fine whine

I don't know why I should have, but I really, really enjoyed watching The longest yard.

It's brash, it's misogynistic, it's dated, it's too long, it's shallow and clichéd, it's inconsistently edited, it's violent, it's got criminals for the heroes, it's no longer a critical darling, and I loved it.

I knew very little about it before I watched it. A couple years ago I'd seen the first few minutes (the ones before Burt beats his girlfriend, steals her car, drives drunk, and leads a police chase and resists arrest) and not been hooked. I taped over my copy of it with something else I probably haven't watched, and didn't give the film much thought until I heard, not so long ago, about this year's remake. Being something of a reverse remake fan (in that I like to check out the originals first, if I ever watch the remakes at all), and still something of a fan of real special editions of DVDs (or at least expanded re-releases), once I discovered that the library had procured the so-called "Lockdown edition" (and moreover that it was widescreen, the real criterion I was seeking), I reserved it on what might resemble a lark from a distance.

From a distance it's difficult to make this sound like a worthwhile movie. It's about an admitted point-shaving drunk ex-footballer guy who's violent to women and apathetic about pretty much anything. He gets thrown in a jail run by a sadistic warden (Eddie Albert of Green acres, very much against type) who's as mad about football as he is about discipline. The warden wants Reynolds to give his guards and their semi-pro football team some pointers, but he refuses.

He doesn't want to give in to anybody. It's an anti-establishment statement, after all.

After some goading, and the requisite awkward bonding with a few of his fellow inmates, Reynolds relents, somewhat, and offers a challenge to the warden and his team in the form of an exhibition game. To the guards it looks like it'll be an easy win, and to the inmates it's a chance to get away with some brutality against the guards. Eventually he recruits enough of them, even the reluctant black players, having sought out the meanest, the biggest, and the best actual players. Then begins the training section of the movie, a rollicking bunch of scenes with the misfit murderers, thugs, and would-be linemen and the ways they can inflict the most possible pain, and so forth. More plot happens, and then the game begins, comprising a sizeable chunk of the last third of the film (in which happens all of the interesting camera work, incidentally). The game is brutal, and Reynolds's character comes into question, the game swings precariously, and, well, you can pretty much guess what happens.

But predictable or not, violent or not, stereotypical or not, implausible or not, it's worth watching, if for no other reason than to see just what they thought machismo meant in the mid 1970s. It's also a great look at the state of the anti-establishment at the time, in that this is a movie where we are supposed to sympathize with multiple murderers and rapists in a violent game against the upholders of the law and the protectors of liberty and justice, or something like that. It's one obvious extension of what Bob Aldritch had done years before with The dirty dozen's ragtag gang of lesser criminals, just kicked up several notches all over. In that respect it's almost a sequel, if only in the inspiration.

I'm not sure why, but I was reminded of the brief bit in Lorenzo Carcaterra's Sleepers where they do an inmates/guards game. In there they approach the game as a way to even the field, to meet the guards on their own terms ("On Saturday we can hit back!") and to maybe get a little taste of the childhood the four boys have had torn from them. It's not so quotable, but the narrator (mind you, this isn't a movie about football but a movie with a bit about football in it) recollects the game thusly, "For ninety minutes we took the game out of the prison, moved it miles beyond the locked gates and the sloping hills of the surrounding countryside, and brought it back down to the streets of the neighborhoods we'd come from. For those ninety minutes we were once again free."

How noble and nearly poetic. Yard is neither nor does it aspire to be. These inmates aren't looking for freedom, they're just out for blood. After all, it's just a movie about football and fighting the powers that be, and damn it, it's a good one.