Pugno Vinco

By RICHARD CORLISS

THE GREAT SANTINI Directed and Written by Lewis John Carlino

Colonel Wilbur ("Bull") Meechum, U.S.M.C., is one of nature's hard cases.

The Marine Corps runs, does not walk, through his veins. He is tough on his men, his family, himself. Everyone's back hairs stand at attention when Bull Meechum marches into the room. Once, in that great good war against Hitler, Bull was a genuine air ace with a heroic nom de guerre: the Great Santini. Now, in 1962, when only statesmen get to go eyeball to eyeball with the enemy, Bull finds himself out of meaningful work -- orchestrating practice missions in the skies over Beaufort, S.C. He might as well be running the shooting-gallery concession at a penny arcade. So this "war hero without a war" brings his belligerence home. He can never rest, not even in the arms of his loving, combat-fatigued wife. His four children must be the best and the brightest, winning at sports and playing to an uneasy draw with him. They must be like him: his eldest son must some day be him. Life is a battleground, and fatherhood is the continuation of war by other means.

The Great Santini is a movie of old-fashioned virtues. It takes its characters, and their place in American life, seriously. It presents the viewer with people he can take home with him, because they were always there. Lewis John Carlino has adapted Pat Conroy's novel without much cinematic grace, but the artlessness serves the subject and showcases three splendid performances: Blythe Banner as the willowy, resilient Lillian Meechum; Michael O'Keefe as 18-year-old Ben, his father's cross and joy; and, above all, Robert Duvall as the raging Bull--sacred monster, gung-ho dinosaur, one-man nuclear-family holocaust--who can do everything except express what he feels for the people he loves.

In this movie season of $30 million demolition derbies and feature-length promos for sound-track albums, The Great Santini had a hard time making itself heard. The film bivouacked in one town after another, opening to sympathetic reviews and closing to public indifference. Its distributor, Orion Pictures, sold the film to airlines and cable networks as a mild soporific for weary travelers and viewers. Doubtless, it was seen as nothing more than an up-scale TV movie, with its careful pacing, liberal humanism and "small" subject: the family. Now Santini has found an almost posthumous success in a Manhattan bijou. Critics helped lead the right audience to it: fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, young people who care to remember where they came from and what they might become. Bull Meechum lives again. He can finally rest in peace. --By Richard Corliss

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