Hancock and Harris avoid any temptation to structure Bang the Drum Slowly as a typical sports movie. Although the team does win the pennant, not much of a point is made of that. There are no telegraphed big moments on the field, when everything depends on a strikeout or a home run or something. Even Bruce’s last big hit in his last time at bat is limited, tactfully, to a triple.
Instead of going for a lot of high points, the movie paints characters in their everyday personalities. We get some feeling of life on the road as Henry talks with a hotel telephone operator who’s a baseball fanatic, and Bruce moons over the prostitute he’s in love with. Phil Foster has a great cameo role as a first-base coach with a genius for luring suckers into card games with remarkably elastic rules. Occupying the background in a lot of shots is the team’s Cuban third baseman, who has it written into his contract that he be provided with a translator. And then, as the movie’s shape begins to be visible, we realize it’s not so much a sports movie as a movie about those elusive subjects, male bonding and work in America. That the males play baseball and that sport is their work is what makes this the ultimate baseball movie; never before has a movie considered the game from the inside out.
Breaking Away
PG, 100 m., 1979
Dennis Christopher (Dave), Dennis Quaid (Mike), Daniel Stern (Cyril), Jackie Earle Haley (Moocher), Paul Dooley (Dad), Barbara Barrie (Mom), Robyn Douglass (Katherine). Directed and produced by Peter Yates. Screenplay by Steve Tesich.
Here’s a sunny, goofy, intelligent little film about coming of age in Bloomington, Indiana. It’s about four local kids, just out of high school, who mess around for one final summer before facing the inexorable choices of jobs or college or the army. One of the kids, Dave (Dennis Christopher), has it in his head that he wants to be a champion Italian bicycle racer, and he drives his father crazy with opera records and ersatz Italian.
His friends have more reasonable ambitions: One (Dennis Quaid) was a high school football star who pretends he doesn’t want to play college ball, but he does; another (Jackie Earle Haley) is a short kid who pretends he doesn’t want to be taller, but he does; and another (Daniel Stern) is one of those kids like we all knew, who learned how to talk by crossing Eric Sevareid with Woody Allen.
There’s the usual town-and-gown tension in Bloomington, between the jocks and the townies (who are known, in Bloomington, as “cutters”—so called after the workers in the area’s limestone quarries). There’s also a poignant kind of tension between local guys and college girls: Will a sorority girl be seen with a cutter? Dave finds out by falling hopelessly in love with a college girl named Kathy (Robyn Douglass), and somehow, insanely, convincing her he’s actually an Italian exchange student.
The whole business of Dave’s Italomania provides the movie’s funniest running joke: Dave’s father (Paul Dooley) rants and raves that he didn’t raise his boy to be an Eyetalian, and that he’s sick and tired of all the eenees in the house: linguini, fettucini … even Jake, the dog, which Dave has renamed Fellini. The performances by Dooley and Barbara Barrie as Dave’s parents are so loving and funny at the same time that we remember almost with a shock, that every movie doesn’t have to have parents and kids who don’t get along.
The movie was directed as a work of love by Peter Yates, whose big commercial hits have included Bullitt and The Deep. The Oscar-winning original screenplay was written by Steve Tesich, who was born in Yugoslavia, was moved to Bloomington at the age of thirteen, won the Little 500 bicycle race there in 1962, and uses it for the film’s climax. Yates has gone for the human elements in Breaking Away, but he hasn’t forgotten how to direct action, and there’s a bravura sequence in which Dave, on a racing bicycle, engages in a high-speed highway duel with a semitrailer truck.
In this scene, and in scenes involving swimming in an abandoned quarry, Yates does a tricky and intriguing thing: He suggests the constant possibility of sudden tragedy. We wait for a terrible accident to happen, and none does, but the hints of one make the characters seem curiously vulnerable, and their lives more precious.
The whole movie, indeed, is a delicate balancing act of its various tones: This movie could have been impossible to direct, but Yates has us on his side almost immediately. Some scenes edge into fantasy, others are straightforward character development, some (like the high school quarterback’s monologue about his probable future) are heartbreakingly true. But the movie always returns to light comedy, to romance, to a wonderfully evocative instant nostalgia.
Breaking Away is a movie to embrace. It’s about people who are complicated but decent, who are optimists but see things realistically, who are fundamentally comic characters but have three full dimensions. It’s about a Middle America we rarely see in the movies, yes, but it’s not corny and it doesn’t condescend. Movies like this are hardly ever made at all; when they’re made this well, they’re precious cinematic miracles.
Bridge on the River Kwai
PG, 161 m., 1957
William Holden (Shears), Alec Guinness (Col. Nicholson), Jack Hawkins (Maj. Warden). Directed by David Lean and produced by Sam Spiegel. Screenplay by Michael Wilson and Carl Foreman, based on the novel Le pont de la rivière Kwai by Pierre Boulle.
The last words in David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai are “Madness! Madness . . . madness!” Although the film’s two most important characters are both mad, the hero more than the villain, we’re not quite certain what is intended by that final dialogue. Part of the puzzle is caused by the film’s shifting points of view.
Seen through the eyes of Col. Nicholson (Alec Guinness), commanding officer of a battalion of British war prisoners, the war narrows to a single task, building a bridge across the Kwai. For Shears (William Holden), an American who escapes from the camp, madness would be returning to the jungle. For Col. Saito (Sessue Hayakawa), the Japanese commandant of the camp, madness and suicide are never far away as the British build a better bridge than his own men could. And to Clipton (James Donald), the army doctor who says the final words, they could simply mean that the final violent confusion led to unnecessary death.
Most war movies are either for or against their wars. The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) is one of the few that focuses not on larger rights and wrongs but on individuals. Like Robert Graves’s World War I memoir, Goodbye to All That, it shows men grimly hanging onto military discipline and pride in their units as a way of clinging to sanity. By the end of Kwai we are less interested in who wins than in how individual characters will behave.
The film is set in 1943, in a POW camp in Burma, along the route of a rail line the Japanese were building between Malaysia and Rangoon. Shears is already in the camp; we’ve seen him steal a cigarette lighter from a corpse to bribe his way into the sick bay. He watches as a column of British prisoners, led by Nicholson, marches into camp whistling “The Colonel Bogey March.”
Nicholson and Saito, the commandant, are quickly involved in a faceoff. Saito wants all of the British to work on the bridge. Nicholson says the Geneva Convention states officers may not be forced to perform manual labor. He even produces a copy of the document, which Saito uses to whip him across the face, drawing blood. Nicholson is prepared to die rather than bend on principle, and eventually, in one of the film’s best-known sequences, he’s locked inside “the Oven”—a corrugated iron hut that stands in the sun.