CheerupSilver Very Cool!!!

Bea Swanson This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

Patience Watson One of those movie experiences that is so good it makes you realize you've been grading everything else on a curve.

Sienna-Rose Mclaughlin The movie really just wants to entertain people.

katparker-86462 Taylor Hackford has created a melodramatic film focusing on blue collared people trying to find their meaning. Richard Gere enrolls in an air academy where he finds love and understand the importance of discipline and etiquette from a stern drill instructor. The characters are well developed, and the acting is superb all round from Richard Gere and Debra Winger to Louis Gossett(who won a best supporting academy award). I would not classify this film as a romantic one per-se, but more like a sweeping drama with a romantic ending. The locations are good- a different background rather than the usual Los Angeles or New York story is always welcome and the airbase scenes are well shot. An Officer and A Gentleman is a very good film buoyed by a fine story and some great acting.

classicalsteve When I first saw this film, being too young and naïve to understand it, I thought the sergeant was a complete jerk, being needlessly rough and even unfair towards his new recruits. Upon several viewings, I finally understood the sergeant's true intentions. He's not being mean for the sake of causing unhappiness. He's pushing his recruits outside their comfort zones to see who they really are for the purposes of revealing their strengths and weaknesses. Even during his opening speech, Sergeant Foley (Louis Gossett, Jr, in an academy-award winning role), he tells them he will use methods fair and unfair to expose their weaknesses, and he expects more than half of them to D.O.R., military abbreviation for "drop on request".Zack Mayo (Richard Gere in his first acclaimed starring role), an Italian-American in the lower middle-class, has joined the Navy. He wants to become a naval pilot, but he must first endure and persevere through a basic-training program at the hands of one of the toughest sergeants in the Navy before the military will allow him to sit in the pilot's seat of a plane. When the new cadet-trainees line up before Sergeant Foley, he tells them that even before they can start learning how to fly planes, they must prove to him they are of the right material for the job. He scolds them for listening to too much "Mick Jaggar music" and defaming their country. He then engages them on a rigorous training program which makes other military programs seem like Romper Room by comparison. However, we notice something about Zack from the get-go: he's a loner. While the other recruits immediately bond and try to pull for one-another to survive the training, Zack is often on the side, alone. He does befriend one other trainee, Sid Worley (David Keith), a young southerner who has family ties to the military.Foley warns the cadets about the local women looking for officer-pilots to date and possibly marry, but Zach and Sid take no heed and instead go out during evenings to meet women in the local town. Zach finds Paula (Debra Winger in an equally compelling performance), a working girl at a paper factory, and they immediately embark on a relationship. However, Paula is uncertain whether Zach truly loves her or whether he's just using her as temporary companionship and sexual release while he's enduring the trainee torture at the hands of Foley. Sid also meets a woman, Lynette, who desires to marry a pilot. When he is invited to have dinner with Paula's family, Zach learns Paula has had a habit of dating potential pilots, and her father was one such pilot-cadet in the same program. Paula was born out of wedlock.However, Zach has a little secret. He's been trading in a black market of military accoutrements, hiding his inventory above one of the ceiling panels in his dormitory room. He buys them in bulk wholesale from another soldier from a different company who has extra items on hand, and then resells them to his fellows at a profit. Usually the customer-soldier comes to Zach's "store" when he needs something which looks shiny and new for inspection. Often, if a cadet doesn't pass inspection he or she may lose their time off, so Zach always has customers willing to buy. Then one day, when an African-American recruit is desperate for an item to pass inspection, Sergeant Foley arrives in the room and says "In every class, there's always one joker who thinks that he's smarter than me." This is just simply a fine story from beginning to end with a top-notch cast. Gere offers his first challenging performance in which he rises to the occasion, one of many to come during the course of his career. In particular, Louis Gossett almost steals the show as the tough but fair-minded sergeant who desires only the best soldiers for the pilot training program. Apparently, his part was written with a white sergeant in mind, but Gossett makes every piece of dialogue his own, and as far as I know the part was little changed when Gossett was cast. Honorable mention also to Debra Winger as Zach's love interest. An amazing story of growth and transcendence.

FilmBuff1994 An Officer and a Gentleman is a great movie with a simple storyline that is very easy to follow but still very enjoyable,a very talented cast and a really beautiful soundtrack.I really enjoyed the love story in this movie between Richard Gere and Debra Winger,it was very realistic and unlike most romantic movies,they didn't make it too sweet,they kept it a serious and dramatic relationship that had a lot of problems instead of making them just be in love with each other for the entire movie.The movie certainly deserved both Academy Awards,Louis Gossett Jr gave a fantastic performance and Up Where We Belong is a really nice song.I would recommend An Officer and a Gentleman to fans of both romance and war movies,it dosen't focus too much on one,it focuses enough on both perfectly and one of the sweetest endings i've ever seen in a movie.Zack Mayo (Richard Gere),an uptight man training to be a navy pilot finds maturity through the love of Paula Pokrifki (Debra Winger).

Michael_Elliott An Officer and a Gentleman (1982) **** (out of 4)Box office champ about a loser (Richard Gere) with an attitude who tries to become an aviator and once at the Naval academy gets involved with a local woman (Debra Winger), a new best friend (David Keith) and a gunnery sergeant (Louis Gossett, Jr.) who tries to get through to him. This here not only ranks as one of the best films of the decade but I think a strong argument could be made that it's right up there with CASABLANCA as one of the greatest love stories ever told. The film is flawless from the acting to the directing to the characters and the story. I really don't think I could find a single negative thing to say about this film and what's so shocking is that a mainstream movie could be so brutally honest on so many levels. This film has quite a bit going for it and all of it works perfectly. This includes the fun scenes early on during the basic training all the way up to the darker elements of the picture. I really can't recall too many movies that have such rich characters as this one. This isn't just true of the lead characters but even the smallest ones also have an impact on the story. The real showcase is of course the love story between Gere and Winger and I think it works perfectly well and is very much believable without coming across as fake or forced. The second love story is the one between Gere and Keith, which is something that doesn't get enough credit in the picture. Of course, there's also the Gossett character and his relationship with Gere. The film is certainly all about relationships and how humans deal with one another and their emotions.The performances are certainly some of the best you're going to see. Gere never gets the credit he deserves, which is a real shame but this here is perhaps his greatest performance. Just the way he goes through the various stages of this character is pretty special to watch and he perfectly nails all of it. Winger is also extremely good in her part and I thought she brought a certain maturity to these sometimes wild, young and naive characters. Keith is the one who never gets enough credit for his part but we've also got Robert Loggia, Lisa Blount, David Caruso, Grace Zabriskie, Tony Plana and Harold Sylvester doing great work. Gossett certainly deserved his Best Supporting Actor Oscar as he turns in one of the more memorable roles of any military officer.Director Taylor Hackford really keeps the film moving at a wonderful pace but he smartly mixes in some laughs with all of the heavy drama. There are some pretty dramatic and dark moments scattered throughout the film but there are also several moments that are quite funny. The film ended up winning two Oscars but I think it could have won a lot more because it really is the type of film that you can watch over and over and never grow tired of it or have its power fade.