Biloxi Blues

Neil Simon's plays about bleached out New Yorkers are not to my tastes. Biloxi Blues (1983), based on the play of the same title, may be the best Neil Simon play (in film form) I have seen. It's essentially a memoir of Simon's days in basic training in Biloxi, Mississippi, in 1945. Directed by Mike Nichols, the film focuses on a small group of young men in their first days and weeks of basic training. They are young, fresh, and just out of high school. They all believe they are headed towards mortal combat in the Pacific, and maybe even death.

In many ways there is nothing particularly remarkable about the film. Matthew Broderick is good as the main character Eugene Morris Jerome, obviously based on Simon, who records his impressions of his experiences in a journal. Late in the film one of his friends finds the journal and reads from it to assembled friends—giving Eugene's opinions about every man in the group. Christopher Walken as the basic training sergeant Toomey is the most interesting character in the film. He demands total obedience from his recruits and has a streak of cruelty in him that takes aim at the more vulnerable boys in the group. He claims to have a silver-plate in his head, the result of a war wound, and at the end of the film, when he is apparently called to Fort Dix, NJ, for surgery, he appears to go crazy and threatens to shoot Eugene.

Despite the title, the South in Biloxi Blues is incidental. The South means humidity, mosquitoes, heat, swamps. It offers some slight local color. In one interlude Eugene has a budding romance from a young Gulfport girl he meets at a USO social. But what's more important in the scene than her Southern background is the fact that they both are young, this is their first romance, they both know they will never see each other again. The best scene in the film involves Eugene's first sexual experience, with a prostitute from Gulfport. The scene is hilarious, but the character of the prostitute with her gentle Southern accent and her lackadaisical attitude is the real source of humor. The South as a place in this film is relevant for its Otherness—it is not the place the characters in this film are from; it is not home; it is somewhere else, thus strange and foreign, though with a few exceptions the most one sees of it is from within a military barracks.

It's obvious this film is based on a stage play, and certain scenes seem taken straight from the stage. But the film is entertaining enough.