Bang the Drum Slowly

Tonight's prime-time lineup on TCM is baseball movies that were nominated for at least one Oscar. Wouldn't you know it, but one of the movies in the lineup has been sitting on my DVR. That movie is Bang the Drum Slowly, tonight at midnight. So as is always the case, I watched it in order to be able to do this review on it.

Michael Moriarty stars as Henry Wiggen, star pitcher for the New York Monarchs baseball team. Some pitchers, especially left-handed starters and knuckleballers, seem to wind up with "personal" catchers in that the combination of the two players works better than putting the pitcher with the nominally "better" catcher. Henry has a catcher who also happens to be his best friend, Bruce Pearson (Robert De Niro). However, as the movie opens, we learn that Henry is picking Bruce up from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN: Bruce is terminally ill with Hodgkin's disease. Henry takes Bruce back to Bruce's family home in the South, although it's not to die, just to meet Bruce's family and introduce us to a made-up card game some of the ballplayers like to play that's really just an excuse to find a mark to take that guy's money from.

Henry is in a contract dispute with his team, so he gives his manager, Dutch Schnell (Vincent Gardenia), an ultimatum: I want my best friend Bruce to be signed to the team along with me, and I want the contracts to be structured in such a way that if you get rid of him or send him to the minors, you have to do the same with me. Now, this presents a serious problem in that at this point of the movie Bruce isn't really presented as Henry's personal catcher in the sense that Bruce could play every fifth day when Henry starts, allowing the regular catcher to take a breather since catcher is one of the more demanding positions physically. Bruce, in fact, is the sort of ballplayer who in a normal world would have topped out in the minors, and rarely gets to start.

And then never mind the fact that Bruce is dying, and that neither Henry nor Bruce are about to tell the team this. Also never mind the fact that the intake physical that certainly every player gets before being signed doesn't seem to have found anything wrong with Bruce. Indeed, Bruce is terrified that the team is going to find out he's terminally ill, since one of the symptoms is going to be some sort of attack reminiscent what poor Bette Davis got in Dark Victory, although not one attack like that. Cancer doesn't work that way. In any case, Bruce does get one of these episodes in the hotel room, and Henry has to call for a doctor, at which point it becomes pretty damn clear that there's something wrong with Bruce although the few people who do figure out something is seriously off are going to keep it a secret as much as they can.

The season goes on, and Bruce still doesn't seem to be getting that much worse, although the movie has a bizarre ending in that Bruce goes missing (well, back home) for the postseason, asking Henry to send him a box score. Wouldn't Bruce stay with the team? If they make the playoffs, wouldn't the contracts require Bruce to be on the playoff roster as well as Henry?

But, then, Bang the Drum Slowly isn't really about baseball per se. Instead, it's one of those movies that uses baseball as a backdrop to be more of a character study of the relationship between Henry and Bruce. Reviewers who can focus on that have generally tended to find Bang the Drum Slowly quite a good movie. I'm sorry to say I don't quite agree with that, as the movie is interminably slow and for me rather full of plot holes. Still, enough people like it that this is one you're definitely going to want to watch and judge for yourself.