Word: cronauer
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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VAUNTED by some as the project which will finally make Robin Williams a truly big star, Good Morning, Vietnam concerns the misadventures of Armed Forces Radio disc jockey Adrian Cronauer, who is stationed in Saigon as U.S. involvement escalates in 1965. An iconoclast whose humorous broadcasting style has won him the admiration of the common grunts and the top brass alike, Cronauer must nevertheless face the displeasure of his immediate superiors as he tries to bring truth, integrity, and rock n' roll to the fighting...
...vehicle for Williams is that a sizable portion of the film is taken up by his on-air improvisational monologues. It is said, in fact, that once the Williams magic was set to work in front of the camera, he was virtually unstoppable: of the original script for the Cronauer broadcast-booth sequences, only one line eventually made it onto the screen...
...Adrian Cronauer is a military misfit. As protagonist of the first major service comedy about Viet Nam -- and what sometimes seems to be the last, dead-on surreal word on the subject -- he appears in Saigon in 1965 out of uniform and out of step with army manners, protocol and discipline. An irrepressibly irreverent motormouth, he is unable to fit the format of Armed Forces Radio (basically hygiene lectures and Mantovani records), where he is the new disk jockey...
...takes nothing away from the filmmakers to say that most of the movie's confidence derives from Williams. He obviously knows that in Cronauer he has finally found a meaty role. At last, the great monologist gets to play -- a great monologist. Not that so bland a term suggests Adrian's full commitment to outrageous verbal behavior or the lunacy of his situation. The massing of troops as the war begins to escalate implies the massing of a hip new draftee audience, kids who need, among other things, the kind of radio fare they were used to back home...
There was a real Adrian Cronauer. He did host a lively radio show, he did play rock 'n' roll, he was ordered not to read a news dispatch about a cafe bombing he had witnessed. ("Adrian is now in law school," says Williams, who met Cronauer two weeks ago. "He looks like Judge Bork.") But around these few facts, the film spins a fantasy of irreverence and lost innocence. Mostly, it puts its star behind an Armed Forces Radio mike to devise some stratospheric ad libs. The monologues, the English lessons for Vietnamese students and Adrian's chat with...