Adolescent boys coming of age in the mid-1980s saw “Top Gun” and left the theater with dreams of joining the military. For me, another film, released earlier that decade, beat Tom Cruise’s to the punch. “An Officer and a Gentleman” came out in 1982, when my parents considered me too young to view R-rated fare with salty language and raunchy sex scenes. Luckily, I had friends with HBO.

The drama stars Richard Gere as Zack Mayo, a self-centered loner who graduates from college and joins the Navy to fly jets. Zack wants to prove to himself that he’s a better man than his petty-officer father, a woman-chasing drunk who raised him on a naval base in the Philippines after Zack’s mother committed suicide. The movie chronicles the efforts of Zack and his fellow recruits to survive, both physically and psychologically, the demanding 13-week Officer Candidate School.

The movie was a critical and commercial success, but by today’s standards, the story and gender roles seem dated. The recruits are mostly working-class strivers. Zack’s love interest, Paula (Debra Winger), is employed at a nearby paper mill full of other women in dead-end jobs who see bagging an aspiring naval officer as their ticket to a better life. Yet the movie still resonates because of the superior acting—not only Mr. Gere’s and Ms. Winger’s but, especially for me at the time, the standout performance of Louis Gossett Jr., who died last week at 87.

Gossett plays the movie’s badass Marine drill instructor, Gunnery Sgt. Emil Foley, and establishes early on that he is not to be trifled with. “You better stop eyeballing me,” Foley tells a jittery trainee in an opening scene. “You’re not worthy enough to look your superiors in the eye. Use your peripheral vision.” It’s one of my favorite movie lines, and by the closing credits, this middle-schooler was convinced that Gossett’s tall, strapping, no-nonsense Foley was the coolest dude in the world.

Although the role hadn’t been written with a black actor in mind, Gossett was cast anyway, making him something of a pioneer. In later decades, A-list actors such as Denzel Washington and Will Smith would alter the practice, but in the early 1980s big studios rarely cast blacks in major parts initially written for white actors. “An Officer and a Gentleman” had no explicit role for a black performer and the plot has no racial theme. Foley is tasked with training a mostly white group of officer candidates and becomes a father figure to Zack, yet his ethnicity goes unmentioned.

“I just went up to the producer and told him this role could be played by a black, white, Chinese— anybody,” Gossett told the Washington Post in 1982. “Just consider me.” The producer obliged, and Gossett took home the Oscar for best supporting actor. A DVD released in 2007 marked the film’s 25th anniversary, and it included interviews with the filmmakers and several of the actors who explained why they initially were reluctant to work on the project.

The script had been passed around from one studio to another since the mid-1970s and “nobody wanted to touch it,” said the screenwriter, Douglas Day Stewart, whose script drew from his personal experience as a former navy officer. “From Vietnam, there had been a real bad taste in everyone’s mouth about the military.”

The director, Taylor Hackford, was likewise hesitant at first. “I was in the Peace Corps. I wasn’t in the military,” he said. “And I was a little worried about doing something that I felt glorified the military.” Even Mr. Gere expressed reservations. “My greatest fear was that it would be an enlistment film for the Navy, which was not pleasing me too much.”

By the late 1980s, attitudes in Hollywood toward military movies would shift. Apparently, the color green trumps disdain for the red, white, and blue. “Top Gun” and Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo films were so popular that the military began setting up recruitment desks outside theaters. Then-Navy Secretary John Lehman told reporters that 1986’s “Top Gun” had helped reverse the downward trend in recruiting high-school graduates. In 1987, the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis received a record high number of applications.

“An Officer and a Gentleman” arguably got this ball rolling. And if Louis Gossett Jr.’s fellow Tinsel-town luminaries had any subsequent regrets about the movie’s legacy, he didn’t seem to share them. The role ” had an international impact on my life” and “was obviously very influential to a lot of people” in the military, he said in reference to his later travel experiences. “I’ve been in Israel when there was trouble. I’ve been in South Africa when there was trouble. And the people from the embassies— the Marines—knew I was there . . . and they’d take good care of me.”