Private Benjamin (1980)

When it comes to comedy,there are many every day situations that are good fodder to build on.The military is one of them.You can take an endless list of comedic performers and,when examined,the whole idea of any of them being in the military is hysterical.Goldie Hawn is definitely on that list.Now,you need to surround her with the right people to make the idea work.Mission:Accomplished.Hawn's talents were complimented well in this film and we have ourselves a gem of a military comedy.While not the best ever made,it certainly is among the best.It has moments about midway where it drags just a little,but not enough to damage the overall viewing experience.

Fmovies: Goldie Hawn as Judy Benjamin is your typical Philadelphia Jewish princess with two husbands already, one quickly annulled, one expiring on their honeymoon night. Seeking something to give life meaning again she meets with an army recruiter and finds herself pushing Mississippi away from her numerous times as Private Benjamin.

This turns out for Goldie Hawn to be one of her career roles, it even spawned a TV series though Hawn did not do it for the small screen. It also won her a Best Actress Oscar nomination for herself and a Supporting Actress nomination for her screen nemesis Eileen Brennan as her basic training company commander. Private Benjamin also got a nomination for Best Original Screenplay.

Some 30 years earlier Rosalind Russell also found a home in the army when she did Never Wave At A WAC. A lot of similarities except that Russell was a good deal older when she decided to enlist. Her film was also more of a recruiting commercial for the Women's Army Corps.

Hawn's army in 1980 was a great deal more integrated although we would not see women in combat roles until the Gulf War. Still Hawn goes through some rigorous training.

She also has a good military mind, pulling out a war game sequence in a similar manner to The Dirty Dozen. She gets the goods on General Robert Webber so to speak and also has mixed results in the romance department with Armand Assante. As a woman who has now learned to be all she can be, she will not be a trophy wife for an Alpha male Frenchman.

Funniest scene for me is Goldie complaining about the latrine facilities and Brennan showing her what she can do about it.

45+ years later and Private Benjamin still a very good and very funny film.

Many of the reviewers have complained that this movie isn't funny enough. I'm not sure what that means. While there are certainly funny moments in this film, it's not intended to be pure slap-stick or laugh-riot farce. Rather, it's a poignant tale of a woman asserting her independence, as told through a comic vehicle.

Another complaint is that too much is going on and that the film doesn't know what it wants to be. Again, I'm not sure what this means. I think the narrative is very straight- forward and all aspects of the story serve to illuminate the central theme: that women no longer need to define their lives according to traditional roles dictated by men.

Goldie Hawn's performance is subtle and charming. She's a delight to watch, and her comic timing can border on genius. Perhaps the best example of this is when she and her army friends are sitting around the campfire smoking pot and she tells them the story of how her second husband died on their wedding night. One of the friends, played by Mary Kay Place, says gravely, "I don't get it. What does a person do after something like that?" After a beat, Goldie Hawn responds, "Join the army," and they all burst out laughing.

I believe that this movie has withstood the test of time, but maybe that's because I'm pushing 50.

Private Benjamin fmovies. This comedy flick is about a spoiled Jewish-American woman Judy Benjamin (Goldie Hawn) who joins the Army after her new husband dies right on their wedding night during sex and duped by sneaky recruiting Sgt. Jim Ballard (Harry Dean Stanton) convinces her that military life to be glamorous, she gets a rude wake up call in boot camp after getting in trouble constantly, especially by Judy's hard-nosed superior officer Capt. Doreen Lewis (Eileen Brennan) prompting her to want a quit the Army, but then Judy has a change of heart and decides to stick it out leading her to a series of adventures that eventually lead her to a promotion and a transfer to Paris, France.

The entire cast is outstanding, but especially Hawn who lights up the screen with her charm and beauty. Goldie Hawn is made for this kind of role, and as usual delivers the goods. There are some genuinely 'laugh out loud' moments as she struggles to adapt and make friends. Unfortunately the film seems to run out of steam half way through. Whereas the first half is true comedy, the second half has very little in the way of humor to offer. Having met a French gynecologist who she falls for, she wangles a posting to Paris to be with him. This is where the humor disappears as Judy leaves the army to be with him and he turns out to be a control freak that turns Judy into a clone of his ex girlfriend. It's almost like watching two separate films. I think it would have been better if the whole movie was her in the army not broken into basically two parts one distinctly comedic and the other a love story. Still, despite some glaring flaws, Private Benjamin is a good movie with a good story to tell. Unfortunately, what was probably a pretty daring look at gender rolls for its time has gotten really stale. If you overlook that, though, the movie is very entertaining.

Overall rating: 8 out of 10.

Hawn's string of successes in the 1980's, Swing Shift, Overboard, Protocol, Seems Like Old Times, and Private Benjamin, are among my favorite comedies of all time. She has timing, presence, and character galore, and this one may just be at the top of my Goldie Hawn list.

The cast is extraordinary. Eileen Brennan is a showstopper as the, shall we say, less than feminine company commander and Benjamin's nemesis, but that's not the start of it. There's an embarrassment of talent here. Craig T. Nelson as the amorous Capt. Woodbridge, Armand Assante as the even more amorous Henri Tremont who sexes Benjamin up, and the still more amorous Albert Brooks, the husband who dies sexing her up, are all stellar. But Sam Wanamaker (see The Competition) and Robert Webber (both sadly deceased) are male role models who may not exactly set the bar very high as father figures, but add a delightful pseudo-machismo as counterpoint to all the talented women.

Mary Kay Place seems so young as a fellow recruit, even more so than in Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, which is a nice segue to the fact that this, like many Hawn movies, draws from a distinguished television pedigree to deliver its surprising success.

This is one of those perfect little movies that I pull out of the DVD closet several times a year like visiting with an old friend, and it just occurred to me why. It's not nihilistic or deconstructionist or multi-plotted or any of the other crap that has supplanted story and dialog in too many movies since. It's sad that the only available version of the DVD is in pan and scan, as with some other great movies of this era, but I keep hoping for a widescreen release.

Favorite Line: "There are mine fields out there. Most of them are inert. However, some are ert." My recommendation: Enlist with Judy. You could use a good laugh.

This film is about a unfortunate young lady whose husband dies on their wedding night. She copes with her sorrow by mistakenly enlisting in the United States army.

"Private Benjamin" is very funny! Even the film is already thirty years old, the jokes are timeless. The scene that Goldie Hawn explaining that she is sent to the wrong army is hilarious. Well, actually the whole section about her adjusting to the fact that Army life is not a holiday is hilarious. Even though I have seen similar story lines before, it is still hilarious. If only all the comedies stood the test of time like "Private Benjamin"!