Stripes

John Winger (Bill Murray) loses his job, his car, his flat and his girlfriend before lunch, and decides the sensible response is to join the Army. He takes his friend Russell Ziskey (Harold Ramis) along for company. Stripes is the film Ivan Reitman built around that idea, and for an hour it is one of the easiest comedies of its period to sit through: a slob, a drill sergeant and a parade ground. It is good, with one plain caveat. When the film leaves the base, most of what was funny about it stays behind.

Murray plays Winger as a man who has never once done what he was told and is mildly curious to find out what happens if he does. Warren Oates, as Sergeant Hulka, is the casting that makes it work. He plays the man entirely straight, a tired professional with no interest in being liked, and the comedy comes from Murray trying to get a rise out of him and failing, scene after scene. Nothing in the second half is as funny as their first exchange on the parade ground.

The platoon is well stocked. John Candy’s Ox announces that he has joined up to lose weight and is the film’s most generous presence. Conrad Dunn’s Psycho warns the barracks what he will do to anyone who touches his things, and Murray’s reply has outlived the film. John Larroquette’s Captain Stillman is a coward with a telescope and the only officer in sight. Ramis, who wrote the script with Len Blum and Daniel Goldberg, gives himself the sane one and underplays him so far he nearly vanishes, so the film has no second lead to speak of. P. J. Soles and Sean Young, as the military policewomen Stella and Louise, are quick and bright and asked to do almost nothing except take an interest in the recruits.

Bill Butler shoots it flat and bright, hard daylight on a great deal of khaki, and the barracks have the yellow cast of institutional lighting. James H. Spencer’s base is breeze block, chain link and painted stones, and Richard Bruno puts the recruits in fatigues that fit nobody. The best of the craft is Elmer Bernstein’s score, which plays the brass and snare drum of a recruiting film without a trace of a wink, so that every time the platoon shambles into frame the music insists they are heroes. A good deal of the laughter lives in that gap.

We laughed hardest at the graduation parade. The platoon, with no sleep and almost no training, marches onto the field to a routine that is half drill and half dance number, Murray calling the steps like a man leading a conga, while Reitman holds on the reviewing stand as the brass try to decide whether they are watching a disaster or a triumph. It is the high point, and it is also, more or less, the end of the film we had been enjoying. The last forty minutes take the platoon off the base on an errand we will not describe, and the comedy that had been coming from people now has to come from vehicles. Three editors are credited, Michael Luciano, Harry Keller and Eva Ruggiero, and the last act looks cut in a hurry: scenes start late, end early and are joined mostly by cutting to the next thing that moves. We found ourselves checking the time, and then slightly cross that a film which had made us laugh so freely had decided we would rather watch a chase.

The shape is the trouble, and it is the genre’s. Service comedies tend to run out of road once the recruits graduate. Stripes tries to become a caper instead, and Murray’s gift is that he visibly does not care about the plot, which is a fine quality in a recruit and a fatal one in an action hero. Reitman had already made a cheerful, shapeless comedy with Murray in Meatballs (1979); three years later, with Murray and Ramis again, he would make Ghostbusters (1984). This one sits between them.

It runs 106 minutes and carries a 15 certificate. Watch it with people who can quote it, or with someone who has never seen Murray this young and this unbothered. Stay for the parade. What follows is an acceptable way to fill the time, and the film plainly thinks it is the point, but we were still on the parade ground, and we were happy there.