OVP: My Favorite Year (1982)

Film: My Favorite Year (1982)
Stars: Peter O'Toole, Mark Linn-Baker, Jessica Harper, Joseph Bologna, Bill Macy, Lainie Kazan
Director: Richard Benjamin
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Actor-Peter O'Toole)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Classical Hollywood is a land of dreams, and frequently illusions.  In the 1980's and ever since, we have seen the Golden Age of Hollywood, land of a thousand movie stars, torn apart.  Bing Crosby and Joan Crawford were hardly as noble as their onscreen characters.  Rock Hudson was hardly going to end up with Doris Day.  Perhaps the first of these onscreen stars to watch their career wildly torn asunder was Errol Flynn, a swashbuckling movie star of the 1930's and 40's who watched his celebrity torn apart by salacious sex scandals and an endless stream of booze.  Flynn's demise is seen on full-display in My Favorite Year, a 1982 film most noted for its sole Oscar nomination in Best Actor.  My Favorite Year never actually mentions Flynn, of course, but he's apparent in every single scene-you can clearly tell which star Peter O'Toole is trying to encapsulate.  It's a fun, meta trick in an otherwise dull and dated comedy, and almost worth the price of admission.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film tells the tale of Allan Swann (O'Toole) a slightly washed-up former matinee idol who is trying to stage a comeback of sorts on television.  He's guesting on a show clearly mirroring Sid Caesar's Your Show of Shows (the film is executive produced by Mel Brooks, who is the inspiration for Mark Linn-Baker's Benjy Stone), but doesn't seem to have enough ground in reality anymore to actually perform, as he's constantly on a bender or ending up in bed with a random woman.

The film is always at its best whenever O'Toole is onscreen, which isn't as often as you'd think considering its star billing.  Mark Linn-Baker is actually the main character (in today's Oscars, someone might have considered O'Toole for the supporting category, even though this is a Miranda Priestley style situation and he belongs in lead), but he doesn't have enough of a presence to really sell his character, frequently trying to be both Mel Brooks and Woody Allen at once, but never having the charisma to be either.

I loved the way that O'Toole is so vicious in the way he takes down the pampered life of movie stars.  He shows how he's essentially constantly being admired, with people throwing themselves at him with little idea of what sort of a scoundrel he is offscreen, and how he needs his assistants and chauffeur to essentially do everything for him-all he is required to do is stand in front of a camera and be admired. O'Toole gets all of the great lines ("I'm not an actor, I'm a movie star!") and the casting director for this film gets great credit for having a rascal of a character played by a rascal of an actor.  Someone with less magnitude than Peter O'Toole, a great actor but an equally great cinema star would have been crushed under the weight of overacting.  With O'Toole, we give him multiple benefits of the doubt when he's charming-we want to be part of his world just like everyone wants to be part of Allan Swann's.  It's a great little trick, and though O'Toole is not helped by the saccharine ending (did we really need the deadbeat dad story, or quite frankly anything involving Benjy's home life with the always lovable but in this case totally unnecessary Lainie Kazan?), he's still quite good.

The film could have used more of this movie star panache, as even though it's essentially about television, TV had stars too, but it's hard to see them here.  I loved the one "blink-and-you'll-miss-it" homage to classic Hollywood (the woman that O'Toole dances with at the restaurant is 30's leading lady and future Oscar nominee Gloria Stuart), but it would have been better if we'd seen more of them. A little more name-dropping and more of Allan as movie star would have given the film a shot in the arm when it felt long (and it's only ninety minutes).

Those are my thoughts-what about yours?  Has anyone seen My Favorite Year, and if so, what did you think?  Where does Peter O'Toole rank in your 1982 Best Actor lineup (when you have Ben Kingsley, Paul Newman, Jack Lemmon, and Dustin Hoffman as your competitors, you know it's going to be a tough competition)?  And did anyone else notice the Gloria Stuart cameo?  Share your thoughts in the comments!