Mel Winkler | Through the Shattered Lens

Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Tuesdays, I will be reviewing Gun, an anthology series that ran on ABC for six week in 1997. The entire show is currently streaming on Tubi!

Tonight, we finish up Gun!

Episode 1.6 “Father John”

(Dir by Jeremiah S. Chechik, originally aired on May 31st, 1997)

Father John, the final episode of Gun, is also one of its worse. The only thing keeping it from being the absolute worst is that Robert Altman directed that episode that dealt with the country club presidency and then there was that episode with Daniel Stern as the guy having an elaborate Hollywood fantasy and, of course, there was last week’s episode with Kirsten Dunst…. actually, now that I think about it, of the six episodes of Gun that were produced, Father John is in the top 3 but only by default.

The episode stars Fred Ward as John Farragut, a newspaper columnist who is also a recovering alcoholic and who is always struggling to keep up with his alimony payments to his ex-wife, Joyce (Brooke Adams). John doesn’t have much faith in the world but he has always worshiped his Uncle John, a priest for whom he was named. When Uncle John dies, nephew John is shocked to discover that his uncle not only died with a lot of money hidden away in his room but that he also owned the pearl-handled gun that appears in every episode of this series. What secrets were being hidden by Uncle John!?

Nephew John sets out to find out. At first, he assumes that his Uncle must have been having an affair with a woman named Gloria (Angela Alvarado) but he then comes to learn that Gloria (whose real name is Gabriella) is a refugee who was rescued from a sex trafficking ring by his uncle. Uncle John had the gun to protect Gabriella and now, it’s time for his nephew to continue to protect her.

It sounds pretty straight-forward and, to be honest, there really aren’t any unexpected twists in this episode. That said, the episode itself is incredibly overwritten. We not only get to watch as living John tries to solve a very simple mystery but, even worse, we have to listen to his narration as he tells us the details of what he’s doing. Of course, we can already see what he’s doing so it all feels a bit redundant. The narration itself is so hard-boiled that it feels almost like a parody of the detective genre and I found myself wondering why anyone would want to read anything written by a man whose narration is essentially a collection of clichés. John Farragut is the type of guy who says, “If you sleep with dogs, you wake up with fleas,” as if he think he’s the first person to ever come up with it. Surprisingly, Fred Ward is very much miscast as John Farragut. With his weathered face and his weary tone, it’s hard to buy Ward as someone who 1) still hero-worships anyone and 2) would still be crying about having never met his father. Farragut appears to be nearly 50 and he’s still whining about stuff that most people get over or have figured out by the time they graduate college. Farragut’s actions often only make sense if you accept that idea that he is impossibly naïve about the world and that’s not the feeling one would ever get from a character played by Fred Ward.

With this episode, Gun ends on a boring note but, then again, it was never a particularly exciting series to begin with. For all the notable actors who appeared in Gun, it’s hard to think of any stand-out episodes or performances. If I had to rank the episodes, it would go something like this:

That’s not a very impressive list, to be honest. Gun perhaps would have worked better if there had been some sort of continuity as far as the gun itself was concerned. Perhaps the show would have worked if there had been a feeling of the gun following a natural journey from owner to owner. Instead, it just randomly showed up in each story and sometimes, it was important and, far more often, it was just a prop. The show certainly had nothing to say about American gun culture. It was an uneven show. The opening credits featured U2 covering Happiness Is Warm Gun and Bono’s overbaked interpretation of the lyrics felt appropriate for this show’s flashy but shallow style.

Next week, there will be a new show in this time slot. What will it be? Uhmmmm …. ask me next week.

For the past week, we’ve been taking a look at 80 of the best, worst, most memorable, and most forgettable films ever made about being a teenager and going to high school. We’ve been posting the reviews in chronological order and now, 30 reviews since we started this series with a film from 1946, we have reached the 1980s, a decade this is often considered to be the golden age of teen films. For our 31st Back To School review, we take a look at 1983’s All The Right Moves.

How did you spend your Labor Day weekend? Me, I spent it visiting with my family down at my uncle’s place. Sunday afternoon, I was laying out by the pool and listening to my cousins Peter Paul and Paul Peter have a conversation. (And yes, I do call both of them “Paulie.”) They were talking about the Dallas Cowboys and I have to admit that I could not understand a word that they were saying. It was like attending a Latin Mass, in that all I could do was hope that I was nodding at the right moment. I can’t help it. Football goes right over my head. I know that the players are trying to score touchdowns and I know that whenever fall and winter come around, everyone I know is going to be complaining about the Cowboys. But that’s it. (I also know that, what we in America call soccer, the rest of the world calls football. But, to be honest, I really don’t care.) Football talk might as well be a secret language.

However, I’m clearly in the minority as far as that’s concerned. America loves football and so does Texas. (Yes, I do consider my home state to be its own independent nation. Take that, Vermont.) And the American film industry has a long tradition of making movies — like All The Right Moves — about football.

In All The Right Moves, Tom Cruise plays Stefan Djordjevic. Stefan lives in a poor town in Pennsylvania and happens to be one of the stars of the Ampipe High School football team. And that’s a pretty good thing because this town is obsessed with football. The proud Coach Nickerson (Craig T. Nelson) is under constant pressure to win and Nickerson responds by pushing all of his players. However, it finally looks like his approach is going to pay for both him and Stefan. Nickerson is being considered for a college coaching job. Meanwhile, Stefan has a chance to get a scholarship to play football in college. Interestingly, Stefan’s ambition is not to play professional football. Instead, he wants to go to a good college so he can get an engineering degree. Stefan’s main fear is to end up like everyone else in the town, working in a steel mill and not having any way to escape from a life of poverty.

All The Right Moves starts out as a standard sports film but, halfway through, it takes an unexpected turn. Ampipe High plays a game against their main rival, Walnut Heights High School. This is the big game. This is the game that most sports movies end with. This is the game that you watch knowing that Nickerson and Stefan will overcome their differences (Nickerson is stubborn, Stefan is cocky) and that they will manage to narrowly win.

Except, of course, Ampipe doesn’t win. As the result of a last minute mistake, Ampipe loses their lead and they lose the big game. Nickerson yells at the team in the locker room. Stefan yells back and Nickerson kicks him off the team. Suddenly, Stefan finds himself with no future. And Nickerson finds himself and his family being targeted by the angry, football-crazed citizens of the town…

For a football movie, All The Right Moves is actually pretty good. Of course, it’s not really about football. It’s about the desperation of people who have found themselves trapped in a cycle of poverty and how something as seemingly inconsequential as the high school football team can become an entire town’s life. It’s about how two stubborn men — Stefan and Nickerson — allow their own fear of being trapped to keep them from thinking and acting rationally.

The film is also distinguished by good performances from Tom Cruise (who, in the same year, would play a much different high school senior in Risky Business), Craig T. Nelson, and Chris Penn (who plays Stefan’s best friend on the team). However, the film’s best performance comes from Lea Thompson, who is so good in the role of Lisa, Stefan’s girlfriend, that you can’t help but wish that the film had been more about her than him. In probably the film’s best scene, she calls out Stefan for being selfish and points out that, regardless of what happens in Stefan’s future, she’s going to be stuck in the town that he’s so desperate to escape from. The scene where she and Stefan make love is sensitively handled and it also features a split-second or so of Tom Cruise full front nudity.

So, there’s always that.

It’s no Risky Business or Fast Times At Ridgemont High but, as far as high school football films are concerned, All The Right Moves is not a bad one.