Taps could just as easily been called Toy Soldiers — its cast of future sitcom regulars, stars, superstars, all look tiny and shiny and new. When it was released in 1981, however, it was a star vehicle for Timothy Hutton, Hollywood royalty (his father was the sentimental favorite Brian Hutton) recently anointed with an Oscar for  Ordinary People. Little did anyone realize that the rest of the cast, which included Sean Penn in his first film (he’d been in plays and some TV episodes and here sounds a lot like his late brother Chris), Tom Cruise in his second film (after having been “discovered” by Franco Zeffirelli for  Endless Love), as well as Giancarlo Esposito and Evan Handler, was quietly power-packed with hungry actors ready for attention.

 

Cruise, it turns out, was just an extra – but so impressed director Harold Becker that he elevated Cruise to a third major part, at the expense of a friend of his who already had the role. But casting, if anything, is the key to Becker’s career.

Becker’s identity is so aligned with the world of Joseph Wambaugh that it is easy to miss the truly defining characteristic of his career: whether by accident or design, Becker was there at the creation for many actors who went on to at least some measure of stardom. The list of future names peeking around the scenery of his movies is impressive: Victoria Tennent in the early  Ragman’s Daughter; James Woods, Ted Danson, and Christopher Lloyd in  Onion Field; Michael Dudikoff in  The Black Marble; Matthew Modine, Daphne Zuniga, Forest Whitaker (and Madonna) in  Vision Quest; Ellen Barkin and John Goodman in  Sea of Love.

Becker brings an almost documentary quality to some of his films, but the attempt at kitchen sink subject matter in  Daughter and strict  Wrong Man-style realism of  Onion is not carried through to the the often preposterous tales he tells in later films. He tends to make dark, grainy works, almost black and white but happening, due to the exigencies of commercial cinema, to be in color. He seems drawn loosely to tales of men in crisis; young or old, his heroes are poised at some crucial moment of transition that will change the rest of their lives.

That few of these movies were star making vehicles in and of themselves suggests that Becker is not tapped into the Zeitgeist and that the flaw of his career is one he shares with so many other directors — absorption of a once original personality (as seen in  Daughter) into the generally commercial and impersonal projects Hollywood offers and proffers. If he is more a casting director than a director, this means simply that actors love him (though he tends to work with them once and no further), and as such he is dependent on good, clever screenplays, such as the brilliant and underrated  Malice, credited to Aaron Sorkin and Jonas McCord, and the initally gripping but ultimately disappointing  City Hall, credited to Ken Lipper and Paul Schrader. When Becker has neither the cast nor the script, you get indifferent paint by numbers works such as  Mercury Rising.

What’s fascinating about seeing  Taps again after so long is how shockingly inert it is … nothing happens in it. Hutton, as Cadet Major Brian Moreland, takes over his military school at the summer break in response to its imminent closure. The major reason is that the board of directors have deemed the property more suitable for condos. The immediate reason is that the school’s leader, General Harlan Bache (George C. Scott in the kind of Patton-esque role he tends to sleepwalk through), has been arrested for shooting a “townie” in a ludicrously and agonizingly staged incident during the school’s version of prom night. The school itself is multidimensional, training kids and near adults, elite tactical forces, horse soldiers, and other types.

In the script credited to Robert Mark Kamen, Darryl Ponicsan, and James Lineberger for the “adaptation”), derived from the novel  Father Sky by Devery Freeman, Scott is invited to evoke a kinder, gentler, more elegiac Patton, who also makes an in-joke crack that allude to other earlier roles, such as  Gen. ‘Buck’ Turgidson in  Dr. Strangelove. But that is about as “funny” as the movie gets. The rest of the film is as somber and implacable as Bache himself. Under Moreland’s leadership the boys turn the school into a fortress, and much attention is paid to the intricacies of their moods and internecine tensions. Action threatens. A tank bearing a flood light rumbles up to the school gate in the dead of night and then — stops. Someone else gets severely burned. In the end everyone who experiences self doubt cries and a few kids are killed. Penn’s character represents the rebellious youth who is competent at what he does but usually takes the moral high ground, while Cruise’s is the gung ho guy who likes shooting people, a figure not all that distant from most of the militaristic or governmentally sponsored heroes he would play later.

When it was first released at the dawn of the Reagan era  Taps was lumped with other films  —  Raiders,  Stripes,  An Officer and a Gentleman — that seemed to evoke a renewed feeling for militarism, honor, standards, and American exceptionalism. However, the main problem with  Taps  is that as you watch you don’t know what the film is really about. Is it critical of the kids? Or sympathetic toward their ambition? Is the film critical of society? Of militarism? Of bad parenting? Like  Patton itself, it is an “incoherent text” that appeals to viewers at both extremes of the political spectrum. Such a cunningly “incoherent” presentation is probably the only truly “Reaganite” thing about the film,

The Fox disc, the second iteration of the film on DVD here in a special edition, comes with an occasionally muddy looking widescreen (1.85:1 enhanced) transfer with occasional artifacts, and adequate sound selections (beginning with DD 4.0). Supplements include an audio commentary track by Becker that covers now-familiar ground, several TV spots, and two retrospective makings of, “Sounding the Call to Arms: Mobilizing the Taps Generation” with lots of clips from the film plus new interview bits with the producer, with Becker, with Hutton, and with co-star Ronny Cox, and “The Bugler’s Cry: The Origins of Playing Taps,” which is what it sounds like, although taps the melody has only a tangential importance to the theme or meaning of the film, just enough to provide a “label”-like title, popular at the time, and in fact, still a curse upon movies.

Taps hit the street on September 12th, retailing for $19.95.

 

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