Thrice Told Tales: The Longest Yard

There are so many great baseball films. From the straight-up biopics like The Pride of the Yankees (“Today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the Earth.”) to screwball comedies like It Happens Every Spring. The manliest of men will weep watching Field of Dreams, and the purest of hearts will laugh at the cussing kids in The Bad News Bears. The Critical Drinker probably doesn’t mind the Girl Power in A League of Their Own, and there may be no better guy film than Major League. Sometimes I think the best sports film ever is Moneyball (while all other sports films say “follow your heart,” it says “use your brain”).

Yeah, I know I left out Bull Durham and The Sandlot, but I need to get on to the real point of this post. I’m just talking about baseball films to point out that there aren’t nearly as many great or even good football films.

In spite of Rudy, North Dallas Forty, Brian’s Song, and more, there seem to be a lot more great baseball films than football films – even though football viewership and revenue have surpassed baseball as America’s sport.

On the other hand, I can’t think of any baseball films that would work for the Thrice Told Tales formula (one story brought to the screen in at least three adaptations), but a classic football film that does: The Longest Yard.

The Longest Yard (1974)

Two movie stars hold the record for being the biggest box office draw for five years in a row: Bing Crosby and Burt Reynolds. This film was made during a time when people would go to a film just because Reynolds was the star. I would even contend that this is the best “Burt Reynolds film.” You can argue Deliverance and Boogie Nights are better films, but those aren’t “Burt Reynolds” films with his combination of action and humor. The film was directed by Robert Aldrich, of The Dirty Dozen fame.

It’s the story of a washed-up NFL player, living as a rich woman’s kept man. But a day comes when he’s had enough. Melissa (Anitra Ford) tells Paul Crewe (Reynolds) he needs to turn off the TV and join the party she’s throwing. “How long do we have to keep watching this crap?... Only a moron can sit and watch two football games, one after the other,” she sneers at him.

This is the breaking point. Crewe hits her (frankly, a pretty bold move to have your star hit a woman) and takes her car on a wild, high-speed chase. When he’s pulled over, he mocks and taunts the cops. Off to prison he goes.

The chief guard (Ed Laughter) greets him with a warning. The warden will ask Crewe to coach his football team (a team of guards), and if he wants to get along at the prison, he’d better turn the warden down.

A few minutes later, he meets the warden (Eddie Albert), who praises his semi-pro team of guards. He asks Crewe what he thinks of semi-pro. “It’s a joke,” Crewe responds. The warden is not pleased by Crewe’s refusal to coach.

Crewe is stuck between these two men who presently control his life, the chief guard and the warden. He comes up with an alternative. He suggests to the warden that he can make a team of convicts for the guards to scrimmage against. They can play a game before the guards’ season starts. The warden agrees to the suggestion, pleased to think that his team will easily beat the inmates.

The other inmates don’t welcome Crewe. “Caretaker” (James Hampton, Dobbs from F-Troop), the only man who’s willing to talk to him, explains why the inmates hate him: though the men in prison are thieves, rapists, and murderers, “You shaved points off a football game, man, that’s un-American. Most boys here had nothing, and you had everything.”

In time Crewe wins a few men to the team with the promise that they’ll be able to play the guards – and hurt the guards. It takes longer to win over the black inmates, who are better athletes overall.

The prison is quite segregated, by the inmates’ choice. The ‘N’ word is used rather freely in the film. But eventually the guards’ abuse of the one black player on Crewe’s team wins the blacks over.

During training, much emphasis is placed on how to hurt the guards without the refs noticing. Caretaker arranges to get game film of the guards, if Crewe will have a romantic (15-minute) interlude with the warden’s secretary. In a funny performance, the secretary is played by the young Bernadette Peters with incredibly tall hair (even for the ’70s in the South).

Crewe begins to think that they might be able to pull off a win. And the warden does not want to let that happen.

Most of the second half of the film is the game, and it’s great fun. The cheerleaders are inmates singing “Born Free,” and it’s a very funny game. A number of former NFL players acted in the film (on both teams). Because Reynolds himself was a running back for the Florida State Seminoles, he’s convincing as a quarterback.

Richard Kiel, later “Jaws” from the Bond films, is an intimidating presence on the team (and in the prison). In his best scene, he clotheslines a guard and cries out, “I think I broke his neck! I broke his freaking neck!” (It was “freaking” when I first saw the film on network television. A different word was used when I recently watched it on DVD.)

When the inmates look like a threat to win, the warden threatens to blackmail Crewe. Will Crewe once again let down his teammates? There is also a very real threat that the warden will kill Crewe. Back in the time of Cool Hand Luke, killing off the star wasn’t an impossibility.

Mean Machine (2001)

This remake makes good sense. Back in the day, there wasn’t as much of a market for American football in the UK, so this film tells the same basic story, but using soccer rather than football (to use the correct terminology) to tell it.

Vinnie Jones, a former footballer, was cast as Danny “The Mean Machine” Meehan, former player and captain of Team Britain. He was banned from football for life for fixing a game against Team Germany. He is considered not just a cheat, but a traitor – which makes him hated by most in the prison (though loved by the Scots).

Again, the governor of the prison wants Meehan to coach his semi-pro soccer team of guards, but the chief of the guards, the present coach, warns him not to take the position. So again, a game between guards and the inmates is suggested. The governor is played by David Hemmings, who decades before starred in Michelangelo Antonioni’s existential classic, Blow-Up.

There isn’t the racial segregation in this film that the original had. The division is between those who are members of a syndicate, led by a prisoner named Charlie Sykes (John Forgeham), and those who are not. From inside the prison, Sykes still leads his gambling organization that has a hold on the prison governor.

The most interesting member of this soccer team is a hardened killer, the Monk, who is the inmate team’s goalie. He’s played by Jason Statham, early in his career, and is the most fun character in the film.

Again, much of the last half of the film is the game. But the game is soccer. For people who like soccer, I’m sure that’s swell. It bored me as a real-world soccer game bores me. There wasn’t as strong an emphasis on the inmates getting a chance to hurt the guards. Much of the humor in the first film was found in the subterranean warfare. There are some gags about such things, but it isn’t nearly as funny.

Also, in the first film, because of the nature of American football, Crewe is instructed to run up the score with three touchdowns. In soccer, we have a 2-1 score. The idea of running up the score just doesn’t work in soccer. But if you like soccer, this may be a film for you.

The Longest Yard (2005)

When people complain about the pointlessness of remakes, this could be a prime exhibit. There are many reasons why this remake is inferior to the original. Instead of the director of The Flight of the Phoenix and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, it’s directed by Peter Segal, the director of Get Smart starring Steve Carell. It’s an MTV Production, so the soundtrack is fairly awful. Many of the casting choices are just sad, especially an elderly Cloris Leachman as the secretary who must be serviced.

But these are the two biggest problems that make the film awful:

1. Adam Sandler taking the Burt Reynolds role

As mentioned before, Burt Reynolds is great as an aging football star. The audience not only believes that he can play football, they believe he can hold his own in a prison where physical abuse is the norm from both guards and other inmates.

Adam Sandler previously played a waterboy, and one wonders if he would actually be up to doing that. In this, Sandler fights with guards and prisoners. I had doubts that he would be able to take on secretary Cloris Leachman in a fight.

This is one of the greatest downgrades in cinema history, comparable to going from James Earl Jones as Darth Vader in Star Wars to young Jake Lloyd in The Phantom Menace.

Paul Crewe is supposed to win the men over by his cool and toughness. These are qualities Burt Reynolds has – and Adam Sandler does not at all. This weakness is highlighted by Burt Reynolds’ appearance in the film as an aged former NFL player, Nate Scarborough (played by Michael Conrad of Hill Street Blues in the first film). Even decades older, Reynolds was still cooler and tougher than Sandler.

2. The film was rated PG-13 rather than R

Now I’m not normally one who campaigns for more violence and profanity in a film. But this is a football film set in a prison. One expects the prisoner's language to be harsh. And both humor and drama are found in the violence in the first film. The mellowing of both the language and action in the remake makes it a lesser film.

The tension between the quarterback and the warden in the first film is palpable and makes the film every bit as much of a drama as a comedy. The remake is just a sitcom. It shouldn’t have been made. Although it gave me a chance to write another of these 'Thrice Told Tales' posts, so there’s that.

So, Ricochet Cineastes, what is your favorite football film? What is your favorite sports film?