My Favorite Year

Posted by hollywoodland (maggie@filmschoolrejects.com) on March 10, 2007

It isn’t easy to be a movie critic when you’re a cynical nitpicker like me in a world of mostly so-so films.

With the dearth of good comedies out there today (the key word being “good”), I’ve been searching for some of the best and funniest. High on my list is 1982’s My Favorite Year.

20 years after his hugely successful turn in Lawrence of Arabia, and still the darling of world cinema, Peter O’Toole could do no wrong. He could choose any movie he wanted, and he chose to do My Favorite Year, a comedy about the early days of television when it was still live.

The lead character, matin©e idol Alan Swann (O’Toole), is almost surely based on the on- and off-screen antics of Errol Flynn, a swordsman in every definition of the word, and a star who must have loved hangovers because he went to great lengths to have as many of them as possible. So does Swann.

It’s New York in the Fifties, and Swann has been booked as a guest on a live television variety show, based on the old Sid Caesar Show, because the IRS is after him and it’s either television or deportation.

But his reputation as a troublemaking, irresponsible drunk precedes him. Doing television instead of movies is a come-down for Swann. The show, nervous at the prospect of what could go wrong, assigns a young writer and longtime Alan Swann fan, Benjy Stone (Mark-Linn Baker), to chaperone Swann until show time. Little does he know.

What follows are the hilarious adventures of the pair, Swann and Stone, from crashing the wrong Park Avenue party to Stone’s conspiratorially creating a diversion at a swank nightclub enabling Swann to run off with someone else’s date, to dragging Swann off on a visit to his parents in Brooklyn. The reaction of the Stone’s family to their famous movie star guest could be a sit-com in itself.

On the day of the show — remember, this is live, not tape — all hell breaks loose as the star, King Kaiser (Joe Bologna) finds himself in the crosshairs of the mob who don’t like King’s intended portrayal of a godfather-type gangster very reminiscent of their own boss.

As King is fending off the mob onstage on camera and in full view of the studio audience which thinks it’s part of the show, Swann learns that the show he thought would be filmed and edited later, is really live. He is filled with dread. The whole world will witness any mistake he makes.

Any further information would be a *spoiler* so I urge you to rent this near-masterpiece written by Dennis Palumbo, and enjoy yourself.

My Favorite Year is one of the eight films for which O’Toole has been nominated for an Oscar as Best Actor. He was also nominated for Golden Globe in the same category, and My Favorite Year was nominated as Best Picture.

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