Biloxi Blues

Biloxi Blues (1988) is a comedy-drama directed by Mike Nichols — watch it online on iFILM. Matthew Broderick plays Eugene Morris Jerome, a Brooklyn kid dropped into an Army training camp in Mississippi in 1945. The screenplay comes from Neil Simon's own semi-autobiographical Broadway play, the second in his Eugene trilogy.

Eugene arrives with three private ambitions: survive the next few weeks, lose his virginity, and become a writer. Sergeant Toomey — Christopher Walken, dry as chalk and twice as cutting — runs the barracks with a kind of exhausted contempt for everyone under his command. The recruits around Eugene are just as strange and vivid as anyone he'd meet in civilian life, and he watches all of it with a novelist's eye.

Nichols keeps the film loose where a lesser director would tighten it up. It is a coming-of-age story that earns its laughs through observation rather than setup. And Walken, in maybe ten minutes of screen time, leaves a deeper impression than most leads manage in two hours. Stream Biloxi Blues (1988) online on iFILM.