My Favorite Year

Peter O’Toole’s public persona as a hard-drinking, womanizing roustabout well suits the lead role in actor-turned-director Richard Benjamin’s likeable comedy about a hard-drinking, womanizing roustabout, called Alan Swann whose heydays as a matinee idol were based on playing dashing heroes in Errol Flynn-style swashbucklers.  Now it’s 1954, he's well past his prime and he’s scheduled to appear in a network comedy sketch show but his reputation for misbehaving is such that young staff writer Benjy Stone (Mark Linn-Baker) is appointed his minder. Hijinx ensue and, of course, the man behind the public face is revealed.

O’Toole, whose previous film was the cult black comedy, The Stunt Man, is in fine fettle as a charming, occasionally imperious rogue and for his fans this will be reward enough, even if his face does show the ravages of time, but the film itself is quite funny albeit slight dragging in places. Those places are largely confined to the sub-plot of a romance between Benjy and a sweet work colleague (Jessica Harper) a set-up which has no scratch to it whatsoever. Linn-Baker is a rather bland individual and this works fine when he's paired up with O’Toole but opposite an equally underwhelming actress like Harper things get really flat. 

When depicting the behind-the-scenes antics at the television studio (in this respect the film is a precursor to 30 Rock), however, things spark up considerably although a trip to Brooklyn for dinner with Benjy’s Jewish mother (Lainie Kazan) is the highlight of the film which also scores well with the 1950s period setting.

 

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