An officer and a gentleman movie clips when they meet

Instead, it relies on the strength of these stereotypes to build a conventional but hugely compelling drama. You don't need a crystal ball to guess how any of these people will affect Zack, or roughly how the story will go ''An Officer and a Gentleman'' isn't a movie that trades heavily in surprises.

There, he meets three people who will become very important to him: Sergeant Foley (Louis Gossett Jr.), the drill instructor whose methods are the shrewdest and the toughest Sid Worley (David Keith), the small-town buddy who isn't as self-sufficient as Mayo and Paula (Debra Winger), the spunky, seductive local girl just waiting for the right cadet to come along. The first scenes of the movie tell of Zack's troubled childhood and make the film a little slow to get started, but the focus soon shifts to the business at hand: Zack's basic training at Naval Aviation Officer Candidate School.

''An Officer and a Gentleman,'' which opens today at the Coronet and other theaters, is the story of Zack Mayo (Richard Gere), who enlists in the Navy as a last-ditch attempt to make something of himself. If this summer hasn't previously had a wonderful Hollywood love story to call its own, it has one now. But that doesn't keep ''An Officer and a Gentleman'' from being a first-rate movie - a beautifully acted, thoroughly involving romance. Undeniably, there's an element of corniness to this. In this resolutely old-fashioned Navy tale, a selfish, hard-hearted loner becomes a much, much better man, thanks to the rigors of basic training and the love of a good woman. THE hero of ''An Officer and a Gentleman'' is neither of those things when the movie begins, but he is both by the time it is over.

An officer and a gentleman movie clips when they meet