My Favorite Year (1982)

My Favorite Year
Directed by Richard Benjamin
Written by Norman Steinberg and Richard Palumbo
1982/US
IMDb page
Repeat viewing/YouTube rental

Alan Swann: I’m not an actor, I’m a movie star!

This is broad physical comedy elevated by Peter O’Toole’s brilliant pixilated performance.

The year is 1954.  The place is New York City.  It was a time when live TV comedy shows hostsd by the likes of Milton Berle and Sid Caesar entertained new television owners.

Narrator Benji Stone AKA Benjamin Steinberg (Mark-Linn Baker) has landed a  job as a junior writer on a live comedy show hosted by bumbling ego maniac ‘King’ Kaiser (Joseph Bologna).  Benji is a big fan of the films of Alan Swann (O’Toole) a star famous for his swashbuckling films (ckearly sort of a stand in for Errol Flynn).  He convinces the team to book Swann as a guest star.  Benji has a crush on co-worker K.C. Dowling (Jessica Harper).

On arrival, Swann proves himself to be a lovable but  irresponsible womanizing drunk.  He arrives seriously tardy and very drunk to his first rehearsal.  The powers that be want to cancel his appearance but Benji volunteers to keep Swann on the straight and narrow until the show.  This is much, much easier said than done.  Swann kind of adopts Benji showing him many adventures and cementing 1954 as his favorite year.  Swann panics when he discovers he will be filmed live.

There is an exception to every rule and I find O’Toole’s comic drunk quite endearing.  He is quite adept at slapstick.  This is an old-fashioned comedy and I laughed frequently.  Recommended.

The Academy nominated O’Toole for his work.

Kitty Kallen singing the top hit of 1954 live on Perry Como’s TV show