THE OLD GRAY LINE

THE LONG GRAY LINE (1955)
dir: John Ford



THE OLD GRAY LINE
MAD #223, June 1981
w: Lou Silverstone
a: Angelo Torres

This very loosely borrows from The Long Grey Line, with Marty Maher (Tyrone Power) telling his story to President Eisenhower. How he started as an Irish immigrant, and rose through the ranks at West Point Military Academy over the years, raising future generations of cadets with his wife Mary (Maureen O'Hara). The premise of this parody is something MAD did often, showing an example of a movie genre from the past and updating it as if it were modern.

THE NEW GRAY LINE

The military academy movie is updated to reflect the standards of 1981 and how military academies have changed over the years and in real life have cheating and sex scandals, and become more accepting of their diversity. This version has caricatures of Jack Nicholson, James Caan, and Cybill Shepherd (or is it Candace Bergen?). James Stewart and Lee Marvin would have been cadets in an old military movie, here they are the commanding officers. Dustin Hoffman also makes a cameo as one of the cadets in the splash.

In some panels, it seems like Angelo Torres never even saw a movie with Nicholson and only knows of him from photographs.