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USA 1979
Directed by
John Schlesinger
139 minutes
Rated PG

Reviewed by
Bernard Hemingway
2 stars

Yanks

An atypical misfire from a usually reliable director. Yanks is an ambitious, well-meant but uninspired WW2 love story about American G.Is billeted in the U.K. at time when many British men were fighting overseas, leaving their women at home.

There's a triple romantic bill of a young couple (Richard Gere and Lisa Eichorn) and a mature couple (played by Jack Nicholson look-alike William Devane and David Bowie look-alike Vanessa Redgrave), as well as second rung of a  wise-cracking bus conductor (Wendy Morgan) and her lover, an Army cook (Chick Vennera). none of which push the thermometer above luke-warm and whole shebang is drowned in carefully-composed period style laboriously contrasting the meekly proper English and the brashly iconoclastic Yanks. The idea, to look at a generally unexplored aspect of war, has potential, but the characters here are so blandly uninteresting that no-one is really going to give a toss.

 

 

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