Rob Reiner (1947-2025) will, for me, always be the maker of three of my favorite movies: This is Spinal Tap, in which he played the narrator of a "mockumentary" about the U.S. tour of "Britain's loudest band"; When Harry Met Sally, which his wife, Michelle, who died with him, convinced him to give an upbeat ending, and in which his mom, in a cameo, gave an unforgettable line at the end of the Katz's Deli scene; and The Princess Bride, with its wedding scene that rivals the one in another of my favorites, Alan Arkin's and Jules Feiffer's Little Murders. I haven't seen A Few Good Men, but it's on my list because, as Alissa Wilkinson notes in her Reiner "appraisal" in today's New York Times,
it’s really in movies like “A Few Good Men” that you can see his notion of what makes for real goodness shine through: not getting everything perfect, or fixing the world, but more simply standing up to powerful people who hurt the weak.
Robert Reich reminds me of something I'd forgotten, or more likely never focused on, which is that early in Reiner's acting career he played Michael Stivic, Archie Bunker's "Meathead" son-in-law, in "All in the Family". In the video clip above, courtesy of Reich, I see that Arch (Carroll O'Connor) and I had something in common: at least a mild form of OCD.
