Volunteers is a 1985 comedy directed by Nicholas Meyer and starring Tom Hanks and John Candy. Lawrence Bourne III is a spoiled rich kid with a large gambling debt in the 1960s. After his father, Lawrence Bourne Jr. , refuses to pay his son's debt, Lawrence escapes his angry debtors by trading places with his college roommate Kent and jumping on a Peace Corps flight to Southeast Asia. There he is assigned to build a bridge for the local villagers with Washington State University graduate Tom Tuttle and the beautiful, down-to earth Beth Wexler . What they do not realize is that the bridge is... coveted by the United States Army, a local Communist force, and the powerful drug lord Chung Mee . Each Peace Corps volunteer gets involved with one of these political groups, with the moral being that the villagers would be better off without these outsiders and the idealistic Peace Corps volunteers. The film spoofs a number of David Lean epics, including Lawrence of Arabia and The Bridge on the River Kwai, with the Washington State University Fight Song used in place of the "Colonel Bogey March".
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| Release date: | August 16, 1985 |
| Directed by: | Nicholas Meyer |
| Rated: |  |
| Runtime: | 107 Minutes |
| Producer: | Walter F. Parkes, Richard Shepherd |
| Music by: | James Horner |
| Screenplay by: | Keith Critchlow, David Isaacs, Ken Levine, Ken Levine |
| Genre: | Comedy |