Improvise, Adapt, Overcome

Rating: 9/10 (19 January 2008)

My favorite Clint Eastwood film is Heartbreak Ridge. Not even in the Dirty Harry films is Clint Eastwood more the Clint Eastwood the movie-going public loves.
In this one Clint is a Marine Corps lifer who has come back to his original Fleet Marine unit to train a really ragged bunch of gyrenes who have an attitude. And as we learn had previously been in the care of another lifer who was coasting towards his retirement.
Coasting is not in the Eastwood creed, it's not something he ever did in any film he was in. Halfway during the film we learn that he was the winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor back in Vietnam. But that fact has probably kept him from being busted out of the Corps because Eastwood can be pretty nasty and insolent, even to superior officers.
The guy he's assigned to, Everett McGill, has a grudge going into the new assignment. Eastwood slugged a superior officer who was a friend of McGill's, an old classmate from Annapolis.
Clint's also got a domestic situation, an ex-wife in the person of Marsha Mason. She's working and keeping company with a redneck bar owner, Bo Svenson. I loved Mason's scenes with Eastwood in Heartbreak Ridge, they remind a whole lot of the way John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara behaved in their best pictures.
Clint's the man in Heartbreak Ridge. Whether it's Marine Corps regulations, Marine Corps training, Marine Corps politics, the man lives his creed, he overcomes, he improvises he adapts, but always in his own way.
Director Eastwood selected a really good supporting cast besides those already mentioned. Really good in their parts are Arlen Dean Snyder as Eastwood's best friend the sergeant-major on the post, Eileen Heckart as the widow of another of Eastwood's Marine Corps friends and his landlady as well and Mario Van Peebles the 'ayatollah of rock and roller'.
One part I really liked, my favorite in the supporting cast is that of Boyd Gaines as the young lieutenant who is in charge of Eastwood's platoon. Most people would remember Gaines from his role in the later years of One Day at a Time as Valerie Bertinelli's husband, but I think this should be his career role. He's a callow youth who grows up under pressure and even as an officer comes under Eastwood's tutelage. I like the way he stood up to Everett McGill's browbeating when McGill was trying to throw the book at Clint. Character can be brought out in a lot of ways.
The climax of the film is the United States invasion of Grenada to both overthrow a Marxist stooge of Castro and rescue American civilians stranded during an uprising. It was nice to see Eastwood and the rest of our fighting force get the welcome they deserved for a nasty job, well done.
And Heartbreak Ridge is a nearly perfect Clint Eastwood, that deserves a well done.