Review: "My Favorite Year" (1982)

If you can ever call a movie nothing more than an expression of pure joy, it'd have to be the 1982 classic My Favorite Year.

It's impossible to imagine a movie this funny, well-written, heartfelt and wild coming out today. But back in the early 1980s this old-fashioned comedy gem slipped out.

The year in question is 1954, and a young comedy writer named Benjy Stone from Brooklyn is writing for the country's most popular TV variety show, Stan "King" Kaiser. One week a washed up British movie star named Allann Swan visits to guest star on the show -- and he's drunk and unreliable. Benjy is told to take care of him for the week -- and craziness and hijinks and hilarity ensue. 

The plot for this movie is slight -- it's more about the characters, their romances, their hopes, and their fears. And it's about a culture clash, two very different worlds smashing together -- the world of Jewish New York City comedians clashing with the world of a British master thespian, all told through a loving 1950s nostalgia lense.

Benjy is played by a very young Mark Lin-Baker, a few years before his long run on Perfect Strangers and then on Broadway. He's charming, and I don't know why he didn't make more movies, especially since My Favorite Year was a big hit. Alan Swann is played magnificently by Peter O'Toole, a truly titanic performance (he also got an Oscar nomination for it). Joe Bologna, the great character actor, plays a Stan Kaiser and the rest of the supporting cast includes a gorgeous Jessica Harper as Benjy's love interest, Lanie Kazain, and many others. You can tell they all had a lot of fun making this picture.

My Favorite Year is very loosely based on something that happened in the early 1950s when a young Mel Brooks was a writer on Sid Ceasar's variety show. The guest one week was Errol Flynn, the great British movie star of the 1930s and '40s who was also a hopeless drunk. Brooks was tasked with making sure he made it to rehearsals and the show, and that wasn't always easy. Nothing as crazy happened in real life as in in the movie, but it's great premise for a movie -- which is obviously why they made one.

The movie is also a look at a special moment in time when NYC was still the heart of television, and shows like Sid Ceasar's reigned supreme. While they never say what network the fictional Stan Kaiser show is on, most of the movie takes place at 30 Rock so it's obviously supposed to be NBC. 

In these dark times, My Favorite Year is a little piece of light.