Another movie that was one of my "blind spots" is one that showed up a few months back when TCM ran their miniseries Two For One, with a bunch of movie types picking double features. That miniseries is being rerun, so we're getting all of those movies again. Having taped several, you'll be getting more over the next few months, just like with One Touch of Venus a few weeks back. This time, the movie in question is The Bad News Bears, tonight at 10:00 PM.
Walter Matthau plays Morris Buttermaker, a heavy drinker who lives in the suburbs of Los Angeles and now has a business cleaning swimming pools. But as the movie opens, he's in his car just outside a baseball field, when a man comes up to him. That man, Bob Whitewood (Ben Piazza), is a local city councillor and has a son he insists is a great baseball player. However, for whatever reason his son and a bunch of lousy baseball players weren't able to join the local Little League until Whitewood threatened legal action. Bob is hiring Morris to be the coach of this ragtag team of players no other team wanted, and is willing to pay well for it.
Morris, in the past, had been a professional baseball player, or so he claims. He only got as far as the minor leagues in the years following World War II, and has stories to tell anyone who will listen. Or at least, anyone who can be forced to listen, which he now has with a bunch of young kids. However, trying to make baseball players out of them isn't going to be easy.
The team is filled with stereotypes, such as the butterball catcher, or the nerdy and shy kids who know that they aren't very good and are OK with sitting on the bench, or the ethnic types. They more or less get along, but basically have no real baseball ability. And Coach Buttermaker nearly turns them off when he first tries molding them into players by harsh practices. They lose their first game not even by the mercy rule, but by having to quit because they can't get anybody out in the top of the first inning.
However, Morris fathered a child out of wedlock, and as part of being an absentee parent, he helped the kid learn to throw a curveball. That kid, Amanda (Tatum O'Neal) is the right age to be on a Little League team, so Dad tries to reconnect with his daughter. Deep down inside, she's always wanted that but doesn't want to show Dad how badly she wanted it. She's also able to convince bad-boy Kelly (Jackie Earle Haley) to join the team.
At this point, the team starts winning, and may just make it to the championship game against the Yankees, who are coached by Roy Turner (Vic Morrow), the sports parent from hell who is, if anything, even more of a taskmaster than Morris.
The Bad News Bears has become a classic over the half-century since it was released. To be honest, however, it left me rather colder than most fans. I'd guess part of that is the fact that I never did Little League, or much in the way of youth sports in general. Part of it is that I would have been a few years too young for the movie, as well as not growing up in the sort of suburb that populated this movie or a lot of the teen movies of the 1980s. And the characters were to me not the most sympathetic.
But a lot of people love The Bad News Bears, so you may love it too if you watch it.
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