Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #159 Glory Years (1987)

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.

Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career.  

This generous patron is now paying for me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I also recently began even more screamingly essential deep dives into the complete filmographies of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen and troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart.

I could not be more appreciative for the Kitten and Gayheart projects. The steady, ongoing income that they have provided have gone a long way towards helping me survive a brutal year that found my page-views and Patreon income plummeting. 

In another universe, I might be worried about the effect devoting a considerable amount of my time and energy to such an exquisitely non-commercial, niche endeavor might have on the site's popularity. 

Thankfully, I gave up on this site being popular long ago. It’s very liberating! There’s something weirdly empowering about knowing that an article like this will be very poorly read and appeal to a tiny percentage of the public and going ahead with it all the same. 

1987’s Glory Years might just be the weirdest, more random and WTF entry in a Kitaen project that has pretty much been nothing but weird, random and WTF pop ephemera. 

What is Glory Years, exactly? I just spent two hours and thirty six minutes watching it and I still don’t know. IMDB lists it as a TV movie while the trivia section notes, “Aired as a television series on the HBO network beginning in 1987.”

So is Glory Years a TV movie, a TV show or some weird combination of the two? I’m not entirely sure. That 157 runtime doesn’t make sense for a TV movie, even one on HBO, but it does roughly equal 7 episodes of a 22 minute television show, and plenty of shows have a first season order of seven episodes. 

On the other hand, Glory Years tells one story over the course of its epic runtime the way a TV or theatrical movie would instead of starting anew every half hour or so the way a sitcom might. 

Glory Years’ opening credits list Gary H. Miller as its “creator" as well as its writer, the way a TV series would along with a battery of surprisingly impressive “Guest Stars” like Joey Bishop, Mamie Van Doren, Avery Schreiber and Joyce Brothers, Larry Holmes and Englebert Humperdink as themselves. 

Tim Thomerson stars in Glory Years as Jack Sanders, the worst human being in the history of the world with the possible exception of Hitler. Jack is introduced pretending to be blind at his twentieth high school reunion to avoid the loan sharks after him and trick women into having sex with him in a nearby bathroom stall despite having an impossibly gorgeous, adoring, loyal girlfriend in Kitaen’s Melinda Murphy. 

Jack had sex with his nerdy pal Gerald Arkin's (Archie Hahn) prom date, something that seems to have traumatized him deeply, yet Gerald remains worshipful towards the gambling addict, deadbeat and singularly awful boyfriend all the same. 

Gerald has issues of his own. LOTS of issues. So many issues that he might as well be in a Todd Solondz indie film about life’s unfathomable cruelty instead of a 1980s HBO version of The Hangover. 

When Gerald casually tosses out,  “I spend too much time thinking about my impotency to worry about suicide” he’s so glib that I laughed out loud but I don’t think it’s meant as a joke. 

Gerald’s hero's journey in Glory Years involves not killing himself long enough to cure his impotency by having sex with a beautiful prostitute so he can go back home to his estranged wife, content in the knowledge that he’ll now be able to perform sexually. 

An insanely patient, understanding sex worker tries to loosen the suicidal Poindexter up by imploring, “tell me about your suicide.” The despondent dentist asks, “Why?” and the savvy  flesh peddler replies “It turns me on” with a casualness that is legitimately laugh out loud funny even if it’s not designed to be. 

Being on HBO allowed Glory Years to go to some unexpectedly dark, weird places. Jack spends much of the movie trying to convince his friends to go to a famous Las Vegas bordello with him but when video store owner John Moss (George Dzundza) says he doesn't pay for sex the trio’s ringleader replies, “Wait a minute, how about when we all nailed Andrea Hollander underneath the boardwalk! You didn't have to pay for that!” 

The punchline, sourly delivered by Dzundza, is that Andrea then stole his wallet but the joke, such as it is, doesn’t make anywhere near as much an impression as the mental image of our ostensible heroes taking turns "nailing" the same woman underneath a crowded boardwalk. 

Casually establishing, for the sake of a weak gag, that Glory Years’ protagonists dabbled in group sex in high school is doubly curious considering that Archie and John otherwise seem sexually inexperienced. 

Archie of course spends much of the film discussing his inability to achieve orgasms while John flirts innocently with a pretty yet approachable waitress played by Saturday Night Fever’s Donna Pescow and then confides in his friends that he’s never, in his entire life, experienced such an electric connection with a woman. 

Jack, on the other hand, is a worthless degenerate who never stops doing horrible, unforgivable things and being not only forgiven but rewarded by the universe and a girlfriend whose powers of forgiveness border on supernatural. 

The deplorable scoundrel owes twenty-five thousand dollars to some very bad men so he talks Gerald into letting him “borrow” scholarship money he’s been entrusted with so that he can gamble it on a fixed fight in Vegas and make enough money to pay off his gambling debts and return the missing money before anyone notices. 

So the three reunited friends head to Las Vegas to make their fortune and are mortified when the boxer they’ve bet all their money on loses. 

Gerald takes it so poorly, in fact, that he enters the ring before the boxer has even fallen to the mat, followed shortly by his two pals. They somehow manage to avoid getting into trouble for interfering with a professional prize fight the same way ultimately wiggle out of getting into trouble for all of the horrible things they do. 

This establishes a template where Jack will lose an enormous money out of greed, selfishness and an inability to think about anything beyond his own immediate needs, only to be saved by a girlfriend he has seemingly done nothing to deserve or a lucky windfall at the perfect time. 

If Glory Years were an actual Hollywood movie instead of a weird something or other the lying, cheating, unfaithful, amoral “master of disaster” at its core would be played by a hurricane of charisma like Jack Nicolson or an A-lister like Bradley Cooper. 

Instead he’s played Thomerson, a comedian and ubiquitous character actor who can be terrific in the right role but lacks the larger-than-life magnetism to make Jack’s inability to do follow the straight and narrow path when he can be doing literally the worst possible thing at every possible moment charming or at least forgivable rather than repellent. 

Jack’s presence in Las Vegas attracts a large number of heavies, henchmen and flunkies, including enforcers played by Chazz Palminteri and Tommy “Tiny” Lister. Glory Years is not without moments of genuine wit, like when Palminteri’s grouchy mobster observes tersely that his flight to Vegas entailed “five hours of turbulence and a fucking Sally Field movie” and Hahn’s journey from impotent, suicidal no-hoper to dude confident enough to get a boner and make love to his wife is funnier than it really has any right to be, as it’s played mostly straight. 

On one hand, Kitaen has a thankless role that primarily calls on her to relentlessly pursue a dumpster fire of a human being who lies to her, exploits her, and cheats on her without shame or remorse. On the other, Glory Years intriguingly establishes that her raging beauty is attracted to Jack despite him being a horrible, horrible person is because she also likes to lie, cause mischief and basically be a trouble-making shit-starter. 

Of course this flagrant misbehavior is a lot more appealing, or at least acceptable, coming from Kitaen because her awfulness isn’t the engine that drives the plot and because she’s such a radiant presence. 

You can get away with an awful lot if you look like Tawny Kitaen circa 1987. That’s less true if you’re a Tim Thomerson doppelgänger. 

Glory Years concludes with Jack in his element, both getting something he in no way deserves (his beautiful girlfriend’s hand in marriage) and fleeing chaos and danger he’s caused. 

John and Gerald assure Melinda, who at that point should know better than anyone, that because of Jack’s um, unique personality and predilection for lying egregiously and without shame, cheating, gambling away other people’s money and generally behaving like a sociopath you never know what life will bring and it’s never boring. 

Then again, the same could be said of being married to a serial killer and I would not recommend that to anyone, let alone a world-class beauty who also comes from a rich family and is pretty much the most supportive partner any scumbag could ask for. 

Despite my hatred for Thomerson’s character and the movie/TV series/thingy’s 156 minute runtime I wasn’t bored by Glory Years. On a sociological level it was neat to see what Las Vegas and its big casinos looked like in the mid-1980s and I quite enjoyed the performances of Hahn, Kitaen, Dzundza and a shockingly overqualified supporting cast. 

Glory Years’ two and a half hours passed surprisingly quickly and painlessly. As a TV movie, or TV series or whatever it was pleasingly mediocre, a nostalgic trip back to Sin City during the tail end of the Reagan era with a soundtrack overflowing with golden oldies. 

So if you have two and a half hours to spare, for the love of god spend them with your children or read a good book or something. But if, like me, you do somehow find yourself in the surreal position of having to watch this for professional reasons I have good news for you! It’s not that bad, or at least it’s bad in a manner that’s intermittently campy and fun. 

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