The Longest Yard (1974)

Long-time readers know I'm not big on sports flicks. Football appeals to me even less than most sports. Offhand, the only fully serious football movie I've seen is Rudy; the rest are at least partly comedic. But this one has Robert Aldrich at the helm, and I like the other four films of his that I've seen, so I gave it a try.

Paul "Wrecking" Crewe (Burt Reynolds) was an esteemed pro quarterback until he took a dive. Now a drunken burnout, he commits several crimes in rapid succession and goes to prison. As it happens, warden Rudolph Hazen (Eddie Albert) cares inordinately about football, particularly as it concerns his guards' underperforming semi-pro team. He and Captain Knauer (Ed Lauter) coerce Crewe to assemble a team of inmates, the idea being that victory against the inmates will pave the way for a championship. But for all the trouble he has finding decent talent, Crewe might just want his team to win for the sake of hurting and embarrassing the prison staff.

Aldrich also directed The Dirty Dozen, and I caught similarities before I remembered as much. Unlike Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile), he doesn't gloss over the "good" prisoners' reasons for being there. Some teammates have committed horrific crimes and don't appear to have repented. Only the brutality, dishonesty, and unfairness of Hazen's side enables us to root for the cons. Crewe himself, while no murderer, does a lot of things we don't normally take from protagonists. An accompanying documentary short asserts that if any actor more serious than Reynolds had played the part, we wouldn't like him at all.

With that in mind, maybe I'd have gotten more out of it if I were more familiar with Reynolds. The only other comedy I've seen him in is Bean, where he's never the center of attention; and the only other early Reynolds movie I've seen is Deliverance, which is good but doesn't try to be funny. I might put Smokey and the Bandit on my queue.

As it is, I have to shake my head at Netflix's description of TLY as "hilarious." It is much too gritty. One guy even dies in a fire. For most of the picture, only the occasional wisecrack suggests anything like a comedy, and most of those didn't come close to making me smile. Later, the "laughs" primarily involve illegal moves yielding injuries, some of them life-threatening. You know the old football-in-the-groin gag? Happens twice to the same guy, who also gets dogpiled by the opposition.

I suspect that part of the problem is the cinematic period. The '70s are better remembered for neo-noir and other dark fare. Even the goofiness of contemporary Mel Brooks got counterbalanced with moments that would make today's censors hem and haw, like the N-word. Incidentally, a subplot of TLY concerns tension between White and Black prisoners, eventually set aside to ally against the still more racist guards.

My personal favorite element: Richard Kiel, before he gained fame in Jaws. Of the handful of dumb muscles, his character is the most incongruous, wimping out over a nose injury until he gets it straightened.

You need either a higher level of testosterone or a greater sense of over-the-top humor than I have to appreciate TLY. I hate to say it, but I think I'd like Adam Sandler's 2005 remake better.