Posted on 04/16/2018 12:34:41 PM PDT by ethom
It’s hard to think of many actors who became as legendary as R. Lee Ermey did for just 40 minutes of screen time. From the moment he first strolled through the milky gray barracks of “Full Metal Jacket” as Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, screaming into the faces of his recruits, popping off taunts like firecrackers, you knew in your bones — you just knew — that you could forget every movie drill sergeant you’d ever seen. This is what those guys were really like. Everything about Ermey seemed to be made of leather: his face, his neck, his vocal cords, his soul. He wasn’t a Southerner (Ermey was born and raised in Kansas), but his voice had the sinewy contours of a mean drawl, and he turned the act of raising it into a thrilling feat of domination. Every word he spoke would be more than just heard. It would be etched onto your brainpan.
And what words they were! The fiendishly over-the-top threats and insults flew out of Ermey’s mouth from moment one, and they were more than just “colorful.” They were voluptuous in their baroque sadism, their dirty purplish fusion of joy and hate. Ermey, a former U.S. Marine Corps staff sergeant, was originally hired as a technical adviser on “Full Metal Jacket,” and it was totally his idea to take over the role of Sgt. Hartman. He waged a campaign for it, showing Stanley Kubrick an instructional video he’d made as a kind of demo tape. It didn’t take Kubrick long to realize that no actor could match the found-object, lower-depths-of-the-Marines quality that Ermey brought.
He wrote almost all his own dialogue, improvising dozens of hours of flamboyantly hostile basic-training patter, and the result sounded like the world’s most obscene graffiti turned into redneck grunt poetry.
Much of it, of course, was scabrously funny. “You’re so ugly you could be a modern-art masterpiece!” “What is your major malfunction, numbnuts? Didn’t your mommy and daddy show you enough attention when you were a child?” “I want that head so sanitary that the Virgin Mary herself would be proud to go in there and take a dump!” “I will give you three seconds, exactly three seconds, to wipe that stupid grin off your face or I will gouge out your eyeballs and skull you!”
Hartman was the drill sergeant as apocalyptic insult comic. Yet the more you listened to it, the more you realized that his herky-jerky monologue of abuse was so mesmerizing because it expressed worldview. One that you couldn’t just dismiss. Ermey’s Hartman is nothing if not an equal-opportunity hater.
After a while, his tough-nut pensées begin to add up to something, a vision that says: If these words hurt you, then what are sticks and stones — and guns and grenades — going to do? Steel yourself; kill your self-pity; or you won’t survive. Hartman starts off as a stylized figure, a satirical gung-ho fascist out of Kurt Vonnegut, but the key to Ermey’s performance is that we like Hartman, and grow to respect him, in the same way that the recruits do. He may seem like a lunatic, but that’s because he’s training these men to do something insane. It’s called war.
“Full Metal Jacket” is one of my favorite films (I’ve seen it dozens of times, and went to see it every day for a week when it first came out), and what I think a lot of people — even Kubrick fans — don’t understand about the film is that it’s not nearly as acerbic and cynical about war as many believe. It’s a film that mutates and evolves in tone and outlook as it goes along. The trick of “Full Metal Jacket” is that it draws on “counterculture” attitudes only to disarm them.
Many viewers love the Parris Island sequence, and Ermey’s performance in it, because its exuberant bootstrap nihilism seems to fit all too snugly into their knee-jerk liberal view of the military as an extreme institution. “Full Metal Jacket” is, after all, a movie about Vietnam, a word that tends to evoke the Pavlovian response of “War — bad!”
Yet Kubrick’s view of what it means to be a soldier is far more ambivalent. Matthew Modine’s Joker starts off as a detached ironic cut-up, facing off against Hartman, but by the end of the basic-training sequence his compulsive jocularity has begun to compete with a more sobering view of what his place in the military is; he’s a Joker who morphs into a soldier. And in the cauldron of Vietnam, as captured in the sniper episode of “Full Metal Jacket” that may be the single greatest sequence in any war film, he discovers how to be a brave one. Bravery, along with the mysterious code of military fellowship, is a major part of what “Full Metal Jacket” is about, even though those things aren’t the first to leap to mind as Kubrickian themes.
And the film plants the seeds of those ideas in the reckless charisma of R. Lee Ermey’s performance. His Hartman is a bug-eyed fanatic, but not a monster; his spirit is strange and scary, but that doesn’t mean it’s unnecessary. In “Full Metal Jacket,” Ermey showed us something we hadn’t seen before (not fully), and it was funny, shocking and in some screwy way, weirdly admirable. It was the spirit of combat, alive on screen in every hypnotically garish and fearlessly shouted word.
DI’s and Drill Sergeants actually work to be funny, because Boot Camp is very hard for even them (especially them). Being a funny Drill is a way to lighten things up for everybody.
Before FMJ, when I thought of DIs, I thought of Darren McGavin in “Tribes”.
Now infantry training school was a different story. It was worse than boot camp. They didn't call in forth phase boot camp for nothing.
I hated going to Edson range and then back up to San Onofre for field training. All those pretty women in their cars, particularly the convertibles. Made your di.., well you know.
In bootcamp you got a lot more sleep than the FMF, and humps had mortars, radios, ammunition, and M60s to be carried.
The cadences were a bit more ... pornographic once you were in a line battalion.
Awesome film!
Thing is, almost every role he played, Ermey channeled GySgt Hartman to some extent or another.
Even the grieving father he played in Dead Man Walking could've been Gunny, retired in civilian clothes.
My favorite scene from FMJ:
HARTMAN: Do any of you people know who Charles Whitman was? None of you dumbasses knows? Private Cowboy?
COWBOY: Sir, he was that guy who shot all those people from that tower in Austin, Texas, sir!
HARTMAN: That’s affirmative. Charles Whitman killed twelve people from a twenty-eight-storey observation tower at the University of Texas from distances up to four hundred yards. Anybody know who Lee Harvey Oswald was? Private Snowball?
SNOWBALL: Sir, he shot Kennedy, sir!
HARTMAN: That’s right, and do you know how far away he was?
SNOWBALL: Sir, it was pretty far! From that book suppository building, sir!
HARTMAN: All right, knock it off! Two hundred and fifty feet! He was two hundred and fifty feet away and shooting at a moving target. Oswald got off three rounds with an old Italian bolt action rifle in only six seconds and scored two hits, including a head shot! Do any of you people know where these individuals learned to shoot? Private Joker?
JOKER: Sir, in the Marines, sir!
HARTMAN: In the Marines! Outstanding! Those individuals showed what one motivated marine and his rifle can do! And before you ladies leave my island, you will be able to do the same thing!
...then would have been given the opportunity to entertain his sister?
Mary Jane Rottencrotch?
He whined how mean one particular DI was (who happened to be the platoon favorite) and got the man transferred.
Matthew Modine (Twitter) RIP amigo. ✌🏽PVT. Joker
At ITS the NCO's were awful. Total power trips with no repercussions. It was the first time we were ever denied our chow. The a-hole cpl. or sgt. said we were not worthy. F-in wannabe DI's.
Yeah. He also played Mr. Martin in the remake of Willard. Ernest Borgnine played the role in the original.
My favorite line of the remake is when Crispin Glover, playing Willard, goes into Martin's office and tells Martin that his rats will do whatever he tells them.
In typical Ermey fashion, Martin replies, "Then tell them to get the F*** out of my office!"
The thing is as you watched the Gunny, you just knew in your bones he was NOT acting.
Actually, you’re right. A lot of his lines were ad-libbed.
4) R. Lee Ermey, who played Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, was originally only a consultant on the film, but pursued the part, and was allowed to ad-lib.
His inability to face McKinney meant that Kubrick needed someone to play the fearsome drill instructor, Gunnery Sergeant Hartman. The director originally cast a relative unknown, former Marine Tim Colceri, in the part. But the film’s technical consultant, R. Lee Ermey, had his eyes on the role. Ermey was a former Marine Sergeant who had served as a drill instructor before doing two tours of duty in Vietnam, and then making his acting debut in 1978’s “The Boys In Company ‘C.’” He then served as a technical advisor on both “Apocalypse Now” and “An Officer And A Gentleman,” appearing in a cameo in the former, and helping Louis Gossett Jr. win an Oscar for playing another Gunnery Sergeant in the latter. To begin with, Ermey was set to only be an advisor on “Full Metal Jacket,” but filmed his own audition tape, improvising insults while being pelted with oranges and tennis balls. His unfazed fury convinced Kubrick that he had the right man, and the rest was history. Ermey was allowed to improvise his profane insults (having to explain to the director what a ‘reach-around’ was at one point), with as much of 50% of the actor’s dialogue being ad-libbed, which was quite unusual for the meticulous Kubrick. Colceri, as consolation, was given the small but memorable role as the door gunner of the helicopter, while Ermey went on to a long career as a character actor, including essentially reprising his “Full Metal Jacket” role in films as diverse as “The Frighteners” and “Toy Story.”
>>>Ermey’s Hartman is nothing if not an equal-opportunity hater<<
No, the character wasn’t a “hater”, he was there to turn young men into Soldiers who’s lives, and the lives of their Comrades were dependent on their training, the tougher the better.
“When Gunny gets to heaven,
To Saint Peter he will tell,
‘One more Marine reporting, Sir,
I’ve served my time in hell....’”
R.I.P Gunny - you were loved and admired.
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