The Lords of Discipline (1983)
Will arrives for his last year at Military Academy, in the Deep South USA, in the 1960's. A black student, Pearce, has been accepted, for the first time and Will is asked to keep an eye out for the inevitable racism. The racists come in the form of The Ten, a secret group of the elite students. They want Pearce to leave on his own free will, but are prepared to torture him to make it 'his free will'. Will is forced to help Pearce and he is prepared to risk his own career to do so.
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Very disappointing...
Good story, Not enough for a whole film
Excellent, Without a doubt!!
Blistering performances.
The Lords of Discipline is a slow-moving, dull, boring, and badly acted 1980s film. The characters come off as cartoonish. David Keith is likable enough, and does a fair job considering what he has to deal with. The rest of the cast overplays their parts and none of them come across as real. The Southern accents are terrible, and it's hard to figure if this is a military college or a high school military school. Regardless, everyone in the cast is way to old to be students in either case. The worst scene is when Keith and his room mates kidnap a lawyer and tie him to a railroad track. The whole scene came across like a cartoon and the actor playing the lawyer gave a junior high school acting performance. Forget the Lords of Discipline.
I was impressed with how well this movie captured the flavor of time and place. As a viewer I easily felt that it was Charleston, SC in the mid 1960's. The parts were well-cast and convincingly played. I would be comfortable suggesting this movie to others and would not mind seeing it again myself.Having read Pat Conroy's original novel years ago I found that the characters in the movie looked remarkably like my imagination expected them to. That was another plus.However......and this is minor......Pat Conroy's novels tend to be sprawling affairs with several plot lines (and the ensuing chaos) running concurrently. They do not condense down into a standard length feature film without editing a good bit of the original novel out. This is the case here......several minor items had to be changed for the movie to cover the fact that one of the major plot elements in the novel were left out entirely.
A movie about discipline, the Lords of Discipline is the wrong title to what could have been a great movie. David Keith stars in a Taps like movie where a coming of age drama turns into a thriller. Some interesting characters, that end up not going anywhere, the movie has a plot but no real story that drives the audience to keep watching. Issues of race and equality take a back seat to the overall story of discipline. Military schools are looked upon as either a wrong idea run by the wrong people, or the only real justice left. These questions are not answered as David Keith tries to lead his cast. Instead, a nice movie, but far from anything great. Much like David Keith's performance, the movie falls short of anything timeless.
Do you wish to understand the root causes of the Abu Ghraib scandal ? Then watch the hollow military 'honor', the fake manhood, the very real macho 'Ooohah !', the false piety and the pervasive hypocrisy displayed in this extraordinary movie, one of my all-time favorites. This movie is more about cultural ethics and values than about military life per se. Here, the military milieu is a microcosm of American society in general. Anybody who wishes to understand the deep causes of My Lai and of Abu Ghraib should watch this movie carefully. The actors are almost all excellent, especially Keith David, Robert J. Prosky and Mark Breland (whatever happened to him, as an actor ?) I have not read the book, so I cannot compare the movie to it. Strictly as a movie, though, it ranks among the top 5 % in my book. I don't understand why it was filmed in England. Are there not equivalent military academies in the United States ?