The Bad News Bears (1976)

Review:

Kids are universally unpredictable, inconsistent, and undisciplined. Perhaps that is why there never seems to be a want of material when it comes to sports movies about kids. But so often, kids in sports teams fall into terrible clichés –the rebel kid who’s also the best player on the team, the girl who is usually the second best player on the team, the abused kid that doesn’t stick up for himself, the runt; the list goes on. But director Michael Ritchie’s The Bad News Bears transcends the genre (perhaps in part because it helped invent it) by realizing kids are more nuanced people than we often give them credit for.

The movie’s success rests entirely in Walter Matthau, a career grump, who never ceases to amuse. Matthau plays Coach Morris Buttermaker, a minor league baseball has-been who is hired by a father who’s son did not make the little league baseball cut that year. Buttermaker, a boozer and cigar smoker always short of cash, takes the job reluctantly and without any heart. You get the sense that deep down this is a man who loves baseball but has had his heart broken by it. The world of professional sports has exiled him to a career of cleaning pools and coaching baseball rejects.

The Bear’s first few games are obviously a disaster. Buttermaker gets drunk at practices and the team suffers for it in their playing. It is not until Buttermaker sees the disappointment in his team after a forfeited game that he starts to take his job seriously. He enlists the daughter of an old girlfriend (a young Tatum O’Neil) to be The Bears’ ringer. Soon, a local motorcycle hoodlum joins the team as a star hitter. And with these additions, the Bears become a formidable force of the little league world. Of course this is Buttermaker’s journey ultimately. Matthau plays the character with a grizzly gentleness about him. He never has a succinct epiphany or an acknowledgement of his restored love for the game, but that’s what makes him human; that’s what makes Buttermaker’s conversion to a good coach actually powerful.


The Bad News Bears does not rely on gimmicks or preachy lessons about how to play the game with a good attitude. This movie has cheating, violence, cursing, drinking, smoking – pretty much everything you would hope would be in a sport’s movie. Foremost it allows the kids to be kids. For the most part, they are all fully realized characters that want to have fun in spite of their self-doubts. But most of all, they want to be able to look up to their coach with pride. Held together by a good script by Bill Lancaster (who reportedly wrote it with the coaching of his father Burt Lancaster in mind), "The Bad News Bears" revels in exploring the glory and cruelty that trickles down even into the little leagues of America’s favorite pastime.


Rating

On a scale of one to "Casablanca" this movie is a "To Have and Have Not" (1944)


Rationalization:


This is a perfectly good movie that stands on its own merits. Its probably one of the best films in the sub-genre. But as far as its relationship to all other films in the universe, you could probably find a better, more worthwhile comedy to watch. Choosing to watch "Bad News Bears" over "Doctor Strangelove" would be like choosing to watch "To Have and Have Not" over "Casablanca" (You should probably see all four of these films listed here by the way). And if one day while you are perusing the selection of DVDs at your local Library and "Bad News Bears" looks appealing, there is nothing that should stop you from grabbing it and enjoying the hell out of it.