The bravest thing he would ever do was let his family love him.


Bull Meechum (Robert Duvall) loves fighting almost as much as he loves the Marine Corps. Profane, cocky, and arrogant, he's a great fighter pilot -- and he knows it. His boss hates his guts, but knows that if he's going to straighten out his lagging squadron, Meechum is the man to do it. The story and irony of The Great Santini is in Meechum's total intolerance of family life and fatherhood. Meechum has a lovely, supportive wife, Lillian (Blythe Danner), an earnest, likeable son, Ben (Michael O'Keefe), three smaller children, and a good home, but Meechum finds the pastoral nature of peacetime totally incompatible with his gung-ho nature. So he begins to drink. He drills his family unmercifully, like recruits. He hammers his son relentlessly until, in a basketball game, his son fights back, and the family cheers Ben's efforts. Tension builds in the household until, during one drunken night, Meechum breaks down. Based on a best-selling novel by Pat Conroy, The Great Santini earned critical raves but fared poorly at the box office. Duvall's performance as Meechum is generally regarded as one of his greatest.


The Great Santini is a 1979 film which tells the story of a Marine officer whose success as a F-4 Phantom military aviator contrasts with his shortcomings as a husband and father. The film explores the high price of heroism and self-sacrifice. It stars Robert Duvall, Blythe Danner, Michael O'Keefe, Lisa Jane Persky, Julie Anne Haddock, Brian Andrews, Stan Shaw and David Keith.
The film is set in 1962 before widespread American involvement in the Vietnam War and is based on the novel of the same name by Pat Conroy. In the novel Conroy makes the point that Santini is a warrior without a war, and in turn is at war alternately with the service that he loves and his family.


Warner Bros. executives were concerned that the film's plot and lack of bankable actors would make it hard to market. It made its world premiere in Beaufort in August 1979 and was soon released in North Carolina and South Carolina to empty houses. Believing that the film's title - giving the perception that it was about circus stunts - would be the problem, it was tested as Sons and Heroes in Fort Wayne, Indiana, as Reaching Out in Rockford, Illinois, and The Ace in Peoria, Illinois. As it tested better in Peoria, The Ace stuck, though even with its new title it was still performing poorly. Orion Pictures eventually pulled the film and sold cable rights to HBO along with the airline rights to recoup its losses.[1]
Producer Charles A. Pratt still had faith in the film and raised enough money, some coming from Orion, to release The Great Santini in New York under its original title. It ended up getting great reviews and business was steady, but two weeks later debuted on HBO, and audiences stopped coming. Orion executive Mike Medavoy blamed the film's box office failure to a lack of a traditional release: screening it first in New York and expanding markets due to word-of-mouth.


Release Date: July 13, 1980 @ The Guild 50th

Distrib: Warner Brothers