American Anthem (1986)

Best movie of this year hands down!

Too much of everything

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

Andrew White pretty much steals the show as Julie's cousin, Arthur, a musician who lost his parents and was injured in a car accident. Not hard to do when you've got charisma vacuums like Mitch Gaylord and Janet Jones playing the leads. What you've heard about this film recycling elements from Rocky IV and Purple Rain is absolutely true, but it does so without any of the style or interest. I've also seen reviews that trash Alan Silvestri's bombastic score, and I'll admit that it's melodramatic in the extreme, but it's also one of the few things aside from some great gymnastics footage that kept me awake. It's a real shame considering a great film could be made about gymnasts. This just isn't it.

I appeared in American Anthem as an extra; recruited for a part in the cast appearing as "Mitch's Dad's" bike shop 'gang'. The major portion of the movie, filmed in Flagstaff, AZ, was much more 'laid back' than the whole "town rallies around the gymnast" scenes, filmed in Phoenix. Shooting and relocations for scene changes seemed to flow smoothly enough; I don't remember but a day or two of repetitious "take 12" scenarios...and I did follow the shooting of the movie beyond just the parts in which "the gang" and I were involved. It was a pleasure working with pleasant, seasoned Tiny Wells. In the end, however, I was disappointed at the culminated result, and wasn't surprised that American Anthem didn't do better at the box office. Frankly, I would love have loved to have seen a lot of what ended up on the cutting room floor. One completely absent scene that I remember, shot in Phoenix, lit a parade of "Mitch's Dad" and his 'constituents', arriving at the gym on the day of the big meet. There were high, long and rack-shots of a shining, side-by-side parade of growling Harleys, rolling down echoing streets. The head-turning entourage pulled into the gymnasium parking lot as a great black dragon would glide on it's wings from the precipice of it's cave...and the crowds looked on...spine-tingling, classic stuff, and good, albeit absent, material.

Now I know why the logo for Lorimar Motion Pictures had a direct shot of the sun shining right into your eyes - to blind you so you wouldn't be able to see movies like "American Anthem." I saw this movie on video first, and later at a drive-in under its overseas title "Take It Easy" (named after one of the songs by Andy Taylor - yes, the one from Duran Duran - that clogs up this movie) as the supporting feature to "Dirty Dancing." Swayze blew away Gaylord then as he has now (hey, how many movies has Mitch done since then? Thank you).From the director of another bad movie starring someone with no business acting ("Purple Rain"), this was a very poor time at the flicks. I can still remember the boring scenes, the undramatic gymnastic moments (except for the one where our hero went too fast on the parallel bars, flew off and crashed - but sadly lived to twirl another day), and I can still remember Janet Jones as our hero's girlfriend dancing to synth soft rock instead of the usual stuff. Actually, Janet's hard body and Alan Silvestri's score (which Mike Clark from 'USA TODAY' dismissed at the time as the kind of stuff associated with political campaign ads - but let's face it, what do most movie critics know about movie music?) were the only good things about the movie - I got the soundtrack album hoping that there'd be some of it, and was not happy to find none of the orchestral stuff there; he only had two synth cuts in amongst the likes of John Parr (did this man ever record anything NOT for a movie?), the aforementioned Andy Taylor and Graham Nash. In other words, like the movie, it sucked apart from him.Lorimar should've stuck with "Dallas" and "The Waltons."

I remember that Mitch Gaylord and Janet Jones were two of the prettiest people in the whole bloody world when this flick came out. And their sex scene, while tame, was pretty darn hot just because they were in it.Mitch did his best world-weary, troubled teen bit. Janet was dead-on as the one-dimensional beauty with the "I know you want me" grin plastered on her adorable mug.More nudity, less gymnastics, and this film might have worked.