The Longest Yard (1974)

At the end of December, TCM ran a tribute to Burt Reynolds, who had died earlier in the year. I that I wanted to record and watch again since I hadn't blogged about it before is The Longest Yard.

Reynolds plays Paul "Wrecking" Crew, a former professional quarterback who got drummed out of the league thanks to a point-shaving scandal. He's living with his girlfriend Melissa, and when they get in an argument that involves her throwing a vase at him, he drives off in her sports car. So she calls the police, and eventually, they catch up with Crew, leading to his getting sent to prison.

For some odd reason, the prison warden, Hazen (Eddie Albert), has a semi-pro football team consisting of the prison guards, led by the head of the guards, Capt. Knauer (Ed Lauter). They're not bad, as far as semi-pro teams go, but they could be better. And now that Hazen has an ex-pro in his prison, he figures that he can call on the pro's knowledge to produce a better prison guard team. Of course, Knauer doesn't like this idea, as he absolutely hates Crew.

Crew is unwilling to help at first, which gets him sent to the worst prison work, cleaning out swamps. But he meets some useful people such as "Caretaker" (Jim Hampton), who can help people get anything on the inside. The swamp work is bad enough that Crew finally decides to make a suggestion to Hazen: find a crappy team, and use that as a pre-season warm-up game to get the prison guard team into shape.

So Hazen comes up with a brilliant idea, which is to have the guards play a team of prisoners. The prisoners will be so out of shape that they can't win, and the guards can get away with basically torturing the prisoners during the game. Crew doesn't want to play or coach, but he's blackmailed by being told his parole will be denied if he doesn't play.

Crew organizes a team, with most of them dumb enough to have no idea that they're supposedly going to have no chance to win. But they figure that they'll have the chance to get in a few licks on the guards, legally. (Well, not quite legally; much of what eventually goes on in the game should have gotten more penalty flags than it did.) The big day comes, and the prisoners are actually competitive. At least until Hazen tells Crew to throw the game....

The Longest Yard is pretty good, although I don't know quite how realistic it is. Reynolds had played college football so he's well-suited to playing a washed up player, and making the football look at least halfway authentic. There are still a lot of Hollywood touches, such as some irritating split screens, and a final play that reminded me of the staircase scene at the climax of Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious: Hitchcock needed to draw that scene out, so if you watch carefully you can see they're going down the same steps repeatedly. By the same token, the final play of The Longest Yard's football game looks like the same footage is looped in slow motion.

It's all minor quibbles, however. Reynolds is amiable, and the supporting cast is quite good, making for an enjoyable sports movie for those who like sports movies.