USA
, 110 min
Shown in 1980
CREDITS
- dir
-
Howard Zieff
- scr
-
Nancy Meyers, Charles Shyer, Harvey Miller
- cam
-
David M. Walsh
- cast
-
Goldie Hawn, Armand Assante, Eileen Brennan, Sam Wanamaker, Barbara Barrie, Mary Kay Place, Harry Dean Stanton, Albert Brooks
- prod co
-
Hawn-Meyers-Shyer Productions
-
COMMENTS
Howard Zieff, Goldie Hawn, Armand Assante, Eileen Brennan and Mary Kay Place in person for Opening Night premiere.
OTHER
A stylish satirical comedy, Private Benjamin is built around the unique talents of its star, Goldie Hawn. It has already become evident that she has long since moved away from her initial image of the carefree sprite of television, carried over into her Academy Award performance as the gaga girl of the '70s in Cactus Flower. In the Steven Spielberg film, The Sugarland Express, she astonished audiences with a range that surpassed the dramatic demands of her previous roles, and not until Private Benjamin has she had an opportunity to synthesize the elusive tragicomic elements of a role into something of her own. The film is comprised of a series of picaresque episodes in which Judy Benjamin, after one unsuccessful marriage, marries an overzealous sexist, Yael. The outcome of this liaison plunges Judy into a sojourn with the U.S. Army, with classic encounters between this upper class suburban princess and the hard-nosed khaki clan. The result of this incongruous confrontation is Judy’s alarming assignment to the Thornbirds, a military unit that appears to challenge the rigors of kamikaze and Green Beret exploits. It is obvious that Private Benjamin is a modern fantasy in which an unwitting sexpot could possibly get into shape and explore the boundaries between sexism and downright male chauvinism. The film is in the screwball tradition of those comedies tailored in Hollywood’s past for the young Ginger Rogers or Lucille Ball, and Goldie Hawn wears this inherited raiment quite well, indeed. The social criticism is within each episode, so that these visions of feminine misadventure have their barbs. Finally, Private Benjamin celebrates those women, who, like Rapunzel, liberate themselves from the ogre—the mythical Mister Right.
—Albert Johnson
FACTOID #78
Now among California’s political luminaries, former ambassador Shirley Temple Black and Representative Nancy Pelosi both worked at the Festival in their days as civilians. Temple assisted in film selection in the mid-’60s and Pelosi planned Festival events in the ’70s.
