'Top Gun' turns 40 and flies back to theater

If you remember the summer of 1986, chances are you spent it at the movies.

"It was much more of an event," Stephen Garvey, a onetime screenwriter and professional playwright from Manhasset, said of movies during that era. Every Friday brought a new round of must-sees, he said, and nobody wanted to miss out. "You just kind of defined yourself in some way by the movies that you were drawn to."

The highest-grossing release of that year, "Top Gun," returns to theaters Wednesday for a weeklong celebration of its 40th anniversary. Starring Tom Cruise as Naval fighter pilot Pete "Maverick" Mitchell, Val Kilmer as his archrival Tom "Iceman" Kazansky and Kelly McGillis as flight instructor Charlotte "Charlie" Blackwood, the movie arrived in mid-May, scored an $8.2 million opening and, according to BoxOfficeMojo, kept playing in more than 1,000 theaters across the country for five straight months. Today it’s treasured as a definitive '80s time capsule: music by Harold Faltermeyer ("Beverly Hills Cop"), glossy direction by Tony Scott (who appears to have shot every scene precisely at sunset) and a student-teacher romance that audiences never thought to question.

"It was just this monster hit, sort of omnipresent," Dylan Skolnick, co-director of Huntington’s Cinema Arts Centre, recalled. "Everybody’s going to see it, people are talking about it, critics are talking about it — even if they don’t like it, they’re writing about it. It was both this blockbuster movie and an important cultural event."

The film’s massive box-office total — $176.9 million worldwide — suggests that "Top Gun" was the quintessential "four-quadrant" crowd-pleaser, appealing to men and women, younger and older. Yet there’s anecdotal evidence, at least, that its audience skewed female. Garvey described what might have been a common Friday night scene with several moviegoing high school friends who split into two groups: The women saw "Top Gun," while the men chose "Back to School," Rodney Dangerfield’s lowbrow comedy featuring Adrienne Barbeau. (It turned out to be the year’s sixth-biggest earner, with $91.2 million.)

"Top Gun" was an assuredly heterosexual film, "but it also has this homoerotic vibe with all these shirtless guys," Skolnick said, citing a famous scene in which several well-defined male pilots play an aggressive game of beach volleyball. Despite the considerably repressive culture of the 1980s, the filmmakers "don’t seem embarrassed about that at all," Skolnick added. "They’re so confident nobody’s going to even say anything."

The film also cast the military in a highly flattering light. A claim circulated at the time that "Top Gun" had boosted Navy recruitment by 500% — a wild exaggeration according to the Australian Associated Press, which decades later reported that official Navy figures showed a bump of just 8%. "Top Gun" has also been alternately praised for rehabilitating the military’s image after the Vietnam War and blamed for inspiring a Naval culture of ugly machismo. (The film was cited more than once in the Inspector General’s official inquiry into Tailhook, a sexual-assault scandal that tarnished the Navy in the early 1990s.)

It’s easy to forget that the summer of 1986 was crammed with many other major hits and future classics. Among them: the John Hughes favorite "Ferris Bueller’s Day Off," Rob Reiner’s enduring "Stand by Me," David Cronenberg’s horror hit "The Fly" and the Muppets-meet-David-Bowie mashup "Labyrinth." There were also midlevel gems such as the romcom "Legal Eagles," which placed Robert Redford between Debra Winger and Daryl Hannah, and the Brat Pack-adjacent "About Last Night," starring Rob Lowe and Demi Moore. Acclaimed indie features released that summer included Spike Lee’s debut, "She’s Gotta Have It," and Neil Jordan’s moody "Mona Lisa," which earned an Oscar nod for Bob Hoskins.

"There was more gravitas even to the lighter films," Garvey said. "They stuck with you longer."

Skolnick, a film school graduate and lifelong cinephile, admitted that "Top Gun" wasn’t on his must-see list in the summer of ’86. "I was more excited for ‘Blue Velvet,’" he said, referring to David Lynch’s perverse neo-noir. "That was a life-changing experience."