwardly engineered narrative optimism. If gender’s masks must by definition always have had to be actively put on at some point in time, it therefore follows that they can also be exchanged or discarded at other junctures. Another world is possible, in other words. Once he drops the aggressively manic wiseguy shtick he assumes is mandatory for any self-respecting professional TV comedy writer, Benjy discovers that the female object of his affections 'like[s] this guy much better than the other guy.' Likewise, he supports Swann to overcome the latter’s crippling stage fright by arguing that masculinity’s performative aspects can on occasion morph into progressive, instead of regressive, personality traits. Or, as Benjy puts matters to Swann, a screen actor that good at portraying fictional heroes on screen must also be able to access some of that heroism when it is needed in real life: 'What does it matter if it was all an illusion? It worked ... you are that silly goddamn hero.'

"With a film this amusing and well-executed, extensive disc extras shouldn’t be necessary to seal the deal. But it’s worth noting that the quality of Blu-ray transfer allows viewers to fully appreciate My Favorite Year's pleasingly unpretentious visual qualities. The movie’s distinctive color palette --- warm pastels that occasionally threaten (or promise) to bloom into something more garish --- recalls dominant design aesthetics of the narrative’s period setting. That palette also suggests that the momentous popular cultural changes already shown to be underway in 1954 would only escalate further and faster yet in the years beyond. Elsewhere, the film’s briskly emphatic lighting and heavy use of painted sets knowingly (and divertingly) align it with prominent production methods and styles of the era in American television history that its narrative depicts.

"Elsewhere, the inclusion of a lengthy, digitally unrestored theatrical trailer feels like an afterthought. Richard Benjamin’s full director’s commentary, however, is a substantial inclusion. In it, he frames his work as 'a valentine to New York ... and the terrific, scrabbling, energetic kind of New Yorkers' who together created a highly distinctive American screen comic idiom. He discusses that idiom and the contemporary industry pressures that came in tow with it ('how serious comedy is, what a serious business it is') at length. More broadly, Benjamin also presents My Favorite Year as a self-aware historical meditation on television’s mid-century replacement of cinema as the hegemonic screen-based mass medium: 'the new and ... what is fading ... that's what's at the heart of this picture.' Finally, and in keeping with his movie’s obvious love for different kinds of screen performer and performance, the director offers an informative account of the process of casting the film’s ensemble of actors.

"Unsurprisingly, the process of casting and working with Peter O’Toole looms largest of all in Benjamin’s account, and the actor’s nuanced, multifaceted approach to the art of comic screen performance is handsomely acknowledged. That feels appropriate: alongside its numerous other achievements and attractions, My Favorite Year houses one of the most enjoyable and bravura of all O’Toole’s screen performances. For that and many other reasons besides, this Warner Archive release is a highly welcome one."

O'Toole was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar for his performance as Alan Swann.