Biloxi Blues

As predictable as Brighton Beach Memoirs, Neil Simon's army reminiscences (adapted from his own play) interest - if at all - through the appropriateness of the playing. It's the ethnic mixture as usual at boot camp, from Jewish intellectual (Parker) to dumb, bullying Polack (Mulhern). Again our narrator is wry, sensitive would-be writer Broderick, so we hear the cues and cadences of Simon's Broadway plays. The new recruits have standard issue hilarious-style problems - route marching, press-ups, food, the local brothel - but most of all they have psychotic, cruel-to-be-kind drill sergeant Walken, who longs to be included in their banal bunkhouse fantasy quizzes, but not the sodomy in the showers, of course. Why Walken plays him so dulcet and limp is beyond comprehension. Suffice it to say it is suicidally against the grain.