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Biloxi Blues Thoughtful Remembrances Directed by Mike Nichols From Universal Pictures Biloxi Blues stars Mathew Broderick as the fresh-faced Army recruit experiencing life for the first time in Neil Simon's latest release. Pictured left to right are Broderick (Eugene Morris Jerome), Penelope Ann Miller (Daisy), Christopher Walken (Seargeant Toomey) and Corey Parker (Epstein). Photo by Rastar, © 1987 Universal City Studios. If I say that Biloxi Blues is the strongest film adaptation of all Neil Simon's plays, I hope you already recognize this as qualified praise. None of the films made previously from his work has been successful (Barefoot In the Park came close), but then neither were the plays. Imagine sitting through only a partial retrospective of Simon's films: say, California Suite, The Goodbye Girl, The Sunshine Boys, and The Prisoner of Second Avenue. If you managed to get out of that alive, there's the macabre possibility that you might begin speaking Simonese-the grating one- and two- liner exchanges (arguments, really)-that characterize his dialogue. The simple truth is that Neil Simon’s writing is phony to the core. It's gloppy sentimentality wrapped in fake-bitchy repartee that's meant to pass for laughing-through-the-tears acrid realism. So what makes Biloxi Blues different, better? Mike Nichols, I'd say. From the beginning, a tone new to Simon's work is established. It's called thoughtfulness. We see a long view of a train peacefully crossing a railroad bridge in a beautiful summer dusk. The mood is underscored by faintly melancholy music, and the first shot inside one of the train cars is of Matthew Broderick sitting in repose, his head pressed against a window pane, which is a tried, but here perfectly true, image of a mind that understands confusion, vulnerability, and loneliness. The film follows the wartime reminiscences of Eugene Morris Jerome (Matthew Broderick, always fine), a smart-mouth kid from the Bronx sent down South to undergo basic training at a bootcamp in Biloxi, Mississippi. The year is 1943, and Eugene becomes the principal adversary of his strangely low-key drill sargeant (Christopher Walken, daringly calm), whose determination to transform his platoon of the hapless into soldiers drives everyone more than a little crazy. Little in the film is unfamiliar. The characters are selected in terms of how they represent the broader culture, so that ethnic and religious backgrounds can be contrasted against each other. One character quickly emerges as the loutish leader of the platoon, and scarcely an hour after Eugene loses his virginity to a heart- of-gold hooker, he falls in love with a spellbinding blonde named Daisy (the incandescent Penelope Ann Miller). What raises all this above the ordinary is the good cast and the delicate substance Nichols manages to bring to at least two key scenes. In the first, we're utterly convinced that Eugene would fall in love with Daisy on first meeting her at a USO dance chaperoned by nuns. All they do is slow dance and talk softly about their mutual devotion to books, but Nichols renders the scene so evocatively, with something of the bewildered deep- breath tenderness of first romantic attachment, that one never doubts the sentiments at play. In the second, Nichols and Simon expertly depict the expulsion (to imprisonment) of one of Eugene's friends for being gay. The Army's corrupted policy-government sanctioned policing of the human heart, a subject so piercingly understood by Nadine Gordimer in her South Africa stories-is shown in its true ugliness. Between them, Neil Simon and Mike Nichols have made a film in which the character acknowledged to be perhaps the bravest and most compassionate of the platoon, is shown being humiliated and carted off to prison by his moral inferiors because of sexual orientation. It's a pleasure to salute such uncommon psychological and social verity in a film made within the box-office constraints of Hollywood filmmaking. -Terry Francis ...UP, UP AND AWAY... OH, EXCUSE ME. IN THE NEXT ISSUE. 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