What a waste of my time!!!

Charming and brutal

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

This is certainly not for everybody, but for those who like humanistic romantic dramas, this is a fine film. It basically centers around three American soldiers and the British women they romance while waiting for the D-Day invasion in 1943 and 1944. There is a good re-creation of the atmosphere through costume and props. While nothing much happens for a good deal of film time, it is a pleasant, seemingly nostalgic visit to a certain place and time. John Schlesinger, the director, was a teen-ager during the war years, so remembering it 35 years later he does tend to make it a sad, but pretty and hopeful time.Lisa Eichhorn gives a good solid performance which was nominated for a golden globe award. There are flashes of brilliance in Richard Gere's performance. This was a year before he became a superstar with "American Giggolo." He had really busted out the year before with "Days of Heaven." Here, he doesn't quite have the confidence in front of the camera that all stars have, but he does have a nice boyish sincerity. I didn't care much for William Devane and Vanessa Redgrave. I didn't think their characters were well developed and they gave unusually colorless performances. Wendy Morgan in a smaller supporting role looked quite fetching and stood out. The Costumes by Ken Russell's wife Shirley are wonderful and she was deservedly nominated for an Academy Award for them. She won the BAFTA award for them.This is a romantic, gentle and sweet film. If you're looking for anything deeper, harder or more powerful, you'll probably be disappointed. It is closer to the British Kitchen Sink dramas of the 1960's than it would like to admit.

"From early 1942 until the invasion of Europe over a million Americans landed in Britain. They came to serve on other battle fronts or to man the vast U.S. bases in England. Hardly a city, town or village remained untouched," reads the film's introduction. What this comes to mean is that the American G.I.s you see riding in on their USA tanks will have affairs with the local women, which is certainly no surprise. Director John Schlesinger finds three representative couples. While this is a war story, the focus is on making love, not war. Both love and war make for very exciting films, but this really isn't one of them."Yanks" is fine in places, but disappointing overall. The affairs are structurally uninteresting and evoke little passion - even the participants seem bored. This is all despite a fine cast headed by Richard Gere (as Matt), Vanessa Redgrave (as Helen), and William Devane (as John). In an early role, lovely Lisa Eichhorn (as Jean) received "Golden Globe" consideration, and motherly Rachel Roberts won a late career "British Academy" award. The "National Board" placed it at #2 and gave their "Best Director" of the year award to Mr. Schlesinger. Though bland, the film is good-looking and richly detailed.****** Yanks (9/19/79) John Schlesinger ~ Richard Gere, Lisa Eichhorn, Vanessa Redgrave, William Devane

Colin Welland hacked this script from the B-plots of a thousand war pictures, in the process forgetting to write a story. This is the part of the war movie not quite as well done as the real show, the part you sit through only so you can watch tanks blow up. Here we get two and a half hours of that level of mediocrity. A Redgrave can do a lot without good dialog or interesting situations, but not everybody has such chops. This director, for instance, never rose above the level of his screenplays: if he had Waldo Salt or William Goldman at the typewriter, he was fine. YANKS has faults endemic to John Schlesinger's latter work - primarily it seems to be suffering a head cold. Not as spectacularly awful as DAY OF THE LOCUST, it is nearly as dumb. Now it's slapstick silliness, now it's brutal gravity, now it's just dull. If the individual scenes often work, a general Hallmark cloy drizzles over all. Richard Gere is at his prettiest. The acting is all pretty good, some of it better than that. And it looks very handsome, mostly shot through filters for a sheen of period nostalgia. But I find the movie not very watchable as document or elegy, and not at all as entertainment.The production is grimed with dissatisfaction, which certainly works thematically; it's about the "chin-up" attitude that replaces happiness in wartime. (If we believe Loach, Hodges and every postwar British director who never worked for Cubby Broccoli, not to mention T.S. Eliot, resignation is a British attitude not exclusive to wartime.) But theme and style are separate issues, and they do not compliment each other here. There's an almost interesting interplay between war-weary Brits and callow Yanks; almost, because nothing's investigated in any depth. None of the love stories is convincing. This is the major problem. So the movie is, unintentionally I suspect, rather hopeless. That's fine, but you can't fly on intention. Regardless of subject matter, competence is always a virtue.

My children were just babies when I saw this movie at the theater in 1979. I really loved it and have all these years. I guess the romance and the finality of goodbyes, not knowing what could happen made it all the more intense. The racism scene was hard to watch, very hard. I am sure things like that went on though. It is a treasure in my huge movie collection. I hope someday to visit England and be able to see some of the towns that were in this movie.Richard Gere is a wonderful Actor and this was the very first time I had heard about him or had ever seen him in a movie.He brought a realism to this part, he was a perfect guy to play an American soldier! Talking about it has made me want to look at it tonight!!